Lessons on 'Working From Home' (Updated - 03/2021)

I posted the spirit of this post as a comment elsewhere on Linkedin, (thanks for the prompting questions Anna-Lisa!) but I thought folks might be interested in learning more about how I took on working from home, and won.

This is especially timely, as I read this morning on the Monocle Minute newsletter that US bank JPMorgan changed its position on remote working. They are telling its senior traders and sellers to return to the office from next week, with the aim of having 50% of its New York staff back in the office. They blame the lack of “creative combustion”. The result of which was not good. They have since gone to a hybrid model where folks may have rotationals in future, with most working from home still now.

So, with all that in mind, firstly, and this is absolutely my best advice (and the basis of the comment that started this train of thought) - don’t try and lift and shift your team to how you were in the office, to working remotely. It won’t work, you’ll get frustrated, and force yourself back into the office unknowingly. You have to work smarter, and differently to work together as a team remotely. 

It wasn’t too big of a mental shift for me, despite being in the office for 90% of the working week when I was at Heathrow (and 100% of the working week, ironically, when I worked in higher education on things like distance learning). Partly because of the latter, and partly because a lot of my work at Heathrow involved remote contractors who I was leading at a distance or folks not working in the head office, but instead the operation (which often feels like a thousand miles away from the HQ).

So, I’ll go through a few tips - and why I think they work. Feel free to share your top tips too, as realistically we’re gonna be in this reality for a goodly while yet. 

Let Outlook help you - You can easily change things like the default meeting length (I suggest 30 minutes - so you have to make a conscious choice to have a longer meeting) and what I learned this week (Feb 2021) is that you can also set meetings to auto-end early or start late! Check out this video from GettingThingsDone South Africa - https://player.vimeo.com/video/512896369

Continual Dialog - If you’re doing Slack, or MS Teams chat, great! If not, why not? I set up chat groups for both my core team (hi old team!) and ones for a sub-team working on a particular project. We shared all sorts of interesting stuff! Pictures of folks’ dogs, the latest banana bread / sourdough disaster, the first meals out in the world. It was great, and because it was using the platform we were already on for other stuff we all looked at it. So if any of us needed to ask a work question, it could be answered pretty quickly too. 

Non work sharing - share your life, you spent more time with these people when you were in the office than your own family most likely. I live with my partner, both of us are 200 to 500 miles away from our families down south. I appreciated hearing about Zoom school classes, and what peoples’ partners were up to on the DIY front, I’m sure one of your colleagues is/was in a similar position. 

Be mindful of time zones - If you have a team member, or supplier stuck at the other side of the world, don’t keep having meetings to suit your time zone, yes it might creep into ‘home time’ but for them it *always* creeps into home time, 5am wake-ups (or past midnight bedtimes). 

Split things up - chats for different things, sub teams etc, fun groups on Yammer for example brought me closer to non-team members. Yammer groups on Movies and Music were great distractions and inspirations when it came to switching off. (Thanks Mitchell!)

Shake things up - have a daily stand up (roughly translated as a quick 15 minute meeting for those not 'agile aware'), but don’t make it the same time each day. Move it about. This was accidental for us, and a few times one of us forgot when it was, but it kept you mindful of your calendar. Plan them ahead though, so you know that at some point in your day you have them. We did a week ahead (thanks Ben!) Stick to non-work stuff in these meetings, work stuff only if absolutely necessary. This was especially useful during lockdown (which hopefully won’t be back) but even afterwards, we kept it going, and it was always the best part of the day. 

Mix things up - I found sitting at a table great for some stuff, but terrible for other stuff. The MSK folks will kill me for this, but some tasks I liked doing on the sofa with my laptop on my lap. I’m writing this there right now! It’s not great for long term, but I found typing short creative things worked better for me on the sofa, but writing longer more formal things was better at the desk. If you've only ever sat at a desk, kitchen table, or similar during WFH time, try mixing it up.

Get personal - ask how people really are, you don’t need to share intimate details if you don’t want to, but it could be a catalyst to having a chat with someone after the meeting, or a signal to go easy on the workload dumping! Help each other too, your colleague might be a goldmine of information about something you’re struggling with at home, but you just never chatted about it. People are affected by Working from Home in different ways, as well as what is going on surrounding it. 

Learn about your colleagues, suppliers and clients - it’ll make you a better co-worker, customer or client, I promise. I always liked the website ‘Hej.Today’ for this (introduced to me by Anna Wikberg ?gren) it provides a great little starting point for a conversation, and I really learned more about my team from some of the more esoteric questions. For suppliers and clients, just find out what makes them happy in life! Hopefully you have something in common that you can share an experience with, or later down the line remember and send them an email that'll make their day.

Try a 45 minute hour. - Especially on video calls, but even when you're working, if you're taking up a full hour solidly on a task, stop. You will burn out, very easily. Don't forget in the office you had distractions aplenty, and you weren't working solidly on tasks without blinking because of those. Spend 15 minutes away from your desk every hour if possible, or even just standing up, you're still being productive because you're PROCESSING what you've just spent 45 minutes on. It'll lead to better work when you come back to the task.

Remember when I said don’t lift and shift? Well, there's always an exception to prove the rule. Absolutely don’t keep having meetings for meetings sake is a big one (see header image, ha, love that pic), but equally if you have a playbook of workshops for example, try them out lifting and shifting, don't forget about that exception... Some of my innovation workshops worked well just moving it over but putting my camera on a tripod and sticking post-it notes everywhere (including famously up and down my staircase), some of them just needed minor tweaks or a change of tech, but some were terrible lifted and shifted, so needed re-working. Try them out on test audiences you know will give you good feedback, and then re-work them (and re-work them again!). As mentioned previously, I worked a lot in a previous life around boosting engagement with blended and distance learning for this, so conversion came relatively easily to me. Thankfully the Ed-Tech community are brilliant sharers, so there’s shedloads of awesome content around this. Early on in COVID, I too shared some of my tips for this on Linkedin to my network in a multi-part series (and they have been expertly summarised and collated by my good friend David here - https://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/technology/online-facilitation/ 

Hopefully some of these things resonated for you, and help you out if you’re struggling. But don't worry that you *have* to head back to the office to do innovation. Yes, you might need to, (live trials are hard from home admittedly!) but it doesn't mean you can't be just as or even more productive remotely.