One Year Working and Leading Permanently from Home – Yet Another Kind of Transition

It has been a tough year for most of us, to say the least...

I packed up my stuff and went home, thinking I'd be back in a couple of week's time. Little did I know that this would extend beyond a full year!

Initially, I felt that permanently working from home was exhausting and anything but effective.

It was exactly a year ago when I started to work from home in a permanent manner. Working from home wasn’t new to me. I started doing that back in 2014. However it was only one day/week and I had to make quite some adjustments to make it work in a more permanent manner.

Here I’d like to share my key learnings and how I learned to transition the hard way. It is fair to say that I never thought of this to be longer than a couple of weeks, 3 months at max. And a full year into this, it doesn’t look like we’re all going back to the office in spring. So here are my learnings:

1. Prioritise Brutally and don’t Attempt to Multitask: Some people claim that humans are perfectly capable of multitasking. Great, if this is the case for you! It isn’t mine. Whilst I can easily drive and speak on the hand free on long drives, I just can’t do two things that require my mental capacity. I found the good old to-do-list to be very important, and to work with my team to have a more short-term focus on goals to be helpful.

2. Eliminate Notifications: We know them too well! Whether it is Outlook, MS Teams, Workplace, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. they all fight for our attention. Whilst some may believe that a quick glance doesn’t do any harm, it actually takes our attention away and extends our working hours as a result. So, key to productivity is to switch off distractions, and this includes notifications.

3. Make Meaningful Connections: I had to adjust my working from the office routine to make it fit for purpose of working permanently from home. Communication being one of the key leadership tasks of any leader, many leaders made the mistake to simply transfer their existing meetings routine into their work-from-home environment. Early into the lockdown we upped our game in making frequent and varied connections with team members. We had daily check-ins, 1:1s and once per week a social virtual. These were all put in place to provide psychological safety and whilst we had many unanswered questions ourselves.

So we stated what we knew, and what we could share with our teams accordingly. Communicating what you don’t know is still better than not communicating at all. A few months into this modus operandi I asked my team members whether we should keep or change the rhythm and frequency of our interactions. And rightly so they suggested to reduce the frequency as people had adjusted to the new ways of working. We also cut down set meetings by 10-15 minutes. So instead of having a 60-minute weekly jour fixe, this is now a 50-minute meeting, allowing a few minutes to grab some water, tea/coffee or do a little stretch in between the calls.

4. Equip Yourself with the Right Tech and Tools: Knowing that all of the key applications that I needed were in the cloud, meant that I could put away the company laptop (with a small screen) and use our home computer to do what was required in a much more effective way. A proper keyboard, an ergonomically friendly mouse and chair, an LED ring light, proper headset and small things like this all may sound like nice-to-have gear. However, they will make a big difference in how you show up in your VCs and feel at the end of a long working day. Over time, they will prove the real value to you and to your health. Halfway through the pandemic we also switched from a clunky VC solution to MS Teams and that again was a productivity boost, especially also the integration with the rest of the MS suite of tools.

5. Find and Build a Meaningful Buffer Between Work and Home Life: Find separation between work and home life. In our flat we had a spare room that was used by my wife to work on her PhD, it also served as a guest room. Hence why I started using our dining table initially. Soon the nurseries went into lockdown, and our son was very intrigued by seeing his father working from home every day. Whilst this was a nice experience initially, working next to other family members, being in the living room and spending a lot of time on calls isn’t necessarily productive. I had to find an arrangement to share our spare room with my wife and also make sure I built a meaningful buffer between my workday and rest of the day. Here, I have developed the habit of jumping on our elliptical trainer and finishing the working day off right after that. I often play catch up with webinars and events that are important, but not urgent that way. We also had to adjust our work patterns by doing some work early in the mornings and late in the evening with a young child at home.

6. Work on Your Mindset AND Health: One of the biggest barriers to being effective in a permanent working from home has proven to be the mindset. We also know that in order to succeed in any discipline, it often comes down to the 'inner game'.

How do you nurture yours? How do you feed your body and soul with what's required most?

I remember the moment exactly when my smartphone reminded me halfway through April 2020 that my daily steps had dropped from over 8,000 to less than 3,000 during the last period. And most of those steps were made walking around in our flat. So, I knew that I needed to build in more physical activity despite the constraints of being stuck at home. Luckily that elliptical trainer that had served as a wardrobe ?? could be dusted off to serve its original purpose. Occasionally, calls could be taken in combination with a long walk or sitting on the balcony and taking in the sun. And my long established daily meditation practice maintained during the many lockdowns helped me to stay mentally sane and have a sense of agency when dealing with many challenging situations and moments.

7. Executive Onboarding, Done Virtually: Working with may executives who have had to transition into a new role during the pandemic, there are key principles that are highlighted by a HBR article[1] next to my own learnings in order to enable executives to onboard more effectively in a virtual setting:

Learning: Provide a structured learning process

Goals: Be crystal clear about short-term objectives

Stakeholders: Build an even more robust stakeholder engagement plan

Buddy: Assign a virtual onboarding buddy

Team Building: Facilitate virtual team building

Coach Support: Hire an executive transition Coach

How have you transitioned into leading and working from home permanently?

[1] Watkins, Michael D. & Driscoll, Mary, “Onboarding a New Leader — Remotely”, HBR, May 2020