Looking at the world around us, one thinks about the political candidates across the globe who have narrowly won or lost elections to lead their country as prime minister or president. One wonders what the outcome would have been had either opponent experienced the fear of failure and/or the fear of success and prematurely dropped out. This article gives advice on how to use a temporary setback for future success when working from home.
Avoiding fear can lead to poor life outcomes and joblessness
Avoiding something feared, whether professional success or disappointment is a type of maladaptive behavior. In the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, repeated attempts to avoid what is feared because of excessive fear or anxiety can lead to poor life outcomes. Imagine experiencing such heightened anxiety and stress, that one chooses to avoid the feelings of fear altogether. A definite no, no! Psychology Today explains that outright avoidance of fear comes at a very high cost.
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Voluntarily taking oneself out of a fiercely fought competition in politics, war or professional job prospects, employment and business opportunities often isn’t advisable. Though there are times when its prudent to do so. To get ahead of a nasty media news cycle, to save face and professional reputation, recover from the negative emotional load of interview rejections. Its difficult to survive just to live to see another day. Thoughts of gathering one’s marbles to go home are tempting. We think of bundling our early losses and stockpiling resources to take a pause. Then only to resume our remote job search, get back into the fray. Re-enter the job market, try again at a much later date and a more opportune time.
This is sorta like the tight job market we are currently experiencing. Do remote job seekers pull back their horns, retract their claws and talons? Cover bared fangs? Maybe it may be a good idea in times of economic contraction. But what happens if a booming economy never materializes? Or an economic recovery takes longer than expected. Five years of a typical 20 to 30 year career can be about 1/5 to 1/4 of one’s professional lifetime. Too much time can go to waste without a moment’s notice.
Failure can be essential to professional and career success
The same thoughts can be true for workers who have been fired or experiencing layoffs.
But, a Forbes article informs us that temporary defeat is essential to success!
Dr. Sam Collins, a motivational speaker reminisced about her disastrous start towards her professional career. She was ecstatic when she obtained her dream job. But her newfound happiness was only fleeting. From there, her career rolled downhill really fast. She talked of these experiences:
- Poor relations with her boss,
- Given odd projects,
- Assigned to complete job tasks of her colleagues, and
- Was isolated from her work peers.
Earning a dream job while being supervised by an unscrupulous boss, led to her ultimate firing. To add to her misery, Dr. Collins did not have a strong support network outside of the workplace. At the age of 29 years, she had migrated to London on her own. Without a job, she had no money, no mother and a nonexistent relationship with her father. “The voices in my head,” she recalled, “beat me up pretty badly.”
In the end, Dr. Collins advised everyone, all job seekers and job holders to undergo at least one experience of failure. Why? To learn what to do and what not to do in times of calamity.
Failure is a part of a successful learning process
Research published in the Frontiers in Psychology, shares with us that ‘to fail’ is a natural part of the learning process. Basically, if we are afraid of making a mistake avoid it at all costs, we can stunt our developmental growth. You’ve probably seen people in your neighborhood, or even members of your own family who failed to launch. Often they lacked the skills to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, possessed inadequate resiliency skills, or may have taken rejection much too harshly. They may have overgeneralized a few rejections to the point where they thought of themselves as absolute misfires rather than concluding that they failed at this point in time on one or two particular tasks.
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Keep a success mindset in the midst of job and career failures
Do you see how those two mindsets differ. Can we tell how they might change the future career trajectory of a person? Again, either we can believe we:
- Failed TEMPORARILY at a particular task that could be related to a lack of skills. It could also be impacted greatly by external conditions (tight job market, heavy competition, interviewer bias, employer financial conditions, and global market trends, for example).
- GLOBAL failure which falsely generalizes and attributes one failed task to global internalized failure of the individual person. This ‘loser’ mindset leads to thoughts, “I am not good enough. I am unworthy. I am a bad person, I am stupid. I should just give up.” And even, “the interviewer was racist. Did not like me.” These thoughts externalizing the challenge presented is no better as it helps the individual avoid personal responsibility and accountability.
Many career benefits to failure to build job skills for success
- Getting back to the study, research shows there are several benefits to failure:
- Improves problem solving and critical thinking skills (Tucker and Edmondson, 2003),
- Enhances decision making skills (Chuang and Baum, 2003),
- Reduces the chance of failing again on the same task (Ingram and Baum, 1997; Kim et al., 2009),
- Encourages thinking outside of the box (Homsma et al., 2009),
- Increases the likelihood of innovation the development of inventions (Homsma et al., 2009),
- Improves individual, team and organizational outcomes (Zollo, 2009),
- Provides real world lessons and personal experiences to improve metacognition and future performance (Chen et al., 2017).
Some argue remote work is a failed experiment
What does remote work, working from home and tele-commuting have to do with failure? What are the linkages?
The Guardian alleges that the remote work, work from home, tele-work movement is a ‘failed experiment.’ The reason isn’t what you might think. The journalist, Gene Marks says, “study after study has found that people working from home are more stressed and less happy.” He emphasized one study purporting to show that up to 2/3rd remote workers who telecommuted craved more in person time with their teams.
The 2021 study drew upon 31,000 employees and independent self employed contractor. In addition to craving more in person contact with their work colleagues at the same time they had complaints that their employers were “asking too much of them.” More than half of the respondents (54%) reported being overworked and 39% were burnt out from exhaustion.
While this information of failure could have devastated the remote work movement, much of this dismay could be attributed the global malaise brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and draconian government overreach.
Work from home failures related to distance from employer
More recent research by Revelio Labs may indicate that remote work disappointments may be related to the physical distance between remote workers and the physical location of their employer. Their 2023 data demonstrated virtual employees are 3 times more likely to switch employers than their report to the office colleagues. Nuances of the data also revealed employees working from home were more loyal to their employer when they lived in the same metro area of the employing firm.
Conversely, telecommuters were less committed to their employer when they resided in the same state as their employer. The researchers concluded that the 10.5 remote worker attrition rate in the US is rather high. Perhaps “due to the fact that employers are more likely to lay off remote employees, or because they are harder to retain.”
Conclusion
What is the morale to this story? Temporary setbacks are like death and taxes. They are inevitable. The key, particularly as a virtual employee, is to profit from temporary losses by learning from them. Eventually they become set ups for success, While we learned the benefits of fleeting defeat, hopefully we gained valuable information. Should you accept your dream remote job, working from home, take steps to ensure your boss is above board and your place of residence is located within a reasonable distance from your employer.
