10 things I’ve learnt about working remotely

Back in February, Sorted Communications celebrated its tenth birthday. What started with just me and one freelance writer has now grown to a remote team of eight permanent employees and a wider team of freelance writers and proofreaders.

We’ve come a long way and have been reflecting recently on just how much we’ve learnt since the business was founded in 2013.

Ever since day one, Sorted was designed as a remote business that allows its employees to work from anywhere in the world. Although Covid-19 hampered our ability to work from anywhere (because, well, we couldn’t go anywhere), recent months have seen team members working from South Africa, Thailand and Cyprus to name just a few. Being remote also means my team comes from all over the UK (as well as one permanent team member living in Serbia), which allows us to find people with the right skills and experience to meet our clients’ needs.

While I think remote working is the best, I admit it does bring some challenges and highlights the need to set up our systems and processes differently. So, here are 10 things I’ve learnt about remote working in the past 10 years.

1. Communication

It’s essential to have clear, concise, and consistent communication when working remotely. Unlike when you work side by side with people in an office, there are limited opportunities for off-the-cuff conversations and knowledge-sharing in a remote team. Similarly, it’s not as easy as just popping to someone’s desk to pass on some information about a client or piece of work. Over the years, we’ve developed solid processes for keeping everyone up to date on the status of tasks (using a cool project management tool called?Monday.com) and a regular routine of meetings and touch points where we can all share things that other team members need to know.

2. Trust

Building trust with your team is especially important when working remotely. This includes trusting team members to complete their work on time and to the best of their ability, as well as creating an open and transparent work environment. A key philosophy for us is that when something doesn’t go to plan, we don’t spend time looking for someone to blame but instead focus on what we can change in our processes or ways of working to stop it happening again.

3. Expectations

It’s important to set clear guidelines and expectations for team members when working remotely so that you can trust one another to get things done. This includes being clear about deadlines, roles and responsibilities.

4. Tools

There are many tools available to help remote teams collaborate and stay organised. It’s important to find the tools that work best for your team and to use them consistently. At first, we used email to share tasks, but it quickly became confusing and difficult to keep tasks separate. We’ve used a couple of different task management systems over the years and currently find?Monday.com?works well as it offers lots of extra functionality.

5. Community

It can be easy for remote team members to feel isolated, so it’s important to find ways to create a sense of community and connection. For us, this includes regular team check-ins, social activities, and opportunities for team members to get to know each other on a personal level through a WhatsApp chat.

6. Boundaries

It’s important for team members to set clear boundaries around their work and personal life when working remotely, otherwise those boundaries can easily blur. As well as being remote, we also work very flexibly, which allows the team to manage their time independently and set their personal boundaries to balance their work and personal lives.

7. Development

Just because team members are working remotely doesn’t mean they should neglect their professional development. I actively encourage team members to take courses, attend conferences, and engage in other learning opportunities to stay up to date on things they already know and learn about something new. There are many such opportunities available virtually, but I also support offline learning and in-person attendance at events where that’s appropriate.

8. Mental health

Working remotely can be stressful and lonely at times, so it’s important to prioritise mental health and wellbeing. Our flexible approach means that team members are trusted to manage their own time and can take a break whenever they need to, whether that’s to sit in the garden for 10 minutes with a cuppa or take the dog for a three-hour walk.

9. Noise

It can be easy for remote teams to get overwhelmed with emails, instant messages, and other forms of digital communication. Through Monday.com, team members can choose which alerts they receive so that they only get the ones that are relevant to them and we use email for less urgent, non-task related conversations.

10. Contingency

Despite our best efforts, things can and do sometimes go wrong (whether you work remotely or not). It’s important to have a plan in place for handling unexpected issues, such as technical difficulties or team members being unexpectedly unavailable. Our business continuity plan lists contact details for support for all our systems and outlines what we’d do if we lost access to any of our systems. Our systems and team structure have also been designed to give resilience so that nothing is reliant on any one person’s memory and there’s more than one person who can do any type of task for any given client.

Remote working isn’t for everyone and there’s a lot to consider to make it work. However, over the last decade I’ve learnt a great deal and find it works perfectly for us and our clients.

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