Managers are more likely to give workers that they spend time with key assignments and, as a result, develop their careers.  In the wake of the pandemic, it's become evident that some managers view in-office workers more favourably. This represents a concern for remote workers: managers biased toward colleagues they see more often may overlook or potentially stigmatise home-workers.

Proximity plays a role in promotions

<ul><li>A 2022 survey of 200 US C-suite executives shows that 41$ of participants believe remote employees are less likely to be considered for promotion.</li><li>Research from 2015 showed remote workers in China had promotion rates 50% lower than their in-person colleagues, despite being more productive.</li></ul>Companies must find ways to ensure remote workers get the same opportunities for advancement as everyone else. Firms are still coming up with best practices to address this issue, but workers could still be in for an uphill climb.

The same opportunities for remote workers

Whether remote workers are likely to encounter promotion-related bias depends on the organisation's working model.  If you're in the minority of people who are working remotely, you're probably at a disadvantage in terms of promotions. But if the majority of people in the organisation are working remotely, then it will be a different story. Policies are relatively new, and it's unclear to what extent they might close the promotion gap between remote and office workers, but achieving parity will be a long process.

No simple solution

Remote workers can take steps to ensure they remain in contention for promotions. Remote workers need to be proactive and make themselves as available and visible as possible. <ul><li>Workers should schedule more catchups with bosses, be clear about career goals, and draw attention to recent achievements.</li><li>Little things like switching cameras on and participating in Zoom calls will go a long way. </li><li>Communicate frequently with your manager in a way that builds trust. For example, send your boss a quick message saying, 'here's what I did today. or 'what do you think about this?'</li></ul>

Workers need to be visible

It's in the long-term interest of companies to find a way. Promotional bias towards in-office workers could become an equity issue. Since hybrid work is forecast to remain the post-pandemic normal, there's growing awareness that companies need to create a supportive environment for remote workers or risk losing that talent to a company that will give them what they want.

Towards a level playing field

In-office workers get more face time with the people who promote them. Is it incumbent on remote workers to compensate?

Stashed ideas

Is it up to employees to fix the remote-work promotion gap?

As a fairly new concept, the People Ops demand has boomed, with vacancies <a href="https://www.zenefits.com/workest/61-stats-about-people-operations-hr-the-workforce-remote-work-and-the-employee-experience-that-youll-definitely-want-to-know-if-youre-in-human-resources/">growing 6x faster</a> than their traditional HR equivalent. This is especially true for remote companies, where remote People Operations roles are actually the norm. People Operations teams are all about putting employees first. While many of the responsibilities cross over into traditional HR, People Ops focuses more broadly on maximizing employee effectiveness.

People Operations

<ul><li>Focusing their entire mission on employee satisfaction and performance. </li><li>Optimizing the entire employee journey, including onboarding and training.</li><li>Cultivating a great employer brand.</li><li>Attracting, evaluating, and hiring talent through optimized hiring processes.</li><li>Modernizing and automating functions such as payroll and recruitment.</li><li>Supporting employees day-to-day with areas such as benefits, company policies, and work/life balance.</li><li>Analyzing people metrics such as turnover rates, time to hire, and employee satisfaction to identify areas of improvement.</li></ul>

The Work Of People Operations

Traditional HR:<ul><li>Narrowly focuses on traditional HR topics such as pay, benefits, and recruitment.</li><li>Ensures employees work in a way that reduces the ‘people’ risk for the company.</li><li>Tells employees about key decisions and policy changes.</li></ul>People Operations:<ul><li>Takes a strategic and holistic view of the needs and performance of People.</li><li>Focused on making people happy, more productive, and more connected with the whole company.</li><li>Consults employees, co-creating key decisions and changes.</li></ul>

People Operations Vs HR

By taking a holistic people-focused approach, remote People Operations specialists help distributed teams overcome the following key challenges:<ul><li>Collaborating and coordinating work across time zones. </li><li>Providing clear and consistent guidance on communication, processes, and habits.</li><li>Fostering best-practice sharing between colleagues.</li><li>Polishing remote hiring processes to hire faster and more confidently.</li><li>Levelling the playing field for pay and benefits across different countries.</li><li>Enabling remote employees with the right technology. </li><li>Maintaining engagement with organizational objectives. </li></ul>

Importance Of People Ops In Remote Organizations: Overcoming Challenges

For remote companies, People Operations become the heartbeat of the business. By focusing on the people, their needs, and ultimately their satisfaction, remote People Operations teams have to create an amazing culture. We all know that feeling truly part of an organization is hard when you’re remote, as nothing quite helps you connect with your team like being in a room with them.

Creating an Amazing Culture

From a recruitment perspective, adopting a People Ops model inevitably leads to a much reduced time to hire. Bring together a fantastic employer brand (focused on putting people first), slick and efficient recruitment processes, and innovative hiring technology, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for rapid, high-quality recruitment. That helps optimize one of the critical recruitment KPIs, time-to-hire, slicing the time it takes to fill a vacancy when one becomes available.

Reducing Time-to-Hire

All of this comes together to improve employee effectiveness. People Ops teams listen to the challenges employees face and put their needs first when it comes to developing solutions. Feeling valued, prioritized, and cared for improves employee satisfaction and, ultimately, employee performance. People Ops managers focus all of their energy on ensuring key metrics such as employee satisfaction, churn rate, and workforce engagement are optimized.

Boosting Employee Effectiveness

Whether you’re hiring a People Ops specialist or looking to make the transition yourself, here are some of the skills and qualities needed to become a People Ops superstar!Collaboration: People Ops is all about co-creating a better way of working, so you need to be able to work well with others. Not only is this important to keep your people happy, but it’s also important to collaborate upward too. This ensures your strategic People Operations work aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives.

Skills or Qualities That Make a Great Remote People Ops Specialist: Collaboration

People Ops specialists need to be able to understand what makes people tick. They need compassion and empathy to understand the challenges employees face to accurately come up with solutions.

Emotional Intelligence

People Ops isn’t as reactive as traditional HR. Instead, People Ops leaders have to be able to tackle situations and come up with problems proactively. Especially for new and exciting remote companies, you may need to think outside the box, harnessing creativity and confidence to try something new.

Problem Solving

People Ops is a results-driven business with success decided by key metrics such as employee satisfaction and churn rate. However your organization collects their data, you need to be an expert at analysis to fully understand it and turn it into actionable outputs.

Analytical Skills

Data shows that <a href="https://img.en25.com/Web/CPP/Conflict_report.pdf">85% of employees</a> experience workplace conflict in their lifetime. As a People Ops specialist, that conflict will come to your door, so you need to be able to manage and diffuse it as effectively as possible.

Conflict Resolution 

Fundamentally, People Ops jobs are no different from any other jobs – there are loads out there, you just need to know where to find them.But if you’re explicitly fishing in the remote market, you need to take your search to some particular places.AngelList – What began as a startup funding brand is now a leader in promoting jobs for newly formed companies, many of which have a remote-first mindset.VentureLoop – Closely linked with venture-backed companies, VentureLoop is a great place to find roles with newly funded and exciting companies.Other options: WeWorkRemotely, and Startupers.

Finding Remote People Ops Jobs

Human Resources is obsolete. Enter People Operations.

Remote People Operations teams are awesome. We look at what People Ops is, why they're so great, and how to hire People Ops superstars now.

Remote Company 101: What is People Operations? - Toggl Blog

When you wake up in the morning, don’t jump out of bed for your workout immediately, or drag yourself to the washroom. Sit up straight, relax, and close your eyes. Say to yourself, “I am grateful for those who support me, believe in me, and are always there for me.” Say this with a deep breath in between each time you say it, for a full five minutes.
When you open your eyes and look at everything around you—keep that moment of gratitude with you, throughout your day, reminding yourself how you can’t wait to get home to your loving family.

Morning Gratitude

Begin your day by stretching with your family and doing some physical activity together. 
All you need is 10 minutes. You’ve accomplished a two-for-one: physical activity and family time!

Workout Partners

On your shared streaming service, make a playlist of your family’s favorite music. When you take a break at work or feel a negative moment getting the best of you, listen to that music, think about your family, and regain your focus. 
Music is a powerful voice and has the ability to affect our mindset. Your family playlist will energize you and improve your mood.

A Family Playlist

At least once a day, call or text your significant other or your kids and repeat Stevie Wonder: “I just called to say I love you, I just called to say how much I care.” 
Let your family know they are always in your thoughts. Even in the face of a big deadline or an important meeting, that moment will relax you and make your family smile!

Daily Phone Call

Discuss with your boss his/her expectations of you in regards to your time and your position to foster a mutual and clear understanding of your role. 
Should your role involve evening/weekend hours, and tasks such as answering emails, working from home, or extra time needed for special projects, establish a strategy and discuss with your boss how to meet these expectations so you don’t feel overwhelmed and pulled between your family and your job.

Clarify Your Work Hours & Expectations

It’s common for colleagues to hang out after work. Say yes when your significant other and/or kids are also busy. This will balance things out more. 
There are times to have beers with colleagues, but there are also times to go home, relax, watch a movie, and simply have fun with your family.

Socializing At Work

We all deal with a lot at work and at times might get irritated or annoyed. Remember you are a human being, not a robot, and thus it’s acceptable to have a buffer moment for these feelings. 
Take a deep breath, zone into your happy place that involves your family, think about how your energy can be used towards something else, and move on.

Buffer Moment

Allocate the last half-hour of your day to do the following and leave the office at 5:30/6:00 p.m.:<ul><li>For two minutes, take deep breaths, in and out, looking away from your desk, feeling the moment of gratitude you felt in the morning. </li><li>Organize your emails based on what is to be reviewed, what requires follow-up, and what needs a response after your breakfast/snack/meal. </li><li>Write out your to-do list, priorities, goals, and key items for the next day.</li><li>Double-check that you have a water bottle and healthy desk snacks.</li></ul>

Winding Up The Day

At the dinner table, leave your phone and turn off the TV. 
Focus on your family, not on work, and use this as a time to bring all your energy, your aura, and your being in the moment with the people who support and believe in what you do, and love you for the ability to do what you do.

Phone And TV-Free Dinner

Keep a two-week work diary: try to track every fifteen minutes of your work time. After that, analyze for, and attack, any inefficiencies! This will import balance in your day and yield a well-deserved coffee break, a breath of fresh air, and time to make your daily family phone call!Does email control you and take you away from your priority list, and thus your work-life balance? Organizational skills are an important factor in how you balance your day, affecting your work-life balance. Get organized and get happy! You'll find that work-life balance sooner than you think.

Your Work Journal

Balancing a career and family is a common concern for most individuals. However, it's important to realize the smallest of changes can produce the strongest of impacts.

10 Tips For Balancing Career And Family

UX Designers advocate for the user. They need to understand their needs and goals and tailor an experience to their needs. But the content is also important. It is the material that causes a user to visit. Without understanding the content's structure and properties, we are unable to fit it for our users' needs. Does the text come as one block, does it have a headline, sub-line, body with paragraphs? How long is the video? What is the aspect ratio of the image?

Understanding the content is key

There is often an underlying back-end that dictates the rules. Mapping and understanding this structure is vital when choosing UI patterns and designing an application. An object-oriented mindset is vital to help build the content inventory. It gives an approach to designing a UI around the content.

An object-oriented mindset

In the early days of the internet, we created websites and applications from the content up. Every new website rendered a new design challenge. The introduction of mobile applications caused a need for systematic design. So, in 2014, Google introduced Material Design and enabled designers to focus on user problems instead of creating patterns. But it caused designers to rely too heavily on copying patterns instead of trying to understand the content. Before we reference design systems, we need to understand what makes our content unique. Failing to do this can lead to a broken experience.

The problem with standardization

Our users come to our applications because of the content. The content allows us to connect with our users and engage them in experiences.  This necessitates us to know how our content behaves. We need to understand how flexible it is and notice when it will break. An object-oriented approach can help to understand and structure the content.<ol><li>Start with a content inventory.</li><li>Then investigate the individual elements.</li><li>Finally, list the different instantiations of the content objects.</li></ol>

The content is our material

<ul><li>Identify the primary content objects used in your application.</li><li>List their content elements. Start with core content elements and metadata, then map the nested objects.</li><li>List all the CTAs the users will need to work with the object.</li></ul>

The content inventory

When you have your inventory, look at each content element's attributes. The image, video, headline, or body copy have specific properties, constraints, and requirements.<ul><li>Origin: Where is the content coming from? Is it hardcoded, coming from a database, user-generated or curated?</li><li>Appearance: What is the general character count of a headline, teaser or body copy? What are the sizes and default aspect ratios of images or videos?</li><li>Relationships: How do those elements relate to one another?</li><li>Hierarchy: Are all related elements equal?</li><li>Versions & state: Is the content changing or static?</li></ul>

The content study

Once you know the content pieces and their constraints, it's time to see how they work together. Content objects can appear in many places and in different shapes,  for example, displayed as a detail page or a listed item on an overview page or shown as a teaser. Identify and detail the required instances and check their relationships. Then list the content elements for each occasion.

The object instantiations

The correct pattern should fit the user and content requirements. It will respect the content needs and help users use the content to reach their goals. When we know the different instantiations of each object and the requirements and constraints of its content, it should narrow the possibilities to a few patterns. From there, we look at our options from a user's perspective to select the best pattern.

Choose the right UI pattern for each instance

Using an object-oriented approach can help UX designers better understand their content and shape it to suit their users’ needs.

We, as UX Designers, are the primary advocate for the user. Therefore, understanding their needs and goals is fundamental to our work. Being able to emphasize with them enables us to tailor an…

Design for your content, as you do for your users

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/courtneyadamo/?hl=en" target="_self">Courtney Adamo</a> is a serial entrepreneur — co-founder of <a href="https://babyccinokids.com/shop/" target="_self">Babyccino</a>, a destination site and online shop for parents and parents-to-be, and <a href="https://intheloop.courtneyadamo.com/" target="_self">In the Loop</a>, Courtney’s handcrafted online courses for parents.&nbsp;We look at her life has changed due to the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns.

Waiting For Normal Life

7am: We wake up and make breakfast in the kitchen (breakfast is taken seriously in our house — we often begin planning it the night before!).8:30am: The school day begins. Michael usually sits with the girls and they practice their morning verse, just as they do at school, and then they study the main lesson or work on any assignments sent over from their teachers.&nbsp;9:30/10am: After cleaning up breakfast and doing a bit of laundry, I usually begin my working day.

What does a typical day look like to you now?

Both my husband and I have worked from home for the past few years. We are now in our Seventh week of staying home and Homeschooling them. We are also in the process of creating a new E-Course for this year. Instead of filming In-Person interviews with experts, I’ve had to conduct the interviews over zoom.&nbsp;The upside is that I get to interview experts from around the world, not just those who are local to me.

How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?

We have found it helpful to wake and follow the normal daily routine. We get dressed, despite the fact we aren’t going anywhere, and we try to start work and schooling at the same time, as usual, to keep to a normal schedule.We’ve been saying we wanted to start meditating for years, but we’ve never made the time for it. Now is our time!

What productivity tips have you found useful whilst working from home?

1. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Poisonwood-Bible-Novel-Barbara-Kingsolver/dp/0060786507/" target="_self">The Poisonwood Bibl</a>e by Barbara Kingsolver2. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Where-Crawdads-Sing-Delia-Owens/dp/0735219095/" target="_self">Where the Crawdads Sing</a> by Delia Owens3. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Guernsey-Literary-Potato-Peel-Society/dp/0385341008/" target="_self">The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society</a> by Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows4. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Help-Kathryn-Stockett/dp/0425232204/" target="_self">The Help </a>by Kathryn Stockett5. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Geisha-Arthur-Golden-1998-06-04/dp/B017MY9ZK2/" target="_self">Memoirs of a Geisha</a> by Arthur Golden

What five books would you recommend during this time at home?

I really hope that this period of time will be an eye-opener for many people and businesses. We will have perhaps learned how to work more productively in fewer work hours. We will have responded and reacted in innovative ways, which may become a wonderful new way forward. We will have slowed down our minds and bodies and allowed room for thinking creatively in terms of business ideas and strategy.&nbsp;Perhaps we will have all shifted our priorities on the work/life balance scale and you’ll see more people thriving on a personal level.&nbsp;

When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?

In this interview with Courtney Adamo, we discuss life on lockdown in Byron Bay - how her and her husband balance working from home whilst homeschooling five children.

Courtney shares her top tips for productivity, books she recommends and what she does for wellbeing during this global pandemic.

When We Go Back to Normal Life, I Hope We Keep the Environment at The Forefront of Our Minds

Time is worth more than money. It took me years to understand that life-changing idea.There are so many demands on our time and we foolishly opt into BS all the time without necessarily realizing it. These brain drain activities serve no tangible benefit and only leave us with less time than we had before.With less time, we make worse and worse decisions, separate ourselves from our loved ones, do less work we enjoy and have less time to do whatever the hell we want to do — even if that means staring out the window.

Time Is Valuable

Not every person is going to love you. Sorry to break it to you!It’s not worth your time getting offended. If you’re making even 10% of people happy then you’re doing okay. Go small and deep for likability. Build a network of people around you that is tiny and awesome. Make 1000 true fans your absolute ceiling if you can.

Being Offended

It’s not worth dedicating every minute of your time to work.<blockquote>It’s definitely not worth dedicating 100% of your time to doing work that somebody else owns.</blockquote>You need time to enjoy your work and spend the fruits of your labor on completely dumb stuff like gifts from the souvenir shop at Disneyland. Take a holiday from your work phone, ignore the email from your boss until tomorrow, and be proud when you miss a work meeting.There’s more to life than doing work — like enjoying it.

Letting Work Occupy Your Brain All the Time

Using your time to be publicly right is a war you will never win. The people you’re arguing with in the comments are never going to let you win. And when one gets tired, a new person spawns to take the baton in the Olympic relay to destroy your credibility.Save your time and win the comments battle with silence.

Horrendous Social Media Comments

There are some people that are always going to think you suck. Even if you win a noble prize or get 30M followers on social media, they’ll still see you as a failure. I had a former boss like this once before.No matter what I did, I’d never be good enough. If I didn’t threaten people with my power then I wasn’t a wartime leader and that made me weak, according to him.There’s an easy solution: focus on impressing yourself.

People Who Will Never Be Impressed by You

You will never have the best job title or be the most powerful leader in business. Do you know why? Because you can be fired at any moment.Whatever you build in the corporate world can be taken away by a simple tool known as redundancy. The key is not to seek power; it’s to use whatever influence you have to build others up.It’s not worth using your time to climb some infinitely high corporate ladder.

Corporate Fame Is Fickle

A luxury car is not worth your time. These are the thoughts of a luxury car owner:<ul><li>Where is a safe place to park the car?</li><li>Did I scratch the alloy wheels?</li><li>Should I put the window down so people can see me?</li><li>How much will the next service cost?</li><li>There is a new model of my car — holy crap!</li></ul>

A Luxury Car You Have to Think About All the Time

Both <a href="https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-ceo-of-airbnb-taught-us-an-extraordinary-lesson-when-he-fired-25-of-his-company-4d41b2e47656">the Airbnb CEO and Elon Musk</a> came out in the last year and said basically the exact same thing: love is the answer. It blew my mind.Wasting your time hating people robs you of your potential.Every minute you spend disliking someone and making it into a sport, is time that could be spent being creative. Love sets you free, whereas hate locks you in the prison chamber of your mind to suffer.

Demonstrating Hate

It’s almost never the right time to do anything.You may not feel like it but just get started. You’ll be surprised how quickly your brain can turn on and get started. Some of the best creative ideas are killed because they are not acted upon when they’re thought of.An idea has power and emotion when it is created. That’s the time you want to put it to good use — not when the idea’s energy has dissipated and you’ve told yourself “I’ll do it later” fifty times in a row while watching an episode of Friends.When would now be a good time? Now is as good a time as any.

Waiting for the Right Time

Dating is hard for everybody. But there are good people out there. One thing that screwed me over when I was single was myself and this little insight:Your dating profile might be leading the wolves to you.What you show as your life online might be attracting all the attention-loving, fame jocks, who say rude things and don’t reply after three messages and then ghost ya, Mexican style.

Blaming Dating Apps

Where do I get started with this one. There is no perfect candidate; they all have skeletons in their Malibu Holiday Home closet.Trying to look for a Jesus-like political candidate is impossible. They’re all guilty of something — even Jesus committed sins.You can just choose the lesser of two evils or the best of a bad bunch. Politicians don’t control your world; you do. Spend your time there.

Political Debates

If this is you then what else are you trying to escape from. You can’t escape life by partying every night and pretending everything is okay in the morning.Let your hair down by all means, but if your life ends up being one Hangover Movie party after another, you might have better uses of your time.

Partying Every Night

<ul><li>Learning a new skill.</li><li>Loving something other than yourself (puppies perhaps).</li><li>Mundane activities that help you think clearly (showers, dishes).</li><li>Reading fiction to relieve stress.</li><li>Being kind to someone for the hell of it.</li><li>Giving away a part of yourself because you can.</li><li>Publishing one thought online.</li></ul>

Try allocating some more time into doing these things

There are so many demands on our time and we foolishly opt in to BS all the time without necessarily realizing it. These brain drain activities serve no tangible benefit and only leave us with less…

12 Things That Are Just Not Worth Your Time

Material Design is continually evolving. The style of the Material text fields changed in 2017 for the following reasons:<ul><li>Users didn't know that they could interact and click on the text field (the most common way users enter and edit text in forms and dialogues).</li><li>The line under the old text fields was confused with a divider.</li><li>The label and input were confused with body text.</li></ul>

How data improved Google’s text fields

Two studies were conducted to improve the usability of text fields and to find out which text field variable to change. <ul><li>The first study aimed to get a sense of the design styles that worked best instead of finding a single best individual text field.</li><li>The second study aimed to determine what the new Material text field should look like, such as the "box style", label location, contrast, and border styles.</li></ul>

Improving the text field

The results of the two studies showed that these elements of text fields were of most value:&nbsp;<ul><li>Enclosed text fields with a rectangular shape performed better than those with a line affordance.&nbsp;</li><li>The text field box should be represented with a semi-transparent fill and a bottom line. Or it should be a fully transparent fill and an opaque stroke.&nbsp;</li><li>The Colour contrast of the text field’s lines or strokes met the minimum 3:1 contrast ratios with the background.&nbsp;</li><li>Label text should be placed within the bounds of the text field box.&nbsp;</li><li>Text fields should have rounded corners.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Main findings

This article was co-written with Michael Gilbert, Senior User Experience Researcher on the Material Design team. Dave Chiu , Staff Interaction Designer, and Sameer Bansal, User Experience Designer…

Is it up to employees to fix the remote-work promotion gap?

Remote Company 101: What is People Operations? - Toggl Blog

10 Tips For Balancing Career And Family

Design for your content, as you do for your users

When We Go Back to Normal Life, I Hope We Keep the Environment at The Forefront of Our Minds

Jessica Cox