WFH burdening women?

Two in five working women are facing anxiety and #stress issues due to the #workfromhome situation, a recent report by Pink Ladder finds. The study said that women are becoming victims of the “double burden syndrome”, juggling both personal and professional commitments.

The situation is not unique to India. A McKinsey report last year had said that women working from home were feeling more exhausted and burned out than men, causing many women to contemplate dialing down on their careers. While the remote work option has also provided more #flexibility, experts say it has been tough on women as they are the primary caregivers. “We are facing a talent glut on the one hand and losing women from the workforce on the other. Companies should provide child care and domestic support and address such issues before they go and mine the talent,” Ashwini Asokan, co-founder of computer vision and AI startup Mad Street Den said.

Source: https://lnkd.in/g_cA4cS

Why should we hire you?

This is often considered a “gotcha” question, as it can be meant to trip you up. That said, it isn’t all that difficult. How you should view this question is an opportunity to sell yourself to the hiring manager. Review your résumé and find three to four selling points that you can reference during the interview.

First, look for summer job experience, skills, fellowships, internships, courses, or association experience on your résumé that are a good match for the job in question. Try to develop at least two success stories in which you cast yourself in a positive light and link this success to the job duties of the new position.

Also, be sure to give concrete examples. If you are touting your writing skills, be sure to reference the college award you won for best legal brief or a letter of reference from your summer internship coordinator lauding your writing abilities.

One other thing to remember: It’s fine to note what you’ll gain by being hired, but the hiring manager really doesn’t care about that. He or she needs to know that they are hiring someone who will bring value to the firm and improve its bottom line—and you need to stress this in your response.

3 in 4 Indian Professionals to look for new job in 2021

More than one-third of job seekers in India are worried about too many recruitment stages and extensively long application documents, while three in four professionals say they have reservations about networking. Despite this uncertainty, India remains resilient towards career growth as two in three professionals say they are confident about their future progression while two in five think attending networking events, and investing in online learning will be critical to landing a job in 2021.

The findings are based on 1,016 survey responses.

As job seekers continue to navigate the uncertainties of the job market today, LinkedIn launched the 2021 'Jobs on the Rise' India list to empower professionals with critical insights about the dynamic jobs landscape, especially those who may have lost their jobs during the pandemic. The top career opportunities as per the Jobs on the Rise 2021 India list include freelance content creators, social media and digital marketing roles, marketing roles, business development, and sales roles, and specialized engineering roles, among others.

Other top opportunities include finance roles, education roles, artificial intelligence roles, e-commerce roles, cybersecurity roles, data science roles, healthcare roles, human resources roles, user experience designer roles, and customer service roles.

"This year's Jobs on the Rise India list is a reflection of how the work ecosystem and the jobs market rapidly changed in 2020. Digital transformation has continued to drive all industries, and both, tech and non-tech roles have shifted to meet the needs of a new collaborative, remote work culture.

"The list shows us that audience builders and content creators are key to brands, HR continues to be at the heart of all operations, user and customer experience are critical in the new online world of service, and emerging tech, especially ed-tech, continues to boom," Ruchee Anand, Director, Talent & Learning Solutions, India at LinkedIn, said in a statement.

Top job trends based on the list include brands and individuals engaging audiences online, cybersecurity becoming critical to a digital-first future, Covid-19 accelerating emerging tech solutions, customer experience becoming key, and lifelong learning emerging as key to keeping talent ahead of the curve. 

Looking For A Job? 6 Practical Tips For Job Seekers In The Pandemic

If you’re looking for a job right now, you’re probably anxious for things to get back to whatever version of “normal” comes after the pandemic. And if you don’t like the job you have, you might feel guilty about thinking about changing companies during this global crisis.

Rest assured, there are millions of people in your same situation. Last spring, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic led to the highest unemployment rate ever witnessed in American history. And a lot of places are nowhere near full recovery from that initial shock. 

But even if you’re feeling desperate about your employment options, you shouldn’t give up trying to find a job. Here are a few pandemic-era strategies you can adopt to make the most of your job search.

1. Prepare to be Flexible

Not seeing a lot of jobs in your field? It may be time to broaden your search.

A recent Joblist survey found that 65% of job seekers are now more likely to take a position outside their industry than they were before the pandemic, and 42% are more open to a part-time, gig or contract position. 

That particularly goes for people working in leisure and hospitality, fields that have been hit especially hard by the economic impact of the pandemic. During the height of the economic shutdown in April, nearly 40% of job losses came from these two industries. And many of those businesses are still trying to figure out paths to stability. 

“A lot of skills in hospitality are widely applicable to other jobs that may have had a surge in hiring. If you’re starting to look for jobs that are outside of your role or industry, you may want to ask for help preparing for the process. Cynthia Hayward, director of coaching and career transition services at CBIZ Inc., recommended tapping into your local community college, as most offer some sort of career coaching or resume review assistance at no cost. 

2. Reflect on Your Career Path

There may be a small silver lining for some job-seekers, Harrington said: the chance to think about how your skills, experience, and interests could work outside your current or most recent role. You may discover that you’re able to seek a role that’s a better fit for the long-term career path you want to take. 

“If there was ever a time to have a gap or take some kind of sabbatical, go back to school, or change careers, now is the time,” Hayward said. If paying for training isn’t an option for you, look for free or low-cost programs in your area, or keep an eye out for employers willing to train new hires. 

Hayward explained that many job changes take place because one opportunity leads to another—but you may not think about how those roles add up until you’re well into a profession. This period may offer you the chance to plan your ideal next few steps for your long-term job goals and start working toward them.

While in the past a big career pivot could be seen as indecisive, recruiters and hiring managers are likely to be more accepting of job jumping and big vocational changes after the pandemic starts to wane. “A year from now…everyone will think it’s normal to have made a change at this time,” she said.

3. Lean on Your Network

Industry meetups and in-person networking happy hours may be on hold for now, but it’s still important to share your employment goals with others. 

Although you may be suffering from Zoom fatigue, it’s worth setting up an informational phone or video-chat meetings as if you were asking someone in your network to meet for a cup of coffee. 

“Seventy to 75% of jobs aren’t published anywhere,” Hayward said. “Look out into your network, identify employers you admire, and network with people you know there. You may discover some inroads to new roles.” 

In another time and place, you might have felt embarrassed to admit you were out of work or were looking for a new job. But in a strange pandemic economy, the more people who know you’re open to opportunities, the better your chances of getting your resume in front of a hiring manager.

4. Look Beyond Your Region

Don’t forget about increasing opportunities for remote work, especially in the fields of customer service, marketing and education.

“Your job market used to be 25-50 miles around where you lived,” Harrington said. With the rapid rise of remote work and more employers choosing to allow remote work beyond the pandemic, you may be able to consider positions at companies you once thought out of reach due to where you live.

Before the pandemic, about 4% of the U.S. workforce worked from home at least half the time. By summer 2020, more than 40% of the U.S. workforce was clocking in from home. 

While that rate of remote work is likely to decline as the economy continues to reopen, it’s likely that many companies will embrace remote work permanently in some capacity.

5. Get Ready for Zoom Interviews

Before you get a job, you’ll likely have to complete at least a couple interviews. And unless you’re preparing to work on the front lines during this pandemic, most interviews will be remote. You’ll need to sell your skills by phone or video chat.

“You don’t get to make that handshake impression,” when you participate in virtual or phone interviews, Hayward said. “So you’ve got to make sure the rest of your stuff is bulletproof.” That means updating and reviewing your resume, LinkedIn, and social media profiles. 

It also means preparing for the technological requirements of a virtual interview. Recruit a friend to test your settings with you prior to a video interview to make sure your connection is strong and you’ve picked out a distraction-free spot to take the meeting. “Those first few minutes are critical,” Hayward said, so make sure your interview starts strong—not with technical difficulties.

6. Remember: Improvement is Coming

Harrington anticipates the job market will improve significantly by the second half of the year, once the vaccine has been distributed more widely. “Main Street” small and medium businesses will start hiring again—alongside large companies that have continued to hire through the pandemic—which will present a greater diversity of job openings. That means job seekers in suburban and rural areas, in particular, could see a considerable increase in openings starting in summer 2021, he said.

How Can You Maintain Company Culture When Everyone Is Working from Home?

"Corporate culture" is difficult to define. Often it's only implicitly understood and develops organically, rather than being explicitly expressed and planned from the top down. Your company's culture becomes its personality and has a major influence on how the public perceives it, as well as how the employees, partners, and other providers interact with the public and with each other. 

Nowadays, with so many companies forced to keep their offices closed in this time of social distancing, working from home has become the “new normal.” Research from the digital document organization app FYI has found that “improved culture” is one of the top responses when people were asked how companies can help upgrade the experience of remote work during the coronavirus crisis. 

So how can you ensure that your culture survives when there’s no physical water cooler to gather around? 

I often like to remind the executives I work with that even before the Covid-19 crisis hit, this was a major challenge. Larger companies with multiple locations, for example, have always found it difficult to maintain a cohesive corporate culture. It’s made even more challenging as companies extend their ecosystem to partners, third-party providers and freelancers outside of the immediate corporate structure. 

Corporate culture is an essential guiding force, but how does it develop when the majority of a company's workers, providers, and freelancers never set foot in the office? Data provided by Global Workplace Analytics suggests that teleworking had become quite common even prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, growing by 140 percent since 2005 – and not just from the self-employed and gig workers; 4.3 million employees now work from home at least half the time. 

At the same time, the self-employed population has grown by 2.4 percent, the home-based self-employed population grew by 7.3 percent, and the telecommuter population grew by 1.7 percent.

Corporate culture when face-to-face interactions are obsolete Collaboration in a remote environment does take some additional work – but a distributed team is really just like any other team, whether they work face-to-face or not. A recent Harvard Business Review podcast noted that successful remote work is based on three principles: Communication, coordination, and culture. 

Communication and coordination are easily achieved through any number of sophisticated real-time communication and social sharing tools, but the culture is what creates a real sense of trust and engagement. 

Corporate culture is more than creating a friendly break room with comfortable chairs and bringing in a box of doughnuts on Friday – developing it means intentionally engaging employees, educating them, and providing venues for interactions, knowledge sharing, and training. Traditionally, this has been done live, with on-site in-services or special off-site events, but this becomes problematic when a company has thousands of remote employees and partners scattered throughout multiple countries. 

Those events can still take place virtually. Fortunately, virtual meeting platforms have evolved to the point where they can be highly interactive, visual, and more importantly, effectively replicate the sense of "being there." And yes, there are plenty of ways to spice up your “virtual happy hours." 

Your culture begins with onboarding – and especially when remote workers are involved, interactive video conferencing sessions can be a highly effective method of engaging those workers from the very beginning. 

The key to success is in the level of engagement – and rather than a one-directional webinar session, culture can be developed and maintained by ensuring that teams huddle regularly, although not so often and for so long that “Zoom fatigue” starts to set in. Finding the right balance between live and asynchronous meetings is key, as is investing in giving people easy access to the information they need to do their jobs independently. 

Related: 5 Ways to Build Team Culture in a Remote World 

Best practices for remote corporate culture A 2017 study by Deloitte noted that 80 percent of survey respondents see culture and engagement as top priorities. The Deloitte report noted that traditional learning management systems are rapidly being replaced with new tools that better meet the need for interaction and participation. 

Best practices in developing that culture include holding managers accountable for training, communications, and collaboration, and arming them with the tools necessary to do so in a manner consistent with the expectations of digitally savvy workers. 

More importantly, consistency and frequency become even more important in a remote environment, and regular interactive video meetings should be held to reinforce corporate messaging and culture, as well as to impart specific training information. 

Also, because of the efficiency of video conferencing, micro-learning becomes much more possible. Unlike live training sessions that require more coordination, remote training opportunities can be held more frequently, and at the same time, become more customized to meet the specific needs of each different group of employees. 

Finally, measure results – look at the social interactions, comments, and social media sharing that takes place as a result of each session; measure user satisfaction and participation, and encourage feedback and input from participants. In so doing, you will be able to create a virtual environment that is not only the "next best thing to being there," in many ways, it's better than being there. 

Related: A New Way To Work: Developing A Company Culture For A Remote ... 

Thriving remotely as a collective 

Maintaining cohesive company culture is a challenge, even when you’re dealing with a relatively small team all working from one location. Multi-branch teams, teams built to operate remotely, and teams forced to suddenly work from home during a health crisis have it even harder. But with the right perspective and approach, your team can remain as cohesive and invested as ever. 

Related: Company Culture Is Everything