Remote Career Development: Kevin Davis Of First Workings On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Do everything possible to find or create a space to work from. This might mean asking roommates or other members of the household to align their own schedules to accommodate this need.

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 Kevin Davis.

Kevin Davis is the Founder and Chairman of First Workings. Originally from London, Mr. Davis graduated from the University of Kent at Canterbury, (UK) with a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Government and was awarded an MA in International Relations from NYU in 2011. Mr. Davis ran one of the world’s largest listed derivatives brokerages, Man Financial, and retired after a quarter of a century in London’s City and New York City’s Wall Street.

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 grew up in London and went to university in the south of England, after which I spent 30 years working in finance. My first twenty years in finance were in London, and the rest were in New York City. I started at the bottom rung of the ladder as a runner, and I loved almost every single day I worked in the financial sector. I experienced incredible highs, such as owing ENRON money after secretly forcing them to close out the world’s largest and most complicated energy derivatives position. And I experienced incredible lows, such as seeing my company hit by a rogue trader just seven months after leading the world’s second largest-ever financial IPO in 2007. I have hilarious memories and anecdotes from my days on the trading desks and exchange floors, as well as from my travels. In 1990, I met the girl of my dreams, and we got engaged 6 weeks later and married 6 months after that. We have now been together for 31 years and have two unbelievable children.

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

Probably the most interesting story happened after 9/11, when I found myself stranded on the West Coast, unable to fly back to our evacuated offices on Wall Street and connect with my understandably traumatized colleagues. I solved the issue by renting a town car with two drivers, who took turns driving me back to New York City as I juggled phones and conference calls from the back seat. I worked to get our decamped NYC trading team up and running in a remote location with virtually no data or voice lines. Traveling along the fabled Route 66, I coordinated with exchange and government officials, as we managed to keep trading uninterrupted, leaning on our teams in Chicago and London, and without the un-yet-invented Zoom! My two drivers and I forged friendships which endure till today, having had countless hilarious interactions with locals along the way.

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?

When I started in finance, there was a strict dress code: solid dark grey or navy suits, the most risqué being a chalk stripe version. Not yet knowing these rules, on my second day at work I wore a navy jacket, beige trousers and brown shoes, thinking I looked very cool indeed. As soon as the chief dealer saw me, he shouted “do you have a suit” in front of my 150 new colleagues, and I replied that I did. He instructed me to go home and retrieve it, saying, “if you ever come to work looking like a used car salesman, you’ll be fired… and by the way, as for the shoes, don’t you know the rule: never wear brown in town!” The lesson I learned from this is to always research the culture and morals of any new company you join, making every possible attempt to respect its norms.

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

Be very careful how you treat people on your way up because you will probably meet them again on the way down. In other words, ALWAYS treat people as you yourself would wish to be treated.

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

Business leaders should remember that the most successful employees are those who love coming to work and who enjoy the job they are doing. Creating a mutually respectful and collaborative culture is essential. Instill the strict rule that any problem between staff must be settled by the end of the day or over a drink after work (if they are of legal drinking age, of course). Petty internal disputes are corrosive and unproductive in any work environment.

It is also critical that staff have time-off — not just for a few days here or there, but for one, two or three weeks at a time, when they can fully recharge their batteries and vacation with family and friends.

On a more structural level, the best way to ensure employees thrive is by setting clear expectations and by providing the tools and resources necessary for them to succeed. A teamwork and partnership ethos underpins First Workings, the non-profit organization I founded in 2015, which connects underserved high school students with paid internships at leading NYC companies.

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?

There is absolutely no doubt that managers and their staff get far more one-on-one facetime than was the case when these interactions took place in-person. One obvious reason for this is that participants in video calls are far less likely to be distracted or interrupted than they would be in a live working environment. This can make their engagement far deeper and more meaningful. Although initially difficult to track colleagues’ progress and activity when remote working became the “norm” in March 2020, the introduction of workflow tools like Slack have arguably made productivity and efficiency better than it was pre-pandemic.

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

1. Many people who work remotely, particularly younger, newer employees who share a home with family members or roommates, struggle to find their own quiet space to conduct video meetings. Even when not doing online meetings, there are often many more distractions at home than there are in an office, ranging from kids demanding attention, to front-door bells ringing with deliveries, etc.
2. The art of conversation or simple verbal interaction can easily be diminished or even lost entirely in this remote environment, where simple interactions often take place solely through texts, instant messages or emails.
3. Although not true of all industries, I feel it is far harder to have creative interactions with colleagues when working remotely. A lot of brainstorming takes place when colleagues bump into one another in the coffee or lunchroom, or when sitting together before or after a formal meeting. It is difficult to have “impromptu” conversations when almost all calls/video chats are scheduled.
4. Pre-Pandemic, smartphones were already making it difficult to maintain a division between work and home. The clue is in the term: “working from home” means our homes are now also our workplaces!
5. Because managers tend to be anxious about demanding too many or too few deliverables when they are not watching their colleagues in person, compensating workflow tracking technologies can create entirely new dimensions of stress.

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. Tell participants who know there is a likelihood of there being interruptions during an upcoming call that they should pre-warn colleagues at the beginning of the video call. Colleagues and customers are almost always sympathetic to challenges that they themselves probably face in varying degrees. Such moments, as long as they are not too frequent, can actually serve to humanize people that they have never met in person.
2. Do everything possible to find or create a space to work from. This might mean asking roommates or other members of the household to align their own schedules to accommodate this need.
3. PICK UP THE PHONE AND TALK! Make every effort possible to forge human relationships with new colleagues. Remember, when companies are looking to cut staff, the easiest person to fire is the one with whom you have little or no “relationship.”
4. Work out a system with colleagues where the only messages you’ll respond to outside working hours are those which come via texts or WhatsApps, with these being assumed as urgent. Emails on the other hand can be regarded as routine and for the next working day.
5. Use Slack or its equivalent as a tool to help colleagues manage their workflow and deliverables. It should only be used to monitor employees’ attendance where there are doubts about individuals’ “stealing time” by not working their full day.

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?

Just like in person-working, always be available to help with work which might be outside your job description. Make yourself integral to as many processes as you can. It is not an employer’s responsibility to make you indispensable, it is yours.

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

It is in everyone’s interest for employers to offer and pay for as much relevant training as they possibly can. Give your employees tasks outside their comfort zone and outside their strict job description. This will help them grow their skills and learn to be adaptive to any challenges they face.

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. :-)

Educate major institutions like investment banks, hedge funds and high-tech companies about the reasons people attend community colleges, which is very often economically driven. If a super bright high school student simply does not have the resources to attend a prestigious 4-year college or university, they will likely go to a community college instead. They will thus never get the chance to be at top tier companies who restrict their recruitment to a narrow group of colleges.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Our mission, program structure and offerings are all available at www.firstworkings.org.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!