Make the Best of Working From Home

You may find yourself in uncharted waters amidst COVID-19 work and travel restrictions. Occasional work at a client site or from a hotel room doesn’t prepare anyone for the novel experience of working from home. About three years ago, I traded a 2+ hour commute in Atlanta traffic for a short flight of stairs to my new home office. My new company embraces WFH, and we’ve built best practices for getting the most out of this flexible and productive work environment. Here are a few tips to make the shift to WFH during COVID-19 a bit easier.

Upgrade your Internet

Speed matters, and people used to business class fiber in a mid-town office will find the shift to a home office daunting without very high-speed internet. What works for casual email and surfing or a couple of Netflix shows after work won’t stand up to suite of Office365 or Google Docs, a few big spreadsheet or PowerPoint downloads, and a VPN. Upgrade your internet, or at least check for a faster speed: www.localcabledeals.com .  In some cases, local internet providers may be able to install a business class service to your home office. Residential class internet service usually adheres to “best effort” service levels, which means the speed you pay for isn’t always what you get. With so many kids now home during work hours because of COVID-19, the bandwidth in your neighborhood gets clogged up with more hours of gaming and homework. Business class internet usually comes with a quality of service to prioritize your network ahead of more “civilian” traffic.   Regardless of your class of service, get the fastest possible package to make all of your online experiences seamless.

Get a Camera and Microphone

Newcomers to working from home quickly come to miss the human contact around the office. You lose the quick chats in the elevator or walks to lunch with work friends, and it’s easy to get disconnected from peers and colleagues.   Replace the physical contact with face to face video conferencing at least a few times a day. But, do yourself a favor and upgrade your microphone and camera. Laptop cameras may work in a pinch, but even an inexpensive streaming camera mounted to your monitor, paired with a high quality microphone will help you be seen and heard by your clients and peers. Set your conference service to launch with the camera on so that others turn on theirs, and set a tone of (virtual) face to face meetings. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your friends turn on their cameras, too.

Carve Out Your Space

While you may be tempted to curl up on the couch with a laptop, you will probably need an environment with a bit more privacy and quiet. Find a spot on the dining room table, make an office out of a guest room closet, or a dedicated room for a home office. Ideally, you can find a dependable space where you don't have to set up and tear down your office each day, and that can house all of your essential tools and materials. Unlike a traditional work environment, you have the liberty of creating a totally personalized work space at home, but just remember that people will see what's behind you, so create a cool background for your webinars.

Dress for Success, at Least from the Waist Up

When I first started telecommuting from my home office, I dressed in khakis and a dress shirt every day. I told myself that I was still at work, but it’s a slippery slope from a “bad hair day” cap to coming to work in pajamas.   I don’t wear ties any longer, but a collared shirt and groomed hair matter, even if I’m wearing shorts and flip flops where the camera can’t see. Just don’t stand up during a video conference call, especially with clients, to let them know you still sport 2005’s cargo shorts. Even a slightly polished look will make you feel more professional, will set the standard for WFH dress with your colleagues, and impress your clients that you go the extra step to be professional in all aspects of your WFH lifestyle.

Forget the Traditional Workday

Embrace the flexibility inherent in the WFH schedule. You lose the commute time, random interruptions and “drive by” meetings of a traditional office, and often the peer or supervisory pressure to be seen. It’s a lot easier in a home office to sequester yourself for work sprints and maintain peak productivity.   But, you will quickly learn new distractions like the endless deliveries of Amazon packages and other residential interruptions. And, too much dedicated project time may distance you from other responsibilities or cause you to neglect peers and clients. Find a way to balance your work with the new flexibility of WFH to stay recharged and connected. Losing an hour of windshield time gives you a chance to get on the treadmill or Peloton. Take the opportunity to send a few emails to work friends and bosses to keep them updated on projects and stay connected.

Have the Heart to Heart Talk with your Significant Other

In the “old days” of business travel, it wasn’t rare to hear from road warrior colleagues that their spouses or kids thought that Mom or Dad’s business trips sounded like fun. It’s hard to explain to civilians that the air travel, hotel rooms, and business meals quickly become a grind. In the new world of telecommuting, it’s equally common for family members to take WFH for granted, and that can cause problems at home. Have the heart to heart with family members that your WFH job remains a job, so while you may be happy to answer a homework question or manage an occasional contractor visit, you should still protect the majority of work hours from domestic distractions. For every cute video of an adorable child or family pet interrupting a conference call, hundreds more calls go wildly wrong and risk your productivity and professional respect. Do yourself a favor and have a tough conversation with your family to let them know some of the ground rules about your work from home status, and the best way for everyone to manage the change.

Stop Working from Home, Occasionally

Take time on a regular schedule to embrace genuine face to face contact with your peers and team members. Even with all of the available technology we use to stay connected to people from your home office, an in-person visit with people from work enhances personal and professional relationships. WFH allows non-verbal communication skills to atrophy, and decreases the normal time spent developing networks at a traditional office environment. Find a regular schedule for a morning coffee, group lunch or monthly networking event to keep all of your professional and interpersonal skills sharp. If social distancing and COVID-19 measures make this step impossible for now, use a group chat and video lunches a mainstay of more casual and friendly engagement with work peers. Post a picture of your latest dinner, practicing your guitar, or walking the dog, but challenge team members to share their moments, as well, to build those broader interpersonal connections, together.

Morning Kick-starts

In a SCRUM shop, the day typically begins with the “stand up,” a meeting designed to get the team aligned for the work due that day and to discuss the challenges or obstacles to overcome. When you manage a team remotely, those virtual stand-up meetings kick-start the day and give your team a chance to connect and align for the day’s work. Insist that everyone use their camera for some virtual face time. You aren’t trying to host an all-hands, just facilitate alignment for the group, and model the kind of WFH behaviors that you want the team to emulate: cameras, regular check-in calls, and supporting the team. A 15 minute kick-start call replaces the morning “walk about” that you may use in an office environment to give your team a jump on the day’s responsibilities.

Be a Master of the WebConference

Companies with a commitment to WFH typically have a conferencing tool like WebEx, Join.me, GoTo Meeting or Zoom. All of these tools offer the same basic phone and webinar features including conference bridges, screen sharing, and chat. None of us like A/V problems during a conference or webinar, so take time to learn the special features of your group’s solution. If, on the other hand, your company has shifted to WFH due to COVID-19 measures, and you don’t have a corporate account ready, sign up for low or no-cost webinar and conference programs to keep you and your teams integrated.  It makes sense for everyone to have accounts on the same tools to make it easy to find everyone for calls, and to present a consistent virtual presence for clients. Frequent short web conferences throughout the day to share information and get virtual face makes a big impact and keeps you connected personally and professionally with your work network and business partners.

Embrace Chat

Chat tools give you the virtual equivalent of a drop-in to your office or cubicle, and teams use chat effectively throughout the day to stay connected in WFH scenarios. Slack jumped to the top of the chat/IM corporate food chain, but free or low-cost tools like Skype give you many of the same capabilities. Get your teams to set up their accounts, and consider setting up group chats, or channels, on common topics as a virtual help desk for your teams. Keep a chat window open on your desktop all day, and create channels for each client or product team so that anyone can post a question or comment to the group. It’s a great way to keep an open line of communication with your team without clogging your email inbox.

Get Creative with Virtual White Boards

For years, companies invested in communal meeting spaces filled with white boards to foster collaboration among teams and groups, which you lose in WFH environments. But, online tools create a virtual workspace that can share ideas, tasks, and project work across teams and clients globally. Miro.com offers the best virtual simulacrum to the office white board, including virtual post-its, markers, and the ability to tape docs and images to the workspace. KanBanFlow.com and ServiceNow offer task manager boards that give teams virtual access to a workspace to track tasks, tally progress, and interact on projects virtually. And, of course, Basecamp, which literally wrote the book on working remotely, enables teams globally to manage projects and communication. These tools do a great job of replacing features of the physical office and keep your WFH teams aligned productively. Find the one you like and use it regularly to get your teams and clients in the right WFH habits to stay productive.

Adapting to the work from home lifestyle takes a bit of time and effort, but generally pays dividends in terms of productivity and flexibility to manage the changing needs of businesses. Staying connected beyond the traditional workday and engaging globally often function more effectively with WFH. If you find yourself in a new work from home situation, take the time to learn the tools and build good work habits for your home office. Who knows how long the coronavirus conditions may force WFH on the global workforce, but you may find that you and your company both benefit from this new work environment

#workfromhome #covid-19 #wfh #newnormal #miro.com #ibexdigital