8 ways to grow your career while working from home

How do you keep remote hires engaged with the team - and ensure they have growth opportunities?

This question was recently posed by a member of the Dev Interrupted Discord community, and with work from home here to stay for many companies, we’ve heard from folks who have had concerns about not having the in-person opportunity to network and worry it might hinder their career growth.

Based on seven years of experience as a team leader and individual contributor in both hybrid and fully remote work environments, I've learned some clear steps to alleviate this potential problem - four tips for individuals and four more for team leaders to enable their organizations

4 ways for individuals to grow their remote careers

On a personal basis, there are four things that I've found to be key for approaching personal growth in remote work:

1. Leverage Digital Content: Sharing your progress publicly via content - whether through pinned LinkedIn updates, personal blogs, short videos, or whatever format best fits for you. This may feel unnatural at first, but is a huge differentiator. People usually don't know what you're up to unless you tell them - leverage LinkedIn/Twitter etc. for external visibility.

2. Schedule Internal Visibility: I use scheduled slack messages to do regular internal reporting about what my team and I are up to so that the rest of the business (and stakeholders in particular) have visibility. You may think the leadership of your company knows what you're up to, but this is often not true. You need to provide regular updates and celebrate wins publicly.

3. Stakeholder Communication: Set regular touchpoints to communicate with stakeholders even if it's not strictly "necessary" so that they have visibility and see you making progress. Without the casual office conversations of an in-person office, you need the face-to-face time, and it'll resonate with them and ensure they feel included - even if you're just updating them.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask: Be intentional about asking for opportunities and pursuing growth: a lot of people struggle with asking for things, but asking for growth opportunities that enable you to learn and also raise your internal organizational profile is both crucial and a benefit to your team - they should want you to grow your impact.

But it's not just on the individual - we also need to be intentional about organizational design.

4 ways to support your remote team’s careers

As Darren Murph has highlighted, you need to be more intentional in remote environments without ad hoc in-person touchpoints - highlighting why some members of our Dev Interrupted Discord have been concerned about distributed work's impact on their careers.

As a team leader in a remote environment, you have a duty and responsibility to lift up your team members and set them up for success.

Here are 4 ways I try to enable my team members:

1. Transparency and context: Include team members in conversations that go beyond their role's scope. High transparency that ensures your team sees broader organizational context and the impact they are making (and are verbally recognized for it, particularly in front of team members or members of other teams within the org) pays major dividends and sets them up to expand their role. Plus, they may bring insights to the conversation you wouldn't expect.

2. Help them goal set: Career conversations as a must: from day one find out what your team members’ goals are and be transparent with them about opportunities. Help build a plan to get them there - even if that means in the long term, they may leave. But if you’re worried about that - don’t be. People leave bad bosses, and if you’re enabling your team to grow in their careers, you’re probably not one of them.

3. Celebrate success: Build a culture that celebrates success: even if the broader organization doesn't do a great job of doing so, that doesn't have to extend to your team. People want to know their work matters, and you'll have a happier, more fulfilled, and more effective team.

4. Offsites: If possible, organizing an in-person team offsite can be a great way to boost team morale, give team members opportunities to get to know each other, network, and take advantage of the benefits of in-person collaboration with designated and designed time to mind-meld.
   
   The quarterly offsites at my current company, LinearB have been a repeated highlight and a key opportunity to solve big problems. As someone who excels in a remote work environment but wants that occasional in-person opportunity, once a quarter is ideal for me, but this may vary for your team - just make sure you're not spending more time traveling and getting ready for offsites than you are getting things done.

I will also readily admit that I am lucky. I joined a rapidly growing team where most people have been hired remotely - and I've found that remote work has enabled me to be at my best. I'm in a great org that is intentional around this - and I have several years of previous experience in hybrid and distributed work environments, so I'm definitely on one end of the adoption curve.

It's okay to still be figuring this out - a lot of individuals and organizations are. But you need to be more intentional as a distributed worker about both your personal career growth and enabling your teams.