Remote Career Development: Tony Pounder Of Intelligent Decisioning On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

The lack of exercise/sunlight/outdoor experience — pre pandemic, for some people, the only time they went outside was to go to the office — gamers in particular are pretty much in doors when not in the office, so organise a physical meet up with those team members. Meet in the local park and walk a mile or two as you discuss the matters of the day.

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 Tony Pounder.

Tony Pounder is the CTO of Intelligent Decisioning, a Microsoft Certified consultancy, specialising in providing solutions to business problems using the Microsoft technology stack. Until that point, Tony had spent his career in enterprise software development, primarily in the financial sector which included a 12 year spell in the R&D department of a global financial organisation. Tony now splits his time between Intelligent Decisioning, distance running, organising UK based events for the Microsoft Office 365 community, his wife, 2 kids and 3 granddaughters, though not necessarily in that order.

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 was born in Sunderland which is a town on the North East coast of England, 100 miles or so south of the Scottish border. I originally left school at 16 with a few low-level qualifications as this was the thing to do back there and then. I spent a couple of years doing jobs I didn’t really like before deciding to go back to school and spent the next 3.5 years at college and University where I studied computer science and learned how to develop software — I’d been into computers from an early age with the introduction of the ZX81 and this seemed like a good fit. My first development project was carried out on a terminal connected to the mainframe — a far cry from the ZX81 and later home computers I owned. I then spent the next 25 years or so, having a family and developing software for financial organisations. I was presented with the opportunity to found Intelligent Decisioning with a couple of colleagues and we set out to do our own thing.

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

About 20 years ago, I was working on a project at the Microsoft Thames Valley campus with a colleague and 2 Microsoft employees. Whilst we were carrying out a whiteboard session we were interrupted by a camera crew and Ruby Wax who was filming a MS promotional video. She interviewed us all and made a comment that you could tell who the real developers as they were dressed in casual clothes — it was my colleague and me who were dressed in casual gear and the Microsoft devs were dressed much smarter than us so “not proper devs”.

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?

The funniest and the most painful was when I was developing software in my first role. Even back then, I took project work home and continued to work on it on my home PC. I had no source control, nowhere to check in the code and I had been developing for a few hours without saving the code. My 1-year-old son, crawled into the room where I was working and managed to flick the power switch off — 4 hours down the drain 😊

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

We used to have a saying back when we started developing online transactional services at the start of the original dotcom boom whenever there was an issue “It’s always the comms!” — in my experience, it still always is.

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

If you have people that are doing a job that is also their hobby it can be very difficult to prevent them from doing too much — it needs the business leader to point out that they may need to slow down, take breaks, it’s in the interests of the individual and the business to do so. I’d also recommend the use of technology such as Microsoft Teams and it’s Headspace integration to setup out of hours’ time slots in your diary and virtual commutes which feature reflective sound tacks etc.

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

1. An ergonomically friendly office space
2. A feeling of isolation — when we all went into the office every day, a lot of time was spent “socialising” with our colleagues. It’s said we spent 40–50 hours a week with our colleagues which is usually more time than we spend with our partners. When the pandemic came along this socialising stopped overnight.
3. The feeling of not being involved
4. The not getting going feeling — it’s easy to get up, sit at your desk and just think, I’ll get ready later — from time to time, it’s a bonus, other times it’s a curse for you and your productivity
5. The lack of exercise/sunlight/outdoor experience — some peoples only trip outside was to go to work — gamers in particular are pretty much in doors when not in the office

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. An ergonomically friendly office space — over the years I’ve worked from time to time at home and I used to work anywhere — the kitchen table, the couch, on the bed etc., but the elongated period brought on by the pandemic has shown me that a comfy, supportive working space is very important for productivity and personal health and wellbeing.
2. A feeling of isolation — when we all went into the office every day, a lot of time was spent “socialising” with our colleagues. It’s said we spent 40–50 hours a week with our colleagues which is usually more time than we spend with our partners. When the pandemic came along this socialising stopped overnight. Use the technology, setup adhoc calls with the team, talk about stuff other than the project you’re all working on. Setup a “water cooler” channel in teams and encourage staff to drop in there for a few minutes of sosialising when they drink their morning / afternoon tea/coffee.
3. The feeling of not being involved — organise regular information sharing sessions with your team. Update them on the team activity, the wider teams activity and the organisational news. Use a platform like SharePoint and Teams to publish organisational news for the team to read at their leisure.
4. The not getting going feeling — it’s easy to get up, sit at your desk and just think, I’ll get ready later — from time to time, it’s a bonus, other times it’s a curse for you and your productivity. Set clear goals and milestones for staff and make sure they are reviewed regularly — following agile development techniques we hold daily team calls of 15 minutes where everyone declares what they have done since the last call, what they are going to do that day and any impediments to them getting that stuff done — it helps keep everyone in the team updated and keeps the team members focussed on what they need to deliver and by when.
5. The lack of exercise/sunlight/outdoor experience — pre pandemic, for some people, the only time they went outside was to go to the office — gamers in particular are pretty much in doors when not in the office, so organise a physical meet up with those team members. Meet in the local park and walk a mile or two as you discuss the matters of the 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?

I love technology — when I’m not working with it, I’m reading about it, or I’m organising/attending tech conferences — the latest conference I’m organising is https://www.collabdays.org/2022-bletchleypark/ which is a conference all about Microsoft Office 365 technology. The event is based at Bletchley Park Museum, England, which is the home of the UK National Museum of Computing and houses such great pieces as Colossus, the worlds first electronic computer and the location where Alan Turing cracked the code of the messages between Hitler and his generals during the second world war.

I find that an interest in the technology drives me to keep going, always looking for the next thing and when I see this great technology being released and updated I make sure that my team at id are fully aware of what’s coming up and what they should be looking out for.

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

The team is made up of individuals and you must remain interested in the individuals career development. Invest time and effort into the individuals career development, what do they want to do? What don’t they want to do?

The team will reap the rewards if you encourage the individuals so encourage those individuals to look beyond what they currently feel comfortable in — set them stretching goals and get them involved in things that they might not normally get involved on but be careful, don’t force someone to do what they might not want to do because you think it will be good for their career. Always refer to their career aspirations and make sure that what you’re asking of them aligns with those.

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. :-)

Free coffee for all at the office — it seemed to work for Bill Gates and Microsoft

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I’m on the usual social media channels:

Twitter https://twitter.com/WorTony — this is not always SFW so beware 😊

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonypounder/

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