Remote Career Development: Fabiana Meléndez Ruiz Of JDI On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Socializing can be awkward: Online meetings are better than phone calls, in my opinion. Being able to see faces and get a glimpse of people’s homes can be fun. However, happy hours via Zoom aren’t quite the same. It’s definitely awkward, you don’t get as many non-verbals as you can when you see people in person.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Fabiana Meléndez Ruiz.

Fabiana Meléndez Ruiz is a Venezuelan-American communications expert and strategic storyteller. She grew up with her mother repeating one daily mantra “cada cabeza es un mundo,” which roughly translates to “everyone’s head is their own world.” As a result, Fabiana has always been interested in why people think the way they do and has utilized that passion to serve her clients through integrated PR strategies.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I landed my first PR internship with Circuit of the Americas in 2014 and assisted with international events like Formula 1. Since then I have developed comprehensive earned media strategies for innovative science and tech companies, marketed and launched food and beverage brands, developed events and influencer marketing tactics for top hospitality brands, and have built thought leadership for companies and their leaders.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

PR is a really interesting industry to work in even when you’re not working with lifestyle brands. Working in the field has provided me with ample opportunities and put me in really unexpected situations which have led to some really interesting stories!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

It’s hard for me to pinpoint another funny mistake aside from the one I usually tell (the time I CC’d all of the guests for an event instead of BCCing them), but I will say that PR is the type of industry where you will make mistakes everyday and it ends up being funny once you’re out of the trenches.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my friends and unofficial mentor, Paige Velasquez Budde, CEO of Zilker Media told me to “fail fast.” I had always been afraid to make mistakes because I thought that doing the job well or living a good life meant having minimal missteps. But, to err is human, right? So, you want to fail because that is how you learn, but you also want to learn and adapt quickly. Make the mistake, learn quickly, and pivot.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

Don’t get so lost in the success of your business that you forget the human element. In marketing, we emphasize focusing on the customer, except that many leaders forget about who the original customer is — the people who actively work to build your business everyday. Really, your internal people are customer numero uno. If they believe in you and your work, they will ensure that your external customers believe in it too.

However, when businesses move too quickly and forget to put employees first, they completely erase the human element leading to overworked employees, endless meetings, and unreasonable deadlines.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

Working remotely has some great benefits which have allowed me to really focus on nurturing and developing my career. Without working from home these past 20-something months, I don’t think I would have been able to develop professionally the way I have. Some benefits include:

1. Integrating life in your work and vice versa: Working remotely provides a sense of freedom most people never experience in their professional lives. You have more autonomy to craft a schedule that works for you, provided that you organize yourself well enough to be able to leverage that additional time. Want to take a workout class at noon? Are you a morning person and want to enjoy a nice breakfast as you ease into your day? Need to run to a doctor’s appointment and don’t want to feel like you NEED to make up the hours?
2. Goodbye rush hour traffic: Sure, commuting can be enjoyable at times and even provide some benefits like much needed alone time. But, for the most part the entire ritual of commuting can eat up a lot of your time (especially if you live in the outskirts of the city like I do). Working from home saves time that I can use for other things that aid in wellness and mental health like having dinner and socializing with friends I wouldn’t normally get to see, or developing my leadership skills by attending committee meetings for the nonprofit I am a part of.
3. Focusing is way more achievable: Working in an office can be fun, but it can also be full of distractions. Between the noisy environment and colleagues coming up to your desk for idle chat, protecting your working time can be really tricky. At home, you don’t have to worry about seeming anti-social in order to get your work done. No one is coming up to you, there can be less noise than an office and you can move around at your leisure allowing you to really develop routines for focus.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

Working from home has a lot of awesome benefits but like all things in life, it does have its share of challenges:

1. Meetings on Meetings on Meetings: Not being able to work in-person means that people can’t just flag you down at the office to quickly debrief about a client or clarify to-dos. Those post meeting debriefs have turned into weekly internal meetings adding to the plethora of recurring Zooms. Every little question can easily turn into yet another meeting making it challenging to do the actual work.
2. Routines…are weird: Routines can blur when you aren’t tethered to a strict commuter schedule. Waking up five minutes before having to log on can feel like you are engaging in a self-care moment because you’re sleeping in, but it can also make you feel disconnected when you’re groggily reading emails. Working from home can also mean perpetual snack time — it’s okay to graze and enjoy meals outside of your routine, but there can come a point where there is no routine which can impact focus and even sleep.
3. The Jekyll and Hyde effect: You could’ve had an amazing manager pre-work from home that allowed you to get things done your way, and then, COVID happened. Some really great managers were lost to stay at home mandates because they were able to monitor employees while they were all in one place. As soon as everyone dispersed, their need to manage devolved into micromanaging because not all managers were equipped to navigate the challenges that come with leading a remote workforce. Full disclosure, this did not happen to me — I have had some great managers. But, this did happen to a lot of people I know so it was worth adding this to the list.
4. Socializing can be awkward: Online meetings are better than phone calls, in my opinion. Being able to see faces and get a glimpse of people’s homes can be fun. However, happy hours via Zoom aren’t quite the same. It’s definitely awkward, you don’t get as many non-verbals as you can when you see people in person.
5. There are limitations to space: I spent the first half of 2020 within the confines of my room which served as my home gym, office and living quarters. It was challenging to figure out how to position my desk and make my background look professional during client meetings when my entire life was in one space. There are legitimate physical limitations people will encounter while working from home if they don’t have the space to make a dedicated office which can make working from home challenging.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

1. Protect your time, because nobody else will: When it comes to excessive meetings, you want to aggressively protect your time. If your colleagues are used to syncing calendars and just populating meetings on everyone’s calendar, block off times for work, lunch, meditation, whatever. This will ensure that the amount of meetings is reasonable and will train your colleagues to ask before they try to schedule something. And, yes, it’s okay to say no — don’t feel obligated to take every single meeting that comes up, they can be rescheduled and moved. As for the meetings that can’t necessarily be moved, there is always a way to make it work. Have too many weekly meetings? Maybe you can make them hour long bi-weeklies or hour long monthlies depending on need.
2. Yes, you’re going to have to wake up early (whatever that means for you): Okay, you don’t really have to wake up early, but I definitely recommend creating some sort of routine. Humans are creatures of habit, any shift to our routines (like jet-lag, or you know, a two-year long pandemic) can impact our eating habits, sleeping habits, mood etc. If you used to wake up at 7 and are now waking up 5 minutes before 9:00, try a middle ground solution and wake up at 8:00. Or, try to schedule a workout for the same time every day or week. Building these routines can help you feel grounded and can help with easing anxiety and stress.
3. There is no one-size fits all solution to dealing with a micromanager: The good news is, though, that there are solutions. The first step is to try to understand your manager’s motivations. Micromanagement doesn’t always stem from an inadequate manager, it can be due to other triggers like pressure from your boss’ boss to meet certain metrics. Once you figure out why your manager is motivated to micromanage you can decide what the next step is based on your relationship. Do you have good rapport and can bring up the issue directly and diplomatically? Or, can you implement strategies like providing weekly update emails every Friday or Monday with all the things that have gotten done?
4. Get creative with social moments: Zoom happy hours can be kind of a bummer, but they don’t have to be. You can try and make them an experience through trivia, games and general “getting to know you questions.” I’ve also had sessions with each one of my colleagues where we may eat lunch together and just chat about things unrelated to work, sometimes keeping interactions small can build a greater sense of community. There is always the option to take it IRL depending on the comfort level of your colleagues — maybe a big gathering is still out of the question, but 1:1 lunches or dinners al fresco can be a great way to build connections.
5. The space issue: This one can be a tricky one to navigate because there are factors that are out of many people’s control such as the ability to own or rent a space large enough to have an office. However, there are ways to make it work. There are mini desks you can buy online that will give you the opportunity to really settle in one area of your house. There are also desks that are meant for small spaces such as wall-mounted desks that fold to be completely out of the way. From there, it is important to find ways to decorate that area with lighting or books or whatever it is you need to feel like you have a dedicated area where you can focus. Settling helped me feel like I was better able to sit in one area for long periods of time and work, even before I moved and had to work out of my tiny room.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

The biggest advice I would give anyone wanting to advance in their career is to join professional organizations. My career has accelerated this past year because I joined two organizations that have provided the tools, connections and resources I needed to move onto the next step in my professional journey.

One is the Young Women’s Alliance (YWA), an Austin-based nonprofit that empowers its members to develop personally and professionally through educational programs and opportunities to lead, network and serve. I immediately jumped in upon joining in July 2021 and became a part of the marketing committee. I have been able to continue to sharpen my PR skills by developing a comprehensive PR program for the organization from the ground up. This is an incredibly valuable experience I can add to my resume.

Providing pro-bono counsel for a nonprofit organization, either through joining an organization or through working with local nonprofits directly is a great way to hone in on your skills by adapting your expertise to a cause you are passionate about and to develop other resume worthy skills that wouldn’t have been in your wheelhouse otherwise.

I also joined the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) which provides a plethora of resources from webinars on relevant industry topics to events for city chapters. These webinars and events have kept me up to date on the changing media landscape and have been invaluable in continuously educating me so that I can, in turn, provide relevant counsel to clients.

There was a point of time where I wanted to get a master's in either communications or business administration, but the truth is, a lot of these programs are outdated — the curriculum isn’t updated at the same speed that the industries are shifting and changing. Joining the professional organization for your industry provides relevant and ever changing knowledge that can be beneficial as you grow.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

Career development begins when employers and managers foster mentorship within the organization. There is a huge difference between simply managing people instead of actively mentoring and cultivating their professional development.

The first step in mentoring means letting employees drive the agenda during manager check-ins, this can be really tricky for employers to do because it means relinquishing control. But, if you want to nurture employees then you need to listen and facilitate the discussion — ask guiding questions not leading ones, help employees develop new ideas or get to a solution on their own through your guidance.

Yes, you still want to set the target objectives that will determine their long-term success, but make sure these objectives are formed together through a discussion of goals, career trajectory, etc.

Career development, in my opinion, is really about collaboration and transparency. You want everyone in your organization to understand the business, the systems, and overarching goals so that they feel empowered to contribute. Really, you want people to grow to become better than you because that is when you can trust them to do great work.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I am interested in a few social causes so it’s difficult to pinpoint what ONE cause or movement I would dedicate most of my time to.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I am very active on LinkedIn so that is a great place to get in touch and connect with me professionally — I am always happy to chat through all things PR and forge new relationships. I am also usually on Twitter, this one is a mix of professional insights and personal interests.

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.