Web Working: When To Ask For Help
Aug 10, 2011

Help!

With the DreamWorks Pictures film The Help hitting theaters nationwide today, we thought it might be the perfect time to talk a little bit about help, when it’s time to ask for help, and the difficulties many web workers (and even typical office workers) feel when asking for the help they often need. You enjoyed our tips for being your own boss so much and now that we’ve boosted your ego, here are some ways to not bite off more than you can chew.

When you’re a web worker it’s easy to feel like you’re working in a vacuum. Even if you are part of a strong, stable team of workers in large (or small) business, the isolation of working from home can make it difficult to make connections with the people in your group. The feeling that you’re an island adrift in a sea of continually-piling-up work is not uncommon for a web worker. All this, however, should not deter you from seeking the help of your co-workers and superiors. Asking for help may not be an easy task for some people (for some, I’m sure, it’s a nearly insurmountable leap of faith), but it can be one of the most beneficial things you can do. Not only for you and your career, but also for the best interest of the company.

HELP So how do you know when it’s time to ask for help? Simple common sense can answer that question most of the time, but there are certainly tricky scenarios where you might feel that asking for help could put you in an awkward position. The general rule of thumb is: if you’re wondering if you should ask for help, you should probably ask for help. It may feel like a quick blow to the ego muscle, but it’s worth it in the end and most bosses will look highly upon you for asking for assistance before it’s too late. To get you started, here are five times when you should definitely press the help button.

  • 1: When you feel like you’re starting to drown. In fact, if you’re feeling like you’re starting to drown, you’ve probably waited too long. Ask for help immediately. In theory, you should be asking for help when you feel your legs start to cramp under you and your arms are getting tired. At this point, you can still tread water, but not for much longer. This is when the words “I need help” should start to form on your lips. Your colleagues are there for a reason and they’re almost always willing to help, especially if it means saving a sinking ship. Put your ego aside and ask for help early. It will save you (and your team) from missed deadlines, botched jobs, and a lot more work in the long run.
  • 2: When you’re confused and struggling to understand how something works. So your boss just gave you a big new project to work on and he spent about thirty minutes explaining every aspect of it in detail. The only problem is, you didn’t understand a lick of it. Uh oh! Time to ask for help. Call your boss back, explain to him or her that you need the details broken down in a less confusing manner, and make sure that you’ve got it right before you hang up that phone. They’ll probably praise you for being so honest and diligent. The truth is, you can’t do your work if you don’t understand what you’re instructed to do.
  • 3: When you’ve made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s human nature. Nobody’s perfect. The big mistake comes when you’ve screwed up but you’re still too stubborn to admit it. Suck it up, tell your boss, and ask for help. Trust in the fact that every single member of your team has made a mistake at one time or another. This time is yours.
  • 4: When you feel like you’ve hit a roadblock. We all get stuck sometimes. Even Stephen King gets writer’s block once in a while, right? Well, maybe not Stephen King, but 99.9% of writers do. When you feel like you’re blocked, stuck, or getting stagnant on a task, a little help with a fresh perspective can give you just the boost you need to tackle the project head on. Clear eyes often bring fresh ideas with them. That’s one of the major benefits of working with a talented group of people.
  • 5: When you begin to wonder if you need help. I said this before, and I’ll say it again, if you’re wondering if you need help, you probably need help. This is the earliest you can possibly ask for assistance and it’s the very best time to do so. It allows your co-workers (or boss) to evaluate the situation at its infantile stage, diagnose the problem, and put you on the right path to fixing it. Ask early and ask often. That’s the very best motto you can have when it comes to asking for help. You’ve probably heard the phrase “there are no stupid questions” about a million times in your life and there’s a reason for that: it’s true.

Help!

Those five tips should get you started on your way to becoming a help-seeking machine! OK, maybe you don’t want to be asking for help from your boss and co-workers for every little situation that pops up, but it’s always good to err on the side of caution. If you trust your team and your own abilities to excel at the tasks given to you, it shouldn’t be any problem at all. It may, in fact, help you boost your presence in the business, increase your productivity, and ensure that you’re doing your very best work at all times. Give it shot. It’s easy. Just open up and say H E L P!

Oh, and if you find yourself in need of help pretty often, maybe it’s time to hire The Click Team to handle your integrated outreach! Wink, wink.

By: Scott Neumyer

Web Working: Being Your Own Not-So-Horrible Boss
Jul 8, 2011

Working From Home

With the Warner Bros. film Horrible Bosses hitting theaters nationwide today, we thought it might be the perfect time to talk a little bit about bosses and their role for you as a web worker (or someone who just happens to work from home). No, no… We’re certainly not going to rail against our bosses here at Click! We have two amazing bosses in Mac and Dinah McLean. They are the epitome of everything you’d want your boss to be; communicative, helpful, straightforward, and the perfect mixture of hands-off and hands-on. But, as a crew that works primarily from home (aside from weekly conference calls, meetings, and the occasional check-in at the “home office”) we also have an additional boss: Ourselves.

To be an effective web worker, it’s absolutely essential that you also be your own boss. You need to stick to your own schedule, produce work that would be up to any boss’s standard, and essentially manage yourself on a minute-to-minute basis. It’s a lot of pressure, to be sure, but something that’s becoming more and more common for workers who now find themselves working directly from their homes. If you want to turn out stellar work, you need to be your own stellar boss.

Working from Home.Managing yourself (especially if you’re new to web working) can take some getting used to. It’s an adjustment that doesn’t exactly come naturally. Most people who have worked since they were teenagers are used to having a boss that tells them what to do, where to do it, how to do it, and when it needs to be done. Now that you’ve joined the work-from-home team, you need to do all that yourself and if you don’t know where to start the task can be daunting. That’s where we come in. Here are a few tips on adjusting to working from home that, as your own boss, should help make the transition a little bit easier. That is, if you follow them just as strictly as if any boss assigned them.

  • 1: Create a work schedule and stick to it. If you don’t have a work schedule, you have nothing. Working from home takes an insane amount of self-discipline. You need to be able to know what you need to do, when you need to do it, and you need to stick to that schedule like glue. It’s incredibly easy to get distracted and derailed when your office is also your home. A schedule will help you keep those distractions to a minimum.
  • 2: Get showered and dressed as if you’re going into a normal office setting. Yeah, we all know that one of the perks of working from home is the ability to work in your pajamas and we’re cool with that. Every once in a while, that is. You see, when you never get changed out of your jammies you tend to let other things (like that schedule we mentioned) slack as well and that’s a slippery slope for a web worker. Being dressed also helps in the event that you need to run out for some reason.
  • 3: Have a dedicated area of your home that is for work only. It’s fine if you want to work on the living room couch, in front of the TV, every now and then (if you have something to do that doesn’t take deep concentration), but having a dedicated “work area” in your home will allow you to close the door and enter “work mode” every day. It’s a great form of muscle memory that can help you kick it into gear the minute you step in the door. It’s also a great tool to help you balance work and life as you can breath easy and be with your family once you shut the door to the work area behind you.
  • 4: Don’t procrastinate. Duh, right? Yes, this can really work for just about any type of work, but it’s especially important for the web worker. When you are your own boss, procrastination simply leads to more procrastination, which leads to missed deadlines, poor work, and maybe even loss of job. Don’t do it.
  • 5: Stay connected. Everyone needs some kind of human interaction. Some kind of connection to someone outside of ourselves. In a typical office setting, you get this every single day (whether you like it or not). When you first start working from home, the break from this interaction can be exhilarating. “Wait, you mean I don’t have to hear Tommy belch after lunch every day anymore? Yes! Sign me up!” But after a while, the lack of connection can be a detriment not only to your emotional well-being but also to your work. Stay connected via IM, telephone, email, Skype, and whatever else you think will help you be as close as possible to your co-workers and management. Interaction goes a long way toward being a great team.

There you have it: five tips to get you started on the path to becoming your own not-so-horrible boss. Of course, there are plenty of other little tidbits of information that can help you successfully transition to working from home, but we’ll save those for a future blog post. These five are a good primer and should have you well on your way to doing some of your best work yet…from home.

54 gratitude: working from home day

Web working (and working from home in general) is easily one of the most rewarding and gratifying things you can do as a professional. It not only instills a sense of complete responsibility over your own destiny, but it also teaches you brand new ways to creatively connect, intelligently produce fantastic work, and flourish as both an individual and part of a larger team. If you have any tips on successful ways to work from home, please feel free to leave them in the comments. We’d love to hear what you have to say!

By: Scott Neumyer