Working from Home - Improve Your Productivity

I have been working from home on and off for the last 7 years. I am generally a sociable person who likes face to face interaction, but often my roles have not required me to go to an office or it has been expensive to commute to an office when the work can be done at home.

Here are my thoughts on how to improve your productivity and the productivity of your team when working from home.

As an Employee

1. Set yourself a routine. Ensure that you set yourself times when you are going to start work and also stop work. It is best to align these to what ever timezone your co-workers are also in.
2. Establish your place of work. If you have somewhere in your home you can work from, then set a pattern around that. The obvious choice might be a home office, but it could be a specific corner of the kitchen table. The key point is to give your brain a trigger. I have been doing this long enough that actually my trigger is my work laptop. As soon as I log into this I am at work.
3. Each day set yourself deliverables as a target - a To Do list of actual things you are going to deliver. Make them SMART which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Tick off your To Do list, it will make you feel like you are achieving.
4. At the start of the day communicate your deliverables to people who are interested. This could be to drop an email to your manager. "I am working on X today", "I intend to deliver Y today"
5. Stay in touch using work chat, such as Amazon Chime , Microsoft Teams, Slack etc.
6. Set a routine for dealing with external communications. You can often see that in the morning there will be some conversations and people catching up, then people will pose questions or seek clarification, then it goes quiet as people knuckle down to work. It is the same for emails, spend 30 mins maximum dealing with your communication then settle down to work.
7. Also, learn to ignore email, chat, random phone calls, twitter, LinkedIn and other social media. Every time you get distracted it will take you 5 minutes to get back into your work. Set out-of-office notifications, set chat to do not disturb and learn to focus on your deliverables.
8. Take breaks - Yes, you need to take breaks just like you do in the office. This article was actually written in a lunch break when I allow myself to be distracted by social media.
9. Deliver short iterations of work to check you are on the right track. I try to produce a deliverable at least once per week, but choose what suits you.
10. If you get stuck, escalate early setting out what you are stuck on and where you need help or clarification. It is not a sign of weakness to ask for help, just because you are remote does not mean you are not part of a team.
11. At the end of the day, send a summary to people on your progress. Some days you are not going to make the progress you wanted to. But the quickest way to loose trust is to go quiet, so let people know about the setbacks and where you need help tomorrow.
12. Accept that some days you will not make as much progress as you wanted to, but try to finish at a prescribed time. With some problems the best solution is a break and fresh eyes in the morning.

As a Manager

1. Assess progress on output and deliverables not when or where the work was done.
2. Don't let remote workers feel like they are 2nd class workers. They are probably working longer hours than those in the office. Recognise contributions to productivity not how often you see them in the office.
3. Change your language to be delivery focussed. Rather than saying "Let's have a meeting to discuss" use terms like "Can you produce me a report on". This will empower your employees to actually produce a deliverable.
4. Help remote workers by providing realistic deadlines and frequent points where they can check they are on track. Frequent short iteration delivery is better than a missed expectation with a long delivery time.
5. Make sure that if you have to have virtual meetings, they have an agenda and outcomes that are deliverables that people can go and work on. Allow employees to decline meetings that don't have these.
6. Try to keep virtual meetings small and only invite people who need to contribute to the meeting. A good number is around 7-9 people max. Anyone who does not need to contribute can get the output as a deliverable.
7. Learn how to set up meetings that integrate into office calendar applications so that the reminder will allow people to connect easily.
8. Ensure that people have multiple different ways of communicating. Email, chat, virtual meetings, collaborative document tools. I have often initiated an idea in a chat room and asked people to put their thoughts and ideas into a collaborative document, which can then form the basis of a virtual meeting to review and refine the resulting document.
9. Ensure that your VPN or virtual desktops other communication technology works consistently. Remote employees don't want to spend half the day trying to get their technology working.

If you have other great ideas add them in the comments.

The author works for Amazon.com, these are my own personal views and not those of Amazon.