Alveena Ahmad
7 ways to grow your professional network while working from home
Working from home can be great as it gives you freedom and flexibility to work on your own terms. Also, it does not involve any commute which makes you work without wasting any time. Although working from home has benefits but growing your professional network can sometimes seem downright impossible.
For this purpose, the following are a few ways to grow your network:
1. Join a Twitter Chat:
Working from home does not mean you cannot be social. You can participate in a LinkedIn discussion or a Twitter Chat so that you can connect with people who are interested in the same topic.
2. Send out notes to professional contacts:
Although nowadays everything is digital nothing can beat the old-fashioned handwritten notes. Therefore, send out handwritten notes to the professionals you have met saying thanks or post congratulations cards to those who have recently been promoted to a better position. It will make you remembered by them more than if you contact them through email.
3. Market yourself through blogs:
If you have the skill to write, participate in a weekly blog through a guest post. On LinkedIn, publish your own informative post and reach out to an industry blog.
4. Sift through the messages:
Many of your important emails can get buried under so many daily emails. Therefore, make time to tackle the unanswered emails. If you are asked to join a meetup, don’t ignore it and reply as soon as possible. You will see your schedule filling up with get together and meet-ups.
5. Reach out:
There must be someone you are truly inspired by within your field. Then it is time to reach out to them through social media, comment on their most recent blog, and chances are, you will hear back from them.
6. LinkedIn recommendation:
Writing a LinkedIn Recommendation by visiting profiles of current or former co-workers helps to increase your presence on LinkedIn. Once you do that, it will increase your chances of getting a solid recommendation in return.
7. Volunteer:
When it comes to increasing your professional network, search for opportunities to volunteer. It is a great way to meet new contacts and a less formal and rigid environment. Therefore, find a cause you want to get involved with and volunteer your time, the reward will be great.
Work-from-home folks are happier, earn more than 9 to 5 job persons
The possibility of emailing or calling someone from anywhere has given rise to different working conditions. Working remotely is becoming the norm today. This kind of work allows plenty of spontaneous interactions with colleagues along with great focus and productivity. According to the professor of Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nicholas Bloom the office environment has become somewhat outdated. Set up during the Industrial Revolution, that system is not flexible enough for absorbing today’s sophisticated communications methods which are not helpful for firms as well as employees. Working from home is a future-looking technology that has an enormous potential to absorb future technological changes.
In order to verify his claims, China’s largest travel agency Ctrip was studied by Nicholas Bloom which has 20,000 employees working for it and a market capitalization of about $20 billion. The company has its headquarters in Shanghai and the leaders there were interested in knowing the impacts of working from home. For a study, the solicited worker workers volunteered in which half worked from home for about nine months, visiting the office once a week whereas the rest worked only in the office. The study was carried out by Bloom over a period of two years. The results showed a massive improvement in the performance of the workers i.e. 13% improvement in the employees’ performance who worked from home.
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Bloom also found out that an office may be considered organized but it actually is a super noisy place. People who work from can concentrate better. Moreover, there was a 50% decline in resignations when people were allowed to work from home. The benefits of working from home were not limited to employees only; managers also gained a lot by spending less of their time on advertising, training, recruiting, and promoting. The experiment led Ctrip to provide the option of working from home to all employees which made the company gain $2,000 more profit per person at home.
According to Bloom, this study is going to help to remove the negative impression regarding working from home. The employees who work from home are productive and happier, and the firms can make more profits by spending less on recruiting and training people.
There are a lot of ways to work but working remotely is a good tool to have in the mix.
This post originally appeared at Insights by Stanford Business. and QZ
