Are you doing your best work?

Startups are redefining work. At least, that’s what everyone keeps saying. In a sense, this is true: co-working spaces, unlimited vacation days, satellite teams, and online collaboration platforms are providing a kind of freedom that has long been unseen in the workplace.

While the way people work is changing, however, the need to make an impact in the organisation you’re a part of is a constant. It may be even more important for startups as we need to move faster in order to successfully compete with more established counterparts with borderline unlimited resources.

Lucky are the startups who have established the core values of their company at its inception. Often, culture is formed only as the company grows and its leaders begin to understand what kind of people, work ethic, and vision it values. Every employee is then crucial to defining what the company is and what it is becoming.

Here at Tech in Asia, editors and community members often dole out advice to entrepreneurs on how to be the best selves they could possibly be. Let’s have a discussion here on how startup employees could be too. Having only been in the professional world for a limited time, I do not consider myself qualified to guide anyone to success, so here are nuggets of advice from minds far greater than mine.

Will people miss you if you are gone?

Recently, one of our colleagues had to take an emergency personal leave. His immediate supervisor, went up to me a few days later saying, “I have been forgetting that I need to do his work as well.”

In my mind, that should be every startup employee’s goal. One’s absence should cause inconvenience.

In corporations, they often have large teams dedicated to perfecting a set of tasks. For example, they have a public relations team, marketing team, and social media team in the communications department alone. The corporation is much larger than the individual.

In startups, the functions above may be entrusted to just one employee. If you’re in a growth-stage startup, it may be about three. In that sense, the company and the individual are the same.

If you leave and people can just go about the work that they have always done, how much were you really contributing? I am often told, and it is probably true, that no one is indispensable in a startup company – but I’ve never seen it as an excuse not to try.

Malcolm Gladwell succinctly put this in a sentence. In an interview with Contently, Joe Lazauskas asks how people can know if they are doing good work. Gladwell’s response?

I think the only one that I care about is: Will people miss you if you are gone?

The Two-Thirds Rule

In one of the most articulate and inspirational speeches I have ever heard, Neil Gaiman speaks to an audience of graduating students about to enter the professional world.

Making a positive impact