Four Ways To Make Working Remotely Work For You, Your Clients, And Your Colleagues

I’ve worked remotely for over a dozen years and the challenges of feeling out-of-touch never fully go away. However, there are ways to overcome it, especially if you have trust – trust in your colleagues, trust in your clients, and trust in yourself. And it’s on you to establish those levels of commitment.

During my time in the Navy, I learned how important it is to build relationships and establish trust. When you’re on a submarine hundreds of feet below sea level and put your life in the hands of the people next to you, you’re trusting them to do their jobs and giving them the faith that you’re going to do the same. I brought this lesson with me when I joined the corporate world.

During my time with Hartford Steam Boiler and Munich Re, I’ve seen how doing so is also so important when you aren’t working side-by-side with someone and instead must rely on people around the world cooperating and sharing a vision.

Here are four great ways to build that trust and get more of working remotely.

1.    Communicate regularly, thoroughly, and personally

Whether you’re working on a nuclear power plant underwater, in a traditional office, or at a desk at home, great communication is an X-factor for success. You need everyone to be on the same page. The irony is that the more modes of communication we have these days, the less connected everyone seems to feel. The amount of technology we have access to every day makes it easy for us to undervalue meaningful communication and send an instant message to someone sitting two desks away.

Sending that IM is even easier when you’re trying to contact someone who works two states away. However, that’s when you need great communication skills the most. Employees begin to feel disengaged and like another cog in the wheel rather than an important member of a team. They can lose sight of your team’s vision. They can even stop caring, because they don’t feel cared about.

Great communication is about listening, and you need to focus on bottom-up communication to stay in touch in with the members of your team. You need to know what’s working and what’s not working and how your people are feeling.

Working as a supervisor at HSB, my team encompassed the entire geography from Montana to Hawaii and Alaska to Northern California, so regular communication was vital to our success. I always tried to make myself available by any means necessary to answer any questions they had and to help in any way possible. Whether it be a technical issue or advice on working with a client, we did what we could to communicate regularly. We also made a point of getting everyone together on the phone once a month to stay on task and humanize the work we were doing and the people we were relying on every day.

Because you can’t keep tabs on everyone every day or get to know everyone as much as you might want, superior communication (being a great listener) is the root of mutual trust between team members who rarely physically interact.

2.    Remember how valuable face-to-face communication is

As great as it is to keep everyone in the loop on a day-to-day basis, at the end of the day, relationships are built face-to-face.

While I was leading my team at HSB, we only saw each other about six times per year, but we made those meetings count. In addition to our meetings, I made a point of taking my colleagues out for dinners and asking them questions so I could get to know them personally, something that is all but impossible through IMs and conference calls.

Those relationships we built during our face time (and not FaceTime) is where our trust and rapport began. Sure, it was great to stay in touch on a daily basis, but true progress was made when we got our team together, showed them they were more than bodies behind computers, and unified them under a shared vision.

3.    Establish boundaries

One of the most common misunderstandings about remote work is that everyone thinks working from home is an easy way to find a work-life balance. I mean, who wouldn’t want to work in their pajamas?

Just like everything else, working remotely has its pros and cons. Although you may have the freedom to attend family functions, such as a child’s mid-week soccer game, you must still remind them occasionally that although you are home you are inaccessible except for emergencies. 

To balance your personal and professional life, you must establish boundaries, such as committing yourself to not checking emails during family time, or treating your home workspace like you would a normal office: a sacred place specifically for focusing on work.

Once you set those boundaries, you need to commit yourself to staying within them. If you aren’t going to hold yourself accountable when no one is watching, how can you ever expect someone else to return the favor?

Finding balance can be tough at first, but once you identify how to juggle these roles, you’ll find it easier to get your work done, feel fulfilled, and keep the people around you happy.

4.    Love what you do

I’m passionate about empowering and preparing our company and clients for the future with technology. I enjoy helping our partners, both internally and externally, find ways to develop new systems, strategies, and products by leveraging technology.

Both HSB and Munich Re have given me that opportunity as both the Director of Mobile Technology as well as being part of the Inno-coach program.  

I couldn’t do any of that if I didn’t care about the work I was doing. My love for the results we create has given me the ability to overcome the struggles of remote work and shape my career into what it has become.

You need to find your “why” if you’re going to succeed at working remotely. You need a reason to go the extra mile to build those relationships, set your boundaries, and care about the people you don’t see every day and causes you may not always feel involved in.

Finding that purpose and making that commitment to yourself and your work is the first step to managing your life, building your career and shaping the future.

#IAmEmpowered

Learn how you can be empowered to build your career, shape the future, manage your life and make a difference too:

·      American Modern: https://www.amig.com/company/careers/

·      HSB: https://www.munichre.com/HSB/hsb-careers/index.html

·      Munich Re, US: https://www.munichre.com/us/property-casualty/careers/index.html