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How to Navigate a Career Transition With Confidence

Published May 4, 2023

At some point in our professional lives, we may face the need or know how to navigate a career transition or pivot. Whether it s due to personal interests, industry shifts, or unforeseen circumstances, such changes can be both exciting and daunting. In this blog post, we ll explore strategies to help you navigate these transitions with confidence. We ll discuss identifying transferable skills, considering a career change or pursuing further education, and handling job loss or unemployment.

Identifying Transferable Skills

One of the key aspects of a successful career transition is recognizing your transferable skills. These are skills that can be applied across different industries and job functions, and are highly valued by employers. Here s how to identify and leverage your transferable skills:

Inventory your skills: Begin by making a list of all the skills you ve developed throughout your career, including both technical and soft skills. Consider your experience in project management, leadership, communication, problem-solving, and adaptability.
Analyze job descriptions: Review job postings in the field you re interested in, and identify the skills and qualifications required. Highlight those that align with your existing skill set.
Draw connections: Connect the dots between your current skills and the requirements of your target industry or job function. Emphasize these transferable skills in your resume, cover letter, and interviews.
Develop a narrative: Craft a compelling story about your career trajectory, focusing on how your transferable skills have contributed to your success and will be an asset in your new role.

Considering a Career Change or Pursuing Further Education

If you re considering a career change or pursuing further education, it s essential to weigh your options carefully and ensure you re making a well-informed decision. Here are some steps to help guide your decision-making process:

Assess your interests and values: Reflect on your passions, strengths, and values. Consider what aspects of your current job you enjoy and what you d like to do differently. This can help you identify potential career paths that align with your interests.
Research potential careers: Investigate industries and job functions that appeal to you. Learn about the job market, growth potential, required skills, and salary expectations. Networking and informational interviews can be valuable tools for gathering insights from professionals in the field.
Identify skill gaps: Determine which skills or qualifications you may need to acquire to be competitive in your target field. This may involve obtaining certifications, attending workshops, or pursuing further education.
Develop a plan: Create a timeline for your career transition, outlining the steps you ll need to take to reach your goal. This may include acquiring new skills, building your network, and updating your job search materials.

Handling Job Loss or Unemployment

Job loss or unemployment can be a challenging experience, both financially and emotionally. However, it can also present an opportunity to reassess your career goals and make a strategic transition. Here are some tips for managing job loss or unemployment and turning it into a chance for growth:

Embrace the emotions: Allow yourself to process the emotions that come with job loss or unemployment. It s normal to feel a range of emotions, from anger and sadness to fear and uncertainty. Acknowledging these feelings is an essential step in moving forward.
Assess your financial situation: Evaluate your current financial state and create a budget to help you manage your expenses during unemployment. Determine any available unemployment benefits and explore options for temporary or part-time work to help maintain financial stability.

Reevaluate your career goals: Use this time to reflect on your long-term career objectives and consider whether a pivot or transition might be beneficial. This could involve exploring new industries, developing new skills, or pursuing further education to increase your marketability.

Network and connect: Leverage your professional network to seek job opportunities, gather information about your target industry, and connect with professionals who can provide guidance and support. Attend networking events, join online forums, and update your LinkedIn profile to reflect your current goals.
Develop a job search strategy: Create a structured plan for your job search, including a list of target companies, a schedule for applying to jobs, and a strategy for customizing your resume and cover letter to each application. Stay organized by tracking your applications and follow-ups.
Stay active and productive: Use your time productively by engaging in activities that support your personal and professional development. This may include volunteering, freelancing, taking online courses, or pursuing a passion project. Staying active can help maintain your motivation and make you a more attractive candidate to potential employers.
Prepare for interviews: Use your downtime to hone your interviewing skills. Practice answering common interview questions, research companies you re interested in, and develop a compelling narrative about your career journey and transferable skills.
Stay positive and resilient: Embrace a growth mindset and focus on the opportunities that may come from your career transition. Stay positive and maintain a support system of friends, family, and professional contacts who can provide encouragement and advice.

Navigating career transitions and pivots can be a challenging process, but by identifying your transferable skills, researching potential career paths, and strategically managing job loss or unemployment, you can make a successful transition to a new role or industry. Embrace the opportunity to grow, adapt, and learn from these experiences, and approach your career journey with confidence and resilience.

Published November 4, 2022

Executive Spotlight: How Leaders Should Measure The Effectiveness Of Their Remote Workers

As a leader in today’s modern workplace, you have to be prepared to manage hybrid, remote, and in-office employees. The success of a company depends on good management, which includes the ability to accurately measure the effectiveness of employees and make changes as needed. But the traditional ways of measuring an employee’s effectiveness don’t take into consideration how the workforce has changed since 2020 with the rise of remote work.

We recently asked our executives how they think leaders should measure the effectiveness of their remote employees.

Here are their responses…

Ana Smith, Talent Architect & Global Learning Strategist

Measuring effectiveness from remote employees can be very tricky, especially considering that 40% of leaders acknowledged in a study conducted by Harvard in 2020 that they were not prepared to manage remote employees and 41% struggled to keep their teams engaged.

Defining what’s a priority and what effectiveness looks like becomes fundamental. It has left managers and leaders unsure about how the best work gets done. Therefore, it is not a huge surprise that a lot of managers would prefer their teams to come back to work in the office.

Besides clearly defining what effectiveness looks like, its transparency to all involved, and how it is measured and improved consistently, it becomes key for managers to quickly figure out the best way to work with their employees, making them feel understood and supported and not micromanaged.

Ana Smith helps people & organizations achieve their full talent potential by developing and co-creating people strategies and customized solutions, and turning them into impactful outcomes and collaborative relationships, using coaching as the “red thread.”

John Schembari, Senior Education Executive

Professional woman works from home

âAna is correct. Evaluating the effectiveness of remote workers comes down to whether or not priorities have been met. It’s less about doing time, say 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, and should be much more about impact whether that impact occurs over a long or short period of time, and whether at 9 am or 9 pm. When evaluating remote workers, organizations would be wise to, yes, define priorities but also determine what success metrics for those priorities will be. In defining success, for instance, I’m a big fan of goal setting and using SMART criteriaâi.e., is the goal specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and/or timely?

Client/project management software can also be used when there are multiple remote workers working on the same initiative so that there is clarity around each person’s role and communication as to how each person’s part fits into the project as a whole. This is where benchmark/milestone data can also be recorded along the way to indicate how well remote workers are making progress toward organizational goals.

John Schembari is a current K-12 teacher/school leader academic improvement coach and former school building and district administrator. He loves to draw, travel, swing dance, and read nonfiction.

Miroslav Jasso, IT & Innovation Management

Remote worker on a Zoom call

âThere are areas and positions where remote working was preferred for years if not decades. Information technology as an example serves well here. Measuring the effectiveness of IT service desk employees is easy. KPIs like number of tickets handled orfFirst instance resolution rate come immediately to mind. Your agile software developers can be measured based on the length of their sprints or the size of the backlog. In many cases IT teams are to a large degree remote and distributed among locations, countries, and even continents.

In general, any position with clearly defined KPIs can easily be measured for effectiveness, no matter the location. In-site, remote, distributedâ¦ numbers do the trick. Where remote working is leaving much room for effectiveness decrease is the soft side of workârelations, knowledge sharing, team spirit, willingness to help and support. Even if not immediately visible, those qualities have a decisive impact on overall effectiveness in the long run.

Miroslav Jasso is an information technology & innovation executive with 22+ years of experience in the development, continuous improvement, and delivery of state-of-the-art IT services across automotive, finance systems, and retail businesses. He has managed teams of 5-100+ with budgets of $1M-$15M+.

Michael Willis, Sports Business Operations Executive

Professional woman interviews a remote job candidate

Measuring remote workers’ effectiveness is no different from having workers present on-site. Having timely expected deliverables will be the most critical test of commitment. If you know the quality of the people on your team, you won’t have to worry about the work not getting done.

Sure there are monitoring tools out there to see log-in times and activity.

But as a business professional trying to run a business, I’d rather spend the time making the company better to raise revenues or creating new ways to compete with my competitors.

Michael Willis has 18+ years of experience working with accounting & sports organizations and has managed P&Ls of $10M – $125M+ with budgets of $3M-$50M+. He worked for the NFL for 22 1/2 years, mainly with the game officials working on the financial/accounting side of the business.

Andrea Markowski, Marketing Executive

Man on the phone works from home

âIf youâre asking how to measure the effectiveness of remote workers, youâre asking the wrong question.

Go back and subtract the word âremote.â There. Thatâs the right question.

There should be no fundamental differences between how you measure the success of a remote worker vs. a hybrid worker vs. an in-person worker. Too many managers get caught up in the thought of a remote worker being somehow incredibly different.

If anything, remote workers most likely require more thoughtful management. That includes you as a manager keeping an eye on equity when handing out resources, social opportunities, and high-profile projects to remote vs. in-person workers.

Is the person meeting their goals? Are they growing in their role? Are they helping to move the organization forward? Remote or not, questions similar to these are what you should focus on.

Andrea Markowski is a marketing director with specializations in strategy development, digital tactics, design thinking, and creative direction. She has superpowers in presentations and public speaking.

Don Schulz, Senior Operations & Commercial Real Estate Executive

Manager talks to remote employees over Zoom

I appreciate and agree with people’s comments so far. The concepts of defining success, using measurable KPIs & SMART goals, and measuring workers in the same positions in a consistent manner whether they are remote or not all make sense. There is however a range of difficulty in assessing effectiveness depending on the specific function of each FTE and how quantifiable vs. qualitative one can make the measurement of their role. That said I would like to add to the discussion the concept of engagement which is often a leading indicator of one’s effectiveness and I’ve found much harder to measure.

A couple of years ago I took on a new role as COO of a national real estate project management company one month before COVID-19 restrictions were put into place. I had to quickly adjust to managing fully remote in a company I had just joined and with people I barely knew. While we were able to successfully implement many of the effectiveness measurement tools mentioned above and felt we had a good feel for individuals’ overall effectiveness, we soon learned that it was people’s engagement we had to get our arms around. That took some time. We retained an outside consultant/survey company to measure the engagement of all employees and made it an annual occurrence.

My summary point is that while measuring employee effectiveness (remote or in person) is an ongoing, more daily requirement, complementing that with an annual or semi-annual measurement of employee engagement is often a good thing that can bring many insights when laid next to effectiveness data.

Don Schulz is a 25+ year commercial real estate executive & COO. On the personal side, he likes to ski, hike, golf, and run, and is an occasional homebrewer.

How do you think leaders should measure the effectiveness of their remote workers? Join the conversation inside Work It Daily’s Executive Program.

Published September 8, 2022

Chief Data Analytics Officer (CDAO): From Mindsets To Skill Sets

In this article, I will outline the primary responsibilities of the CDAO role and, in this and subsequent posts, will further differentiate CDAOs from CIOs and CTO roles. I invite the readers of this post to comment and add their thoughts and experiences with the position.

The State Of The CDAO Role

Executive/leader smiles a work

CAO (chief analytics officer) and chief data officer (CDO) are terms that have increasingly been used interchangeably for the CDAO (chief data analytics officer) role that has been getting traction over the past several years. This trend is not only happening in mid-sized firms with 1000 or more employees but also in large Fortune 1000 companies such as global banks. Scale, while an essential topic for certain aspects of the CDAO role, is not the only consideration for having a CDAO and a center of excellence in data analytics.

In a data-driven decisioning company, the CDAO is the steward of the cognitive or thinking functions behind every decision in the firm. The CDAO provides the ‘neurons’ (data, decision sciences, insights, platforms, and more) that enable better thinking and decision-making throughout the organization. This broader view that “data analytics is the brain and part of the central nervous system in the organization” is warranted given the shift to digitization and AI. The use of data will accelerate over the next ten yearsâdriving decision-making by ever more constituents in the organization, adopting artificial intelligence, making sense of the metaverse, and other high-tech, knowledge-driven endeavors.

In addition, the CDAO is often best positioned to drive and deploy CRM initiatives and digital infrastructure programs such as marketing and risk automation. Led by the CDAO, the data analytics team, the organization’s data, and appropriate tools are the core enablers of this knowledge, decisioning, and action ecosystem. The CDAO’s role in data-driven infrastructure development is often lost in much confusion about who designs and implements AI, how it should be built, and what data and tools are needed.

The CDAO Mindset Is Multi-Disciplinary, Analytical, Creative, And Collaborative

Leaders look at data during a work meeting

The CDAO mindset differs from that of the CIO or the CTO as they don’t own or exclusively think about operational systems and tech infrastructure. CDAOs think about the data in those systems and how it feeds into knowledge systems for analytics and decision-making. The CDAO consults with business partners to arrive at a knowledge solution. In other words, they don’t think about servers or plumbing unless it relates to dataâwarehouses, big data, or other knowledge platforms.

SHOULD evangelize AI and insights-driven business outcomes.
SHOULD NOT evangelize platforms.
SHOULD deliver the platform with outcomes in mind. In doing so, they…
- Consider revenue generation, good customer outcomes, or NPS uplifts.
- Timing SHOULD and MUST be considered. For example, if capabilities development is needed to meet regulatory or risk goals, the delivery may take more than a year or two.
Evangelizing SHOULD be linked to a corporate strategy and, ideally, a business or digital transformation to get future traction.

The CDAO must be a collaborative leader who can engender trust to transform and lead the function. Change management and transformation skills must include running a strategic roadmap, blueprinting process, and ongoing executive committees to seek stakeholder buy-in and top management support.

What Tom Davenport said in Competing on Analytics in the early 2000s still holds today: engaging top management’s trust through thoughtful communications is the key to building a successful data analytics and AI COE. The CDAO should have strategy expertise and experience managing diverse teams. Another key trait is the ability to coach and grow data analytics professionals; these teams are highly skilled and in demand, and many are very independent thinkers and experts.

Ideally, the CDAO should have a POV on the work product and will challenge and coach the team during the development phase but not micromanage. Said differently, having a POV on the data analytics solutions of the team should be in the form of advice; think growing talent, not telling talent what to do. In terms of the operational aspects of the function, CDAOs must understand how to make trade-offs in the form of prioritization processes.

Setting The Boundaries Of The CDAO Role

Executive/leader works on her laptop at work

The CDAO is a highly visible and critical role responsible for leading the data analytics function as a general manager and businessperson.

The CDAO drives outcomes:

Overall value creation includes creating new business or customer propositions
Actionable insights connected to P&L drivers
Data analytics innovation: finding new ways to apply facts, data, and methodologies to opportunities and problem sets

Data: The CDAO is the executive responsible for ensuring the firm treats data as a strategic and critical asset. The CDA drives the data strategy, management, and governanceâincluding all aspects of data throughout the lifecycle. The CDAO helps select the tools for data lineage, hires the team, vets data stewards, and ensures connectivity to IT governance and the corporate governance process. At the same time, the CDAO plays a crucial role in building gold standard quality data and the platform(s) to house that data, most likely in the cloud. However, the role profile of the CDAO, unlike its legacy predecessor, the chief data officer, is grounding the data efforts with the end game in mind. This represents yet another mindset to skill set shift from the past. The CDAO starts with the commercial purposes and outcomes and spends time learning what the business needs instead of an all-too-common trend in data management: build it, and they will come.

Whether or not it is technically possible to throw all the data into a big data platform is beside the point; again, mindset versus skill set must still be done with the priorities and applications desired by the business in mind. Suppose you are reading a CDAO job description or a CDO job description that leads with regulatory commitments or risk management capabilities. In that case, this will result in a stalled road map for data analytics as that is not thinking about the end-state vision for data analytics and AI. That position then will struggle to get beyond data governance and developing the platform because whatever gets built will not be fit for purpose for all use cases.

The CDAO ensures business partner input and consensus are accounted for in the priorities from a data analytics blueprint that seeks to connect AI, analytics, and data into a unified impact strategy. Using terms like data literacy probably needs to be revisited into something like quality decisioning or data analytics and AI literacy. Data literacy is very 2005 in an age of ML, and many executives find being called data illiterate somewhat insulting, so it is time to rethink how this gets presented.

Success factors and mindset shifts include:

Ensure the data strategy is aligned with business outcomes.
- Ongoing data strategy and planning as opposed to viewing data strategy as a project.
- Making data governance and management an exco-level committee.
Understand business problems and use cases and their prioritization within the business.
Avoid the tools for tool’s sake syndrome. Align data tools by purpose and function.
Don’t just interface with LOBs; create a permanent planning process with your C-suite that deliberately seeks to calibrate and constantly validate data initiatives with LOBs.
Don’t just run a compliance-based data literacy education program. Create an ongoing summit for insights literacy from data that seeks to cover various transformational topics.

Information: The CDAO mindset for information is about distributing insights and democratizing data access for citizen data scientists and citizen business users. The mindset goes beyond business intelligence concepts (BI) such as regulatory reporting to concepts such as data visualization and analytical self-service. Still, the focus is on assisting business and power users in generating insights from data visualization and Analytics-as-a-Service platform tools. For that, the exemplary architecture facilitates the delivery of insights. But understanding what architecture to build requires a blueprint and road map that is business aligned. Many firms refer to this as simply delivering the platform but providing the “platform” requires so much more. This goes beyond just standing up the environment or ensuring data stewardship.

The CDAO was created; as Gartner recently mentioned in a talk, I attended to be more of a “concierge” type role beyond data stewardship and strictly the plumbing and configuration of tools. The CDAO needs to ensure an assisted self-service paradigm to help businesses and other users gain traction with data analytics. This means helping the business generate insights when they get stuck and helping them to use the tools until they graduate to power users. Cloud-based or on-prem tools such as Power BI and Tableau data visualization tools should enable the self-service paradigm.

Success factors and mindset shifts include:

From business performance to adaptive intelligence and real-time insights.
From data warehouses to Analytics-as-a-Service (AAS), particularly self-service.
From data-warehousing to data lake or open garden to facilitating data sharing and partnerships and third-party data acquisition.
From viewing data strategy as a stand-alone to viewing data analytic strategy as one overarching strategy aligned to corporate strategy.

Knowledge: The holy grail and the highest level of DA maturity occurs when you generate and use knowledge. Achieving the knowledge stage in a company is a complex endeavor requiring not only change leadership but the right combination of org design, stakeholder engagement, and the right open-source tools. This is where proactive and predictive analytics comes into play, as well as topics in AI such as automated machine learning, deep learning, and optimization modeling. The fact of the matter is very few firms truly achieve this level. Many firms attain a beachhead level of one or more competencies, such as predictive modeling for marketing or risk. But the full vision of truly plugging in AI and decision engines to drive the next best action or next best everything requires for the consumer or business is a concept that only a few world-class, leading-edge firms have fully achieved.

Success factors and mindset shifts include:

From having a separate data council or committee to having an integrated data analytics governance committee beyond just advisory.
Viewing data analytics as strategy, not only a capability.
Balancing business needs with technology through understanding and framing the right data analytics solutions. Notice I didn’t lead with technology. Data analytics is the conduit.
From batch mode to real-time insights.
From capabilities development to designing the enterprise knowledge strategy.
From deploying tools to partnering with business lines, identify the path to deploy the tools and come up with the priorities to do so.

In conclusion, the CDAO has a formidable challenge to bring insights to ultimately inform decision-making, data, and other tools to bear on various problems. The CDAO role is becoming more common, and it is a role many firms are ready for, including mid-size firms, but it will all go back to the level of transformation and maturity the board and the CEO are trying to drive.

I look forward to your thoughts on this post and your experience with the CDAO role.

Published May 2, 2023

Why You Shouldn’t Write “To Whom It May Concern” On Your Cover Letter

Many job seekers still don’t understand how important cover letters are in their job search. Your cover letter has the power to turn your job application from a “maybe” to a “yes.” Even the little details, like how you address your cover letter, can impact a hiring manager’s decision whether to give you a call or not.

As a job seeker, there are many ways you can choose to address your cover letter. But there’s one you should never useâno matter the circumstances.

Here’s why you shouldn’t write “To Whom It May Concern” on your cover letter:

It’s Impersonal

The whole point of your cover letter (a disruptive cover letter, at least) is to connect with the employer. How can you do that when you begin your cover letter with such an impersonal greeting?

When you write “To Whom It May Concern” on your cover letter, you’ve already lost an opportunity to be warm and friendly. This type of greeting is cold and formal, something you’d see in business correspondence. Maybe a cover letter was considered a form of business correspondence back in the day, but it’s much more than that now.

So, skip the formality. Your cover letter should be personal. It should tell a storyâthe story of why you want to work for the company, why you’re passionate about what they do, and how you believe you can help them achieve their goals as an organization. And no good story ever began with “To Whom It May Concern.”

It’s Outdated

Man on laptop deletes "To Whom It May Concern" on his cover letter

If you write “To Whom It May Concern” on your cover letter, there’s a good chance the hiring manager will think you’re old-fashioned, if they didn’t already think so after reviewing your resume.

In the job search, it’s all about relevancy. By using such an outdated greeting in your cover letter, the hiring manager will also begin to question just how relevant your skills are, or if you’re still relevant in your industry.

Simply put, “To Whom It May Concern” is outdated, old-fashioned, and can bring into question your relevancy as a professional, a business-of-one. That’s not something you ever want.

It’s Lazy

Woman on laptop avoids writing "To Whom It May Concern" on her cover letter

Writing “To Whom It May Concern” on your cover letter might’ve been completely fine before the internet and the rise of professional networking sites like LinkedIn. But now information about who works at a certain company and their roles within an organization is freely available and out there for anybody to find. You just have to look for it.

That’s why when you use this type of cover letter greeting it can come off as lazy. The hiring manager may think you didn’t care enough about the job opening to properly address the cover letter to the person who’d be reading it. So, do you really care about getting the job? Do you really want the job? If you’re lazy even before you get the job, would someone be wrong to assume you’d probably be lazy on the job as well?

In the job search, you never want to do the bare minimum. Writing “To Whom It May Concern” on your cover letter is the bare minimum.

A little research never hurt anybody. Before starting your cover letter, try to find the name of the hiring manager at the company you’re applying to. If you can’t, writing “Dear Hiring Team” or “Dear Hiring Manager” will work just fine.

How you address your cover letter is more important than you think. Every little detail can impact a hiring manager’s impression of you. So, whatever you do, avoid the impersonal, outdated, and lazy greeting of “To Whom It May Concern” on your next cover letter. You’ll thank us later.

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This article was originally published at an earlier date.

Published February 2, 2024

Unlocking Connection: Proven Strategies For Tackling Remote Work Loneliness

As we navigate the evolving landscape of remote work, shifting from traditional office settings to decentralized home-based work has brought advantages and challenges. In the wake of the global pandemic, employees across industries adapted to a new normal, juggling professional responsibilities amid the chaos of family life and virtual schooling.

Four years into this transformative journey, the flexibility of remote work has become a lasting aspect of our professional lives. While the benefits include increased productivity, reduced commutes, and enhanced work-life balance, there’s a lingering challenge that demands attentionâremote work loneliness.

As employees continue to strike a balance between solitude for focused productivity and the need for social connection, this article explores proven strategies to address remote work loneliness and foster meaningful connections in a decentralized work environment. Whether you’re a seasoned remote worker or navigating the new normal, the insights shared here aim to enhance the quality of both professional and personal well-being.

Sharon Grace

It’s 2024, four years past the “two-week shutdown and quarantine” at the onset of the pandemic. Many employees were quickly forced to transition to working from home with the rest of their family members, including kids trying to do virtual school. It was a crazy time!

I think companies have accepted the employees’ desire to have flexibility and not have to work in the office every day if they do not want to. Like most things, there are pluses and minuses, and working remotely has both. We have learned more during these past few years about the effects of working remotely. For some, quiet thinking time is beneficial to productivity. Most remote workers feel they are less distracted at home and are accomplishing more. Not having a long commute or being stuck in traffic is a plus and adds time to their day to work out or cook dinner more often.

I mentioned that quiet time is thinking time and helps some of us focus. However, for others, it can bring a sense of isolation and loneliness. Some struggled coming out of the pandemic being accustomed to staying at home with little or no reason to leave. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy warned of an ‘epidemic of loneliness and isolation’ (2023 advisory).

Today, most employees work in the office an average of three days a week. Most people I speak with want to get out of the house and connect with their colleagues in person again if they live close to the office. Many people have moved away from their employer’s offices and can only work remotely.

How do we identify the need for quiet, thinking time for productivity versus feeling removed from social interactions? People who are extroverts and introverts can experience both.

Get to know yourself better and analyze your thoughts, actions, and how they relate to your social interactions and productivity.
Measure your workflow, productivity, and quality of work in your quiet, thinking time. Did it take longer to complete, and was the quality below your regular standards? Were you completing work to complete it, or were you fully engaged and lost track of time in it?
How is your mood during the day? Have you taken a break and stepped outside?

Try to tailor your workday around interacting with colleagues. Send instant messages or schedule a phone chat or a short video call to connect. Consider a morning meeting to discuss the day’s projects, a lunchtime chat for a quick break to disconnect from work, or even an end-of-day happy hour to discuss the plan for the next day. If possible, planning offsites to meet in person is a great idea to bond and get together to collaborate or to socialize without discussing work.

If you are interviewing for remote positions, consider asking questions about how the teams communicate, bond, and frequency. Try to meet as many people as you can. Remote and hybrid work is here to stay and remember the value of human connection. We need it for professional and personal well-being.

Sharon Grace is a veteran search executive at Duffy Group who helps hiring leaders hire great people because of her proven track record as a strategic partner and advisor to recruit, identify, and assess talent.

Kristin Pozen

Man on laptop deals with remote work loneliness

As organizations adapt to flexible work arrangements, employers must now prioritize addressing their remote workforce’s social and mental well-being. By understanding the unique challenges associated with remote work, employers can play a pivotal role in creating a supportive and connected virtual work environment.

Understanding and prioritizing combatting remote work loneliness is essential for maintaining mental well-being and productivity in the workplace. Employers must ensure that everyone has the opportunity to connect, regardless of where they are located. Be intentional about connecting employees outside of their teams. Make it a once-a-week event for casual connection and a once-a-quarter or annual event for more formal L&D or strategy planning.

Here are some employer strategies to tackle remote work loneliness:

Establish Regular Virtual Meetings: Encourage teams to schedule regular video calls with each other. This helps maintain social connections and provides a sense of belonging.

Provide Automated Collaboration: Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or others allow for employees to stay connected throughout the day. Instant messaging can simulate the casual conversations that happen in an office setting.

Schedule Virtual Coffee Breaks: Informal meetings where you can discuss non-work topics that mimic the casual interactions that occur in an office environment.

Set Up Virtual Social Events: Organize virtual social events, such as virtual happy hours, game nights, or team-building activities. This helps maintain a sense of camaraderie.

Work From Co-Working Spaces: If possible, consider offering to work from co-working spaces occasionally. This allows for face-to-face interactions with others and a change of environment.

Offer Online Communities: Provide access to online forums or communities related to your company’s industry. This can provide a sense of community and facilitate networking.

Evaluate Your Employee Mental Health Benefits: Are they being utilized? If not, ensure your employees know they are available and confidential. Do they need to be enhanced to provide more coverage or more access?

Make Onboarding More Experiential: Onboarding is a critical first opportunity to facilitate friendships at work. Since the pandemic, millions of employees have started new jobs and have never met one of their colleagues in person. Especially for early career employees, this can be incredibly challenging.

Make Recharging a Reality: We must take employee health seriously for human connection and friendship to thrive. We can start by supporting more generous family leave policies, child care, and elder care. Also, ensure that when taking time off, employees recharge by not answering emails and phone calls. They can truly check out for a week at a time.

Kristin Pozen is a research recruitment recruiter at Duffy Group and a former HR recruiter.

Colleen Neese

Woman working from home on laptop deals with remote work loneliness

In a world increasingly adapting to remote work, Duffy Group, a global recruitment firm based in Phoenix, Arizona, stands out with its 33-year history of successfully operating as a remote workforce. As pioneers in the field, company leaders have valuable insights on fostering employee success in the virtual realm, beyond the conventional steps of establishing a dedicated workspace and managing distractions. Duffy Group emphasizes the importance of meaningful connections and combating loneliness in the evolving landscape of remote work. The company showcases a holistic approach to maintaining a strong sense of community among its widely dispersed team, providing inspiration for other organizations seeking innovative ways to keep their remote employees connected.

Duffy Group is a national recruitment firm headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona; however, our recruiters live all over the country and work from home. We have been a remote workforce for 33 years, way before the pandemic and the recent trend that has led to many workers working from home either full time or part of the time.

Since we’ve been doing this so long, we feel like we’ve learned a thing or two that may assist other companies set their employees up for success when it comes to working remotely.

We all know the obvious first steps to creating a positive experience working from home such as:

Have a dedicated workspace
Clear distractions
Take breaks
Make plans after work
Take advantage of not being in the office
Consider getting a pet

But how do you ensure that your employees are connecting on a meaningful level and combating loneliness? We are in the people business, after all! Here are some of the things Duffy Group does to ensure our employees are staying connected:

Utilize technology! We meet regularly via video with each other, with our clients, and with our candidates. We have many company meetings via video that allow us to connect and share information. We also utilize technology to stay connected on various messenger apps. We have one that’s ‘Just for Fun’ where we share silly memes or other fun things going on in our lives, we have one ‘Just for Pets’ where we love to share photos and stories about our furry family members, we have one for our healthy habits and fitness competition, and we have the ability to message as groups or one to one.
Recruiter Huddles â These are small groups of employees who have scheduled informal meetings on the calendars that allow for connecting on all topics.
We’ve created small groups to connect for those who want to connect on things that are not work-relatedâfor example, a Book Club and one where we share recipes and food prep tips.
Celebrate often! We have virtual meet-ups to celebrate all sorts of occasions, from winning awards to weddings and baby showers. My favorite was when we all celebrated our 30th anniversary and received a surprise box at our homes with food and drinks to enjoy as we celebrated virtually.
Provide a leadership coach who will work with all employees virtually and with those who want one-on-one coaching.
Strive to have in-person connections if possible. Once a year, we fly all of our employees to our headquarters in Phoenix, where we all stay at the same resort for three days of training, bonding, and community service. It’s one of my favorite events, and the karaoke night has been a hit year after year!

There are many ways to stay connected as a remote workforce. Hopefully, some of the things Duffy Group has been doing for years will inspire you to implement new and creative ways for your employees to stay connected!

Colleen Neese is a practice leader at Duffy Group. She specializes in recruiting executives in non-profit and healthcare.

Need help recruiting talent for your organization? Check out Duffy Group today.