I worked fully remote for six months with my team on the opposite side of the country. These are my top tips for staying top of mind in the eyes of your manager, your team, your management, your leadership, whoever is making important decisions that your career does not get put on pause.
No. 1, respond to teams messages and emails on their time zone. I worked on the West Coast. My team was entirely on the east coast. I would start getting messages around 7 a. M, if not earlier, and I would respond to them.
This was one of my most incognito ways to just kind of always feel available, even though I wasn’t actually working at 6,7 a. M. I was just available to message. If there was messages asking me to do work, I would agree to the work. I would say, sounds good, we’ll get it to you later today. Or I would answer questions that I can answer without needing to log on to my laptop up. But if you actually respond in the time that they’re asking, you’re perceived as available and helpful. And they’ll also take note that you’re not in that time zone. So it’s like an added bonus that you’re available outside of your working hours. I’m not saying do more work if you start working earlier, end work earlier.
This is something that now I’m that I’m co located. I have an early meeting at like 8:30. I get shout outs like this is nothing like Allison used to join meetings at like 6:37 a. M. I’d be like, that’s right, I did.
Tip No. 2 is send your boss updates regularly or your team, whoever is relevant for these updates. My go to message that I would send to my manager all the time was, hey, I have some free time today. If I can take anything off of your plate.
This is the golden ticket message. You’re acknowledging that you’re done, you don’t have any pending work, and you’re offering to help them with their work. So if this is the case and you send this message, you’re also free to exist. At least I felt free to exist if I said, hey, I have time, feel free to give me more work. I don’t have any work, so I don’t have to squiggle around on teams and I pretend to be working. So I think it’s a win. I did oftentimes get more work, which was good because then I was perceived as helpful.
Dave goes for like deliverables. I would always message my boss, be like, hey, can you take a look at this for like deliverables that were done just to pass along? Because if there’s something that I can fix, if I get to the window in which it’s like 2 to five PM, I don’t have anyone to look at it. So getting things done as early as possible and sending them over then leaves me with my afternoon free.
Third tip is get comfortable messaging your manager on teams or in like an informal sort of way. So the saying that this meeting could have been an email, I did the opposite. This team’s message could have been a meeting and probably should have been have very in depth conversations over teams about a project or about a task and I ask questions as I work on it so I get the scoop, I get the gist of what I’m to be doing. I go start doing it. As I do it, I have a question. Hello, I have a question.
Hello. My manager is booked in meetings all day long, so it’s very hard to get time on his calendar. We have three recurring meetings and two of the three of them usually end up getting canceled. So it is very difficult to get this man’s time.
A lot of people will say that asking questions will make you like seem dumb. I think it gives like a window into your thought process. And if you’re asking good questions, like genuinely how things should be operated or how things should be performed or like how things work. It’s better to ask and like to be thorough about something than to just do it and then have it get corrected. So might as well just ask.
All these tips revolve around getting more work. And of course, if you feel like you’re very busy, then don’t be offering yourself up to do more work. However, I do feel like as a tenant of remote work, when everyone’s together and you’re not there, you’re just objectively getting less work. So by asking for more, you’re filling up your day to be full. And therefore you’re also looking like, hey, I’m doing so much extra work. So it’s a win in my opinion, following from a content like this five.