First Time Working Remotely?

For everyone who has worked remotely, we tend to take for granted some of the challenges that we overcame. As a result of the coronavirus, millions of employees are being forced on short notice to work from home for the first time. I am exponentially more productive working from home, so I thought I would share some best practices that hopefully will help some folks out there that are struggling.

I have found that productivity is highly impacted by 3 primary categories:

·     Environment & Culture

·     Technology and Equipment

·     Workflow and Process

Environment & Culture

I have worked from a home office (When I am not traveling) for the majority of the last 20 years, with dogs and kids of all ages in the house. First and foremost, it is important to set boundaries. You need to have a dedicated space for work that is “Your Office.” I would explain to my wife and kids that they should not come to my office and knock on the door unless it is something that they would drive downtown and knock on my office door if I worked in a traditional office. This was something that the kids have understood since they were infants. If they have a question or if there is something that they want to discuss, they send me a text or e-mail and I get back to them when I have a chance. Limiting interruptions is the most important variable to productivity at home. A quick distraction actually causes about 20 minutes in lagging productivity as you refocus. 

Create an office space the is comfortable and efficient for you. My biggest challenge in working from home is that I get into such a rhythm that I forget to eat and don’t end up coming out of my office until my wife reminds me that dinner is getting cold! I also have 3 different workstations; a treadmill desk, a standing desk and a sitting desk. I set an alarm every hour to remind me to move to a different position, so I am not getting desk or standing fatigue.

Working from home requires self-discipline and trusting supervisors. Bosses often times struggle with allowing remote work offices because they don’t trust employees to work as hard. CRM tools enable visibility into activity that should ease most of that concern. Ultimately it is up to the employee to be more productive. Taking advantage of time that is normally wasted during commuting, standing around the water cooler or unnecessary meetings is key to taking care of this concern. You shouldn’t be as productive as if you were in an office, you should be exponentially MORE productive.

Technology & Equipment

I still have a LAND LINE!!! That makes me a dinosaur, but everyone is starting to understand the logic. Wi-Fi still goes down…regularly. I actually don’t understand how Internet providers claim to follow any service level standard. I often find myself screensharing and giving a web demonstration while sharing video camera and Wi-Fi goes down. No problem; turn on my mobile hot spot on my phone while I reboot my modem. There is less bandwidth obviously, so turn off video sharing until the modem is re-booted. First challenge is the cell phone signal and coverage actually still sucks in a lot of places. So for audio, I always dial into conference calls through my land line so I can maintain the conversation while I deal with technology. Moral of the story is to make sure you have bandwidth and consistent dependable connectivity with some form of backup plan.

Depending on your job you will need technology to support your work. Slack & Microsoft Teams have taken the place of Skype in most corporate environments for interoffice communications, with both of them having unique challenges. Slack “Channels” become numerous and there is no way to check all of your channels for tasks that have been assigned to you. Teams, I have found to have connectivity issues and less functionality around channel communication. The important thing in this area is to make sure there is an agreed upon communication process. Slack can be used as an instant messenger of sorts for near real time quick questions and communication but should not be used as a place where important communication is posted in random channels and expected to be seen by all. 

For external communications you will still need to have seats for Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. and they will all start 20 minutes late as people still struggle to download an app and show up to a meeting on time. I would recommend an application called Clearslide which basically lets anyone see your screen that goes to a simple URL. This is less secure that what might be required for some industries and some meetings, but for 98% of meetings, it is a game changer.

Do you need a printer and scanner for your job and document organization? Ink, Paper? How are you sharing files, google drive, dropbox, etc. Is it secure? Again, there are pros and cons to each, it is just important to pick one and have a well communicated process for documents so everyone know where and how to save documents so that they can be easily found by those who have authority to find them.

Depending on your job, there may be other tools that are needed but the biggest benefit to most software being moved to a SaaS model is you can access them from anywhere. Make sure that you pick one and not multiple solutions, communicate process to everyone so there is uniformity of process and finally include IT in your decisions so that you are not creating unnecessary security threats.

Workflow & Process

This is actually the most difficult piece to work through and will vary widely based on your job description. For example, my wife works very closely with a small team of 4 that need to be in almost constant communication during busy times. In a physical office you would put them in the same room. I suggested they figure out how to have the same access to each other working different places. They simply opened up a Zoom meeting and muted their phones. When someone on the team needs something, they just unmute themselves and ask the questions or give direction to them team, they communicate what they need to, mute themselves again and get back to work. 

I think the biggest inhibitor to remote office is supervisor resistance to using their own calendars. The traditional workflow is when something comes up that is urgent, we want access to our employees so we can stick our head in their offices and tell them to drop everything to put out the fire that is most important to the boss. For remote employees to actually function, everyone needs to keep their calendars updated with their availability and schedule time with each other to accomplish specific tasks. On the positive side you will see more focus and planning as an organization which should improve results. 

At the end of the day there may be some jobs that don’t fit a remote workplace and there may be some employees that can’t make the transition. The technology is there, with a little effort I think that almost any job can be done from a remote office. Sure, there will be some discomfort as I am seeing with my son’s teachers who are being asked to move their classes to on-line for the first time in their careers. There will be challenges to overcome as people are trying something for the first time (I just saw a colleague doing a conference call from his closet so he could block out his barking dog). At the end of the day, we still need to do the work of the day. Get to it and come back with results not excuses.