A marketing agency that creates creative videos and posters have been having a really bad year. The manager of the production division found that the employees aren’t working as motivated and quick as before. So in the next quarter the manager tried to have a weekly performance review in order to rev up the performance. It did work for a while but later on the manager found out that you can’t last a marathon with a sprint.  Later on the management team tried to focus on what drives the people to work. The team found out that people were gaining praise for doing new things even if they were not delivering their promised results. They thought that short-term results were more important than satisfying the consumer. And when the time came to choose, they felt that their individual goals were bigger than the company’s. All this was limiting them from participating wholeheartedly in the transformation underway. Mindsets needed to be flipped through a set of targeted initiatives. The people came to realize that satisfying the consumer is what will bring the short-term results. There won't be any success for the individual if the company is not doing well. They started to be recognized for executing with discipline focusing on our full potential to deliver challenging goals. Sharing the story of why the transformation was necessary and addressing these mindsets engaged the employees with a whole new level of energy, and only a few months later the organization was able to deliver its first quarter back on track and continue the trend. Companies that take the time to identify and shift deep-seated mindsets were 4 times more likely to rate their change programs as successful, according to the McKinsey Quarterly transformational change survey 2010. mindset shifts are linked to the highest impact behaviors a person wants to change.

Remote working has been on the rise over the past decade, and now it’s becoming more mainstream than ever. Remote working is a working style which allows someone to work outside of their corporate office. Remote working is closely linked with freelancers, as they don’t have to come to the office for the whole week, only if they need to. There are two types of remote working which are working-from-home (WFH) and working-from-anywhere (WFA). Both WFH and WFA speak for itself from the place of work. The precedent is WFH, but since a number of research and statements by managers said that working-from-home is not increasing productivity but instead it reduces it. Employees feel too comfortable when they are in their house, thus it has shifted to WFH now. The current trend in Indonesia, with the rise of start-ups, remote working is becoming a mainstream alternative to work without or outside of the office. Remote working doesn’t have to be in one city, it could scale up as working with someone on the other side of the world. There are cases like that where the start-up is in a different country and each country head has to set the best time for a conference call. Although remote working seems like the future of working for everyone, not every job position and every individual is right for remote working. The ideal positions that would fit best with remote working are jobs that only involve individual work such as web or graphic designer, freelance writers, translator, and programmer. If the work requires teamwork and/or collaboration with other people, then it is believed to be inefficient to be remote working. Before you propose for a remote working position or ask your superior for a work-from-home job, you should consider some of the benefits and things to look out for. The advantages of remote working might be tempting such as working at a more comfortable space, you can work in your pajamas, no transportation cost to the office, you can find a cheaper place to live, autonomy over your work, and you might be more productive because of those things. What you should look out for in remote working is that first you’ll be lonely, there won’t be anyone to chat with and it could be quite stressful. Beside being lonely, a research by HBR found that most remote workers tend to leave the company they work for. The stress of no one that looks after you and you don’t see your colleagues for a long time affects the commitment of work in a company.  

Feedback is an important part of an employee's growth and development. Most managers and colleagues will give you a "sandwich" feedback. The "sandwich" feedback is where negative feedback is "sandwiched" between two positive feedback. This happens because they don't want you to feel bad. But should you receive a sugar coated feedback or not? Sugarcoated or “sandwich” type of feedback can be deliberate or unintentionally delivered. Deliberate feedback of delivery is usually done by colleagues that you asked for feedback or when they want to give you feedback. For as unintentional, most managers do so without realizing it.  Deliberate sandwich feedback is caused because it is a common thing to do. People do this because it's easier for people to hear and accept negative feedback when it comes with positive feedback. They assume the sandwich approach provides balanced feedback.They also believe by giving both negative and positive feedback reduces discomfort and anxiety. Managers unintentionally deliver sugarcoated feedback because of the illusion of transparency. The illusion of transparency makes the communication vague and the receiving end can misinterpret the intent of the feedback. It is where people are so focused on their own intense feelings and intentions that they overestimate the extent to which their inner world come across to others resulting in the words may be too vague to convey their true intent. In order to avoid misinterpretation of feedback you could dispel any incorrect assumptions by asking questions or by requesting managers to use precise, explicit terms when delivering feedback. If your manager doesn’t ask you to rearticulate what they have told you, you can try using statements that begin with “So if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying…”. As the person receiving the feedback, you should not fear the negative feedback. As an employee negative feedback should be a motivation that leads you to grow to be a better employee. It may be hard in our culture, a high context one, to receive negative feedback but just hearing positive feedback would make you a stagnant employee in his/her comfort zone.