Feeling Invisible? Tips to Manage Perception When Working From Home
4 things I do to increase visibility (and look busy)
For most people with a full-time job in the corporate world, working from home can be a rare luxury.
In the past few years, many industries began to adopt increasingly flexible work arrangements. Then, in 2020, working from home became a weird norm with the coronavirus raging globally.
Working from home begs the question:
When performance often is judged based on how you are perceived, how do you manage the perception that you are always productive and busy — when no one can see you working in the office?
There are some easy, actionable strategies to increase visibility. You want to make sure your team (especially your manager) sees that you are busy and productive. More importantly, you want them to see that you are always making progress.
The following tips I am about to share come from my experience both as an employee and a manager.
Perception Matters
At the beginning of my finance career, the norm for an investment banking analyst was 80+ hour work weeks (including the weekend). There was an expectation that we would spend most of our waking hours toiling away in the office. Even when we finally did leave the office, we were glued to our smartphones, always responding to emails.
I knew a few colleagues who spent all their waking hours in the bullpen and went home simply to shower and sleep. They were in the office before anyone else and were still in their cubicles by the time I left at 2 am.
I was surprised to find out most of them did not rank at the top of the class during bonus season. The managers simply did not view them as the hardest working nor most productive employees.
Fast forward to ten years later. As the Regional Asia Head, I now manage employees across Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Several patterns became very obvious to me as to why certain employees gave off a consistent impression of being more productive than others.
You will notice I use the words such as see, view, and impression. I’m highlighting the tendency that your performance often is judged based on how you are perceived.
Unfortunately, perception often is not an accurate representation of reality.
Three Golden Principles
- Perception becomes reality — especially when you cannot be seen working in the office
- Work smart > work hard
- Communicate proactively to manage transparency
I have always adhered to these golden principles. But more relevant than ever, these should be applied when you are working remotely or working from home.
Don’t forget — it is your responsibility to manage how others perceive you. If you work long hours, but no one sees or hears about your long hours, you can expect people to assume you haven’t been working all that hard.
Work From Home (WFH) Strategies
Here are some practical strategies that can increase your perceived productivity at work, which starts with improving your overall visibility.
Remember this: you are in control of your narrative.
1. Keep the Emails Going: How to Make Sure You Are Visible
I always maintain clear visibility in the firm by keeping people cc’d or bcc’d in emails.
Obviously, don’t do this in all of your emails. In 50–70% of my emails, I keep a variety of coworkers cc’d or bcc’d as long as they are relevant recipients. When I work from home, I dial that ratio up to 80%.
For example, if I am negotiating with an investor, usually, I would leave the conversation to a call. It’s more personal and efficient that way. In a WFH situation, I would take the extra step to follow up with an email, cc’ing people who were not on the call, summarizing the discussion.
This email gives me an excuse (I mean excellent opportunity) to cc team members or managers so they can see that the conversation happened. I simply want them to see that I have done something. It’s a way to say, “Hey, FYI, I did this.”
The point here is to build the perception that you have good email traffic volume, which makes a difference in managing visibility — more is generally better when you cannot make that up with physical face time.
2. Pick Up the Phone: How to Make People Think You are Reachable
Millennials don’t like to pick up the phone and call each other. I am no different. I reserve phone conversations to situations where phone calls are more efficient than emails or texts.
In the absence of in-person meetings, letting people hear your voice can reduce the perception of distance and make the relationship feel more personal.
In his TED talk How to Speak so that People Want to Listen, Julian Treasure said, “The human voice is the most powerful sound in the world.”
In a WFH setting, it’s no surprise that phone calls are the next best option for face-to-face meetings. The impact of seeing each other is so powerful, which makes total sense that Zoom Video’s stock (NASDAQ: ZM) skyrocketed when most other shares fell off a cliff in 2020.
Why? It has to do with people’s need to feel connected.
Visibility matters.
For example, I will call my manager to proactively give him a short rundown of the key updates of the day or week. I do this, assuming that he has not seen the emails in detail. Even if he has, I use this as an excuse to connect and let him hear my voice.
Similarly, when I manage my team, I have this impression that people who proactively give me update calls have been doing more work.
I can’t pinpoint why. Maybe it’s the perception that these employees prioritize me enough to make an active effort keeping me posted on their work.
3. Share Progress Updates Proactively: How to Make Waiting Less Painful
Waiting is something that we all do every day. Our experience of waiting can vary drastically, depending on the context.
Fortunately, it’s easy to manage that perception: making waiting feel reasonable vs. completely unbearable.
The secret of making waiting less painful is simple — share progress updates, proactively.
There are two parts to this advice:
- Share progress updates
- Do it proactively (before someone makes the request)
The act of sharing progress updates helps maintain transparency. What this means is it helps to make your boss or client feel that they are in control.
I like to proactively send progress update emails to clients or managers when a particular task is taking longer, even when I don’t have any substantial progress to report. People get antsy when they don’t hear from you when they wait.
For example, if a legal document takes five days for the legal team to review, I will send an email on the third day to my investors, letting them know the legal team is finalizing their comments, and they should expect a response in two days.
This email doesn’t constitute a substantial update, but it makes the client feel that I always have them in mind. They will also appreciate that you provided the update before they ask for it.
By communicating progress proactively, you remove the potential anxiety and powerlessness that comes from waiting.
You also build the perception that you have been working on their task and prioritizing their request.
4. Communicate an Active Pipeline: How to Always Look Busy
This strategy demonstrates working smart > working hard.
You want to maintain the perception that you have a lot on your plate. I learned this the hard way during my first year of work when I was simply trying to survive the awful 80+ hour weeks.
In a work situation, never respond “not much” to a “what’s up.”
The few times I accidentally said “not much,” I was issued so much additional work that I wish I didn’t show up to the office in the first place.
The key is to communicate an active pipeline of tasks, prioritizing actionable tasks that have the highest probabilities of success first, followed by several tasks that are in more nascent stages.
This is my variation of 80–20 rule.
You want to highlight that you are spending 80% of your time working on the 20% of tasks that will come to fruition. However, by also listing a few tasks in more nascent stages, you strategically emphasize that you think long-term enough to line up and generate new leads that can become new priorities.
You will be surprised that many people simply spend time discussing the top priorities and not the more nascent work-in-progress tasks.
Summing Up
As an employee, I continuously remind myself that it is my responsibility to manage my employer’s perception of me.
As a manager, even though I have a general idea of what my team is working on, I don’t spend time keeping track of the day to day tasks.
What this means is no, I don’t know how difficult or tedious specific tasks are, or how long it takes to complete the tasks, or how much progress has been made, unless if they tell me.
So, I do appreciate it when my team proactively gives me progress updates. It makes the wait less painful. And I do form the impression that my team is working hard when their emails show up frequently in my inbox.
You can control your narratives by making sure you are visible, reachable, proactive, and looking busy.
In a world where performance often is judged based on how people see you, remember that perception matters.
