Digital businesses were forced to move fully remotely during the social isolation of COVID-19. But this is one of the worst experiments of “testing out remote working”. Employees experience different dynamics at home. Kids are home-schooled (or babysitters are no longer available). Social contacts are non-existent. The biological weapon creeping out there keeps everyone alert.…

Resilience is my number 1 hiring trait.  As a manager, you will have ups and downs with your employees, and your feedback should reflect this. It’s not about harshness or power play, mind you. Receiving critical feedback may be absolutely devastating for juniors and many introverts.  However, your options are very limited and you don’t…

What determines “progress” in terms of employment? Progress is defined by focusing on a higher goal without having to constantly worry about day-to-day needs (food, water, shelter, clothing). Those are the basic survival needs. Until you are sure that those are taken care of, your mind constantly switches back to the urgent needs at hand…

Over 50,000 US users search for “productivity” in Google every single month. When you add the long list of queries around productivity tips, productivity apps, productivity planners and other forms of definitions around the term, we’re ranking over 300,000 total searches across the board. We are all eager to fight procrastination and maximize our time.…

Management and ownership are different. But are these truly incompatible? Successful business owners and entrepreneurs have simply struggled for a continuous period of time, juggling with anything and everything from legal and accounting through sales and marketing, IT, operations, recruitment, branding, management, negotiations, to name A FEW. This isn’t necessarily a great thing if the…

What makes projects so difficult to manage? As a project manager, you need to assess the culture, your role, your team, how problems escalate, what your responsibilities are and how to tackle edge cases (delays, problematic team members, running out of budget, handling scope creep, disagreeing with a client, etc.) And within the right environment,…

Around $359 billion in paid hours or 385 million working days are lost every year due to workplace conflict. This is according to the “Workplace Conflict and How Business Can Harness it to Thrive” report. To avoid conflict and maintain positive employee relations, there are certain aspects that must be present in your workplace. These…

There are good managers. And then, there are great ones. According to The Predictive Index, nearly 30% of employees believe their managers fail at team-building skills, and a portion of them suck at handling feedback, delegation, and time management. While some best practices are inherited over the years (starting with the way families raise their…

Working remotely is about mutual trust. It’s the same as assessing the security of your home, the reliability of your office job, or the viability of your relationship. If you don’t care, you’ll lose. If you stress over it too much, something seems fishy and you may get burned again. I am a proponent of…

I’ve jumped between the role of a senior developer and a manager multiple times – including leading and managing a software development team role. My first stunt in management was over a decade ago. We were building a Java-based distributed software for a telecom group operating in multiple countries. I spent a year and a half…