Earn Work-Life Balance

How To Get Ahead If You’re Working Remotely

Haley Paskalides  |  November 13, 2024

Working remotely comes with many perks, especially for women. Here’s how to ensure job security when you want to work from anywhere.

What does the future of remote work really look like? For those of us who love our fully remote or hybrid jobs, the news of CEOs calling employees back into the office 5 days a week was disappointing, if not downright terrifying. 

Among them: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mandated that employees must return to the office 5 days a week, and so did Elon Musk for employees of both Tesla and X. And most big banking institutions have called employees back for a 5-day workweek, including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, among others. 

However, most of us — 60% of Americans — want at least a hybrid role, and 37% of us want to work fully remotely, according to a new report from staffing solutions firm Robert Half. If you’re one of those people, Nick Bloom, Stanford Professor of Economics and expert on the subject of working remotely, says there are ways to ensure you continue to impress your supervisors and get ahead. Here’s a look at our favorites. 

Get Aligned With Your Colleagues’ Schedules 

With employers that offer a hybrid model now offering their employees the flexibility to choose the days they come into the office, it’s important to choose your days wisely. Why? You want to get as much face-to-face time with your colleagues and your bosses as possible. 

For example, if you’re on a team where everyone works in the office several days a week, but you work from home five days a week, that is likely to be pretty costly from a career perspective, Bloom says. “You’re going to be missing out on meetings. So, the first thing is you want to be aligned with the rest of your team, which means if you really want to work from home four days a week, the best way to do it without suffering on promotions is to find a role in your company or a different job where everyone else is working from home four days a week.”

Focus on Your Performance (Which Now Means Everything) 

In a traditional office environment, the time spent at your desk can be a means by which you’re judged. But if you’re working from home, your performance becomes the only metric by which you’re evaluated. In other words, you need to make sure you’re delivering everything promised, on deadline. (There are no water cooler brownie points to be earned that could help make up for any performance shortfall.) 

If you’re managing someone who works from home, Bloom recommends focusing on “performance management.” “So you’d say to your employee, ‘You’re at home on Friday and you’ve got to get these tasks done. It’s up to you how you do it. And if you want to say, go for a run or go to the dentist, that’s okay. But you have to make up for it in the evening or on the weekend,’” Bloom says. “You’ve got to focus more on achievements and performance for home-based employees and less on how quickly they respond to an email. Because that doesn’t really work for either the manager or the employee.”

Choose an Indispensable Career 

According to Pew Research Center, roughly 14% of all employed adults in the U.S. now work remotely. And while working remotely certainly has its perks, one drawback is that rather than your competition for roles being limited to people in your city, you’re now up against talent from all over the world. 

If you want to continue working remotely and have success finding a remote job in the future, Bloom suggests focusing on more creative work and thinking about roles that AI won’t be able to perform anytime soon. “The other thing that’s valuable is being able to meet in person, say once every other month,” Bloom says. “That’s something that AI would never be able to do — at least not for the next 20 years.”

Bottom Line: Remote Work Is Here To Stay 

Working remotely or working in a hybrid model has become the new normal for many of us, and thankfully, Bloom says remote work isn’t going anywhere — in fact, remote roles are likely to increase in the future. However, it’s up to you to make certain that your performance on your couch in your sweatpants is just as solid as your performance in the boardroom in a 3-piece suit.  

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