For Market Researchers being offered a long-term work from home (WFH) option: should you accept?
Many Market Research & Insights professionals are being offered full or hybrid WFH scenarios as long-term options. What’s the career-oriented market researcher to do? Would choosing a 100% work from home scenario impede your career? Your visibility with upper management? What tips and tactics can you use to make sure that the choice you make will be right for you both personally and professionally?
To help answer these questions, Research Rockstar President Kathryn Korostoff interviewed remote working expert Maya Middlemiss.
In this episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars, Maya opens the conversation with the perspective of decision-makers around giving employees the choice to work at home or in an office. She explains, “I think the idea of giving people a choice implies a certain amount of integrity on behalf of the decision-makers, acknowledgment that they don’t have all the answers and that we’re still in a state of flux.” She highlights the benefits employers provide through this choice, but also acknowledges that the ability to work from home can be an empowering decision, but obviously has some risks.
One of the chief issues is, “…availability bias. That if you’re in the office and that’s where the managers are, that’s where the opportunities are… Will the office become like the golf course of a couple of decades ago? Will we end up with indirect discrimination if more women, more people with disabilities, other cohorts opt for WFH, and will that reinforce that discrimination if we have people in the office who are then receiving those opportunities because they happen to bump into the CEO in the break room?” Though these issues are concerning, Maya reassures that, “I firmly believe that if you love the work from home lifestyle, then it’s well worth doing, and it’s well worth acknowledging these things and tackling them head-on.”
So how do you avoid “the golf course effect”? Maya explains, “when you’re the remote person on a hybrid team, you need to bring your whole communication to those fairly limited interfaces, which might be text, or email, or a video call. So, you do need to over-communicate to an extent, though the 10-page email probably isn’t the best tactic. Far better would be 10 short messages through the day…It’s a good idea to use the old paradigm of: say what you’re going to do, do the thing, say you’ve done it… Ideally, the thing you’ve done will be visible in some kind of project management tool anyway, but if it’s not then you need to talk about it.”
WFH is not all “bad news” for career advancement. Maya elaborates, “Use the fact that the online space has some hierarchies removed from it.” For example, getting an appointment with the CMO may have been near impossible in the past, but with WFH, sending them a direct message in Slack may be totally appropriate.
For more WFH success tactics. check out the current episode of Conversations for Research Rockstars with special guest Maya Middlemiss.
Looking for more resources on working from home? Check out our article on going virtual.
More About Our Guest: Maya Middlemiss is a freelance writer and consultant, specializing in future-of-work and collaboration themes. Check out her related information article, and website. Passionate about inclusivity in location-independence and the social impact of technology, she is the creator of the Healthy Happy Homeworking community and book series, and the Successfully Securing Your Remote Job training programme. Maya is an associate with Virtual Not Distant (and the 21st Century Work-Life podcast) in London, a regular contributor to a range of collaboration technology publications and operates her Estonian-based e-business as a British immigrant in Spain. Prior to freelancing full time, Maya created and led a fully remote international research fieldwork team, from 2000-2017, managing recruitment and logistics for thousands of qualitative research and UX projects.
