Remote Career Development: Nia Davies On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely
An Interview With David Liu
Balance: as some face-to-face time is required for building and maintaining good relationships, as well as allowing space for spontaneous water cooler conversations and serendipity.
Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaborating 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 Nia Davies.
Nia is a founder and wellbeing writer from London. She has a BSc in medical science from Imperial College and an Mst in entrepreneurship from Cambridge University. You can find out more about her venture at yugenial.com as well as her portfolio on niaelindavies.com
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”?
Having left medical school during my finals due to an unhealthy lifestyle and mental health concerns, I became more interested in holistic approaches to personal wellbeing. As someone who’s heritage is Welsh-Korean, this meant integrating Eastern and Western perspectives and finding more crossover in the intersection between mainstream and ‘alternative’ practices. With regards to the world of work, this hybrid approach translated into creating more autonomy in my life, which has now become the norm thanks to the increasing numbers of people having the option to work from home under the remote model.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
One of the most interesting things that happened to me when I started my new career path was noticing how many doors opened up by simply following my curiosities and interests. I had always been scared to leave the world of clinical practice because I feared that I would never find security and stability anywhere else.
However, I could not have seen or predicted the opportunities that were going to present themselves until I had already taken the leap — building a platform, being invited to events and receiving offers to collaborate from individuals and brands were all things that emerged spontaneously as a by-product of pursuing what I was interested in.
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 first started, I went to an event on a press pass and accidentally ended up interviewing an important political figure from Israel completely unexpectedly. I was unprepared and am ashamed to admit that I had no idea who I was speaking to until the end (they had kept his arrival confidential for security reasons). However, I knew the industry well enough to have an engaging and insightful conversation and it taught me that there’s always benefit to be had in stepping outside of your comfort zone, no matter how ridiculous it may feel.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
‘The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes’ — I think that how and what you do in life is important because it changes who you are, which creates a ripple effect in the environment.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?
I think the pandemic has helped an increasing number of people wake up to the realization that health is the real wealth. In the world of work this translates to allowing employees more autonomy over their lives and schedules, by leveraging internal motivators alongside external incentives when it comes to progression (individual strengths, passions and motivations over blanket financial bonuses).
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?
One of my favorite business books is ‘let my people go surfing’ by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. They have long been ahead of the curve in operating a purpose-lead business model that adheres to the triple bottom line and employs alternative marketing and work-life practices as they’ve scaled.
They hire people that are passionate about the greater mission and vision, which creates a culture whereby allowing people the freedom to work remotely means that they have a more functional work-life balance. As a by-product, this creates a positive feedback loop which is also better for the bottom line.
X+Why are a co-working space in London that have been inspired by such practices and also support all the start-ups they house to do the same under the B Corporation framework and guidelines.
Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?
Five main challenges include:
- Balance: as some face-to-face time is required for building and maintaining good relationships, as well as allowing space for spontaneous water cooler conversations and serendipity.
- Choice: the hybrid approach to remote work is arguably one of the most popular models as it allows for choice, flexibility and adaptability in navigating the best of both worlds. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to health and wellbeing and having choice and options allows people and businesses to experiment with the best choices for them as the environment changes.
- Culture: maintaining company culture can be more difficult if most of the team is remote, which makes the importance of truly understanding motivation at the hiring process even more important.
- Metrics: the metrics we use to measure progress are changing and should be more holistic and inclusive of intangible factors such as psychological needs and fulfilment, especially as the world becomes increasingly remote and automated.
- Technology: many remote workers still do not have adequate access to the correct technology and facilities that could make their transition out of the office smoother. Many local co-working spaces are beginning to step in and scale up to meet these demands.
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?
(listed above)
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?
Most of my personal career development has come from taking on new challenges and pursuing curiosities. I think that giving people more time and space to simply experiment with novel processes can create innovative outputs that can then be brought back into an environment of collaboration for further development. The remote model is great for this.
Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?
Providing access to resources which can often be expensive, and making development more enjoyable and engaging by tailoring it to personal motivators, which can be better aligned with overall company requirements — a bottom-up approach based on feedback and refinement, instead of top-down.
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 believe that if more people were happy and engaged in life, the world would be a better place. For me this translates to better mental health and aligning who you are with what you do, as there is an inclination towards shaving off the edges of square pegs to fit them into society’s round holes.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
My portfolio is available at niaelindavies.com and I write about my interests at niafaraway.com
Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success
