Working from home? Seven practical tips to help manage perceptions.

The benefits of working from home (for the individual AND the organisation) are well attested. As with anything, there are also some downsides. On the issue of WFH, one of the most significant issues is that unique sense of uneasiness connected to perceptions.

Is she (Do people think that I'm) just taking it easy at home and not really putting in a full day's work?

Does he (Do I) have problems being a team player?

Can I trust that work I (they) can't see happening will be at the quality we (they) need?

The list goes on.

As a fierce advocate of WFH, both for myself and for my teams, here are seven practical tips you might like to try out - specifically aligned to positively managing perceptions (your boss'/workmates' as well as your own).

1. Plan and communicate WFH in advance

While it might be nice to be able to 'make a WFH call' when you wake up, being adaptable to how you're feeling on the day, it may not translate that way to your work colleagues. In fact, it's likely to translate to '____ doesn't feel like showing up today (to the office or the work)'.

What is likely to go down far better is a premeditated, planned and communicated WFH day.

That can involve setting certain days or times of the week as WFH, being careful to skirt around regular important meeting commitments (see also 7. below), and embedding it as a predictable rhythm for your boss and colleagues to get used to.

What also works really well (and something my current team are using to great effect) is a short email at the end of the day - preceding a WFH day - where you remind or inform the team you'll be working from home, available and working on the following 3-6 things (list them).

You'll feel better, too, going into your WFH day knowing that it's planned and well communicated in advance.

Even if you are making an on-the-day call around WFH, notifying with your list of to-dos in combination with points 2. through 7. below can make a world of difference.

2. Start early

An email (or worse, a reply to an email) at 10:30 am, hours after the rest of the organisation has started the work day, informing that you're working from home and now you can make a start on things, doesn't usually inspire a lot of confidence in the WFH prospect. It reads as anywhere on a spectrum from 'That person is so unorganised' to 'Clearly ____ has elected to take/thinks they're entitled to a half day off.'

(The obvious exception to this is genuine emergencies, but that's a different situation).

Trying starting early. Get a few tasks done or make some progress on a project and start communicating back into the team or your boss. Give yourself an hour or two before you need to get the kids off to school. Getting up earlier can make a tremendous difference.

For your work colleagues, getting into the chair at the start of the day and seeing that you're already up and away with the work is a great validation for the whole mentality around WFH.

For you, it's a great positive to feel like you're getting a head start on the rest of the team or organisation. It can also be helpful in mitigating that sense of guilt that can creep up when you're not available between 7.30 and 9.30, getting your family organised.

3. Make yourself presentable

I've read and heard a lot about this notion of it being really cool and convenient to skip the morning shower and do your work at home dressed in your pyjamas or your very own special interpretation of the human sloth. I get that, but generally don't recommend it.

Psychologically, you feel like you're on the job and being professional when you're dressed that way, too. Maybe not the full regalia, but certainly being clean, reasonably well groomed and neat and tidily dressed can make a big difference to your state of mind when you sit down to start the work. One way it can help to think of it is this: if a client or a colleague is coming over to my home office today, how would I like them to see me?

The same goes for your work area. Set up a nice working space that looks and feels reasonably professional.

That mindset can actually impact on the way you do your work while at home, how you talk to people on the phone, etc.

This is also important for point (5.) below, as you will see.

4. Be reasonably and reliably responsive

For your boss and/or colleagues, your WFH should never end up as their impression of MIA.

Answer the phone or call back reasonably promptly. Respond to the emails. Perhaps (if it's going to work for your output to go for a while into Oyster Mode) consider hourly check in points throughout the main portion of the work day so that you can stay connected and be responsive.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised just how much more correspondence I'm able to respond to or initiate when working from home. The day flies by and I feel incredibly productive.

Of course, being available at all times is not always healthy or productive; the list of tasks you distributed in (1.) above still needs to be attended to, and we don't want our WFH days turning into 18-hour work days on account of being paranoid about not answering every phone call or email. See also (6.) below.

So be responsive, but reasonably and reliably. Don't go MIA.

5. Leverage technology for F2F meetings and catch ups

This is a big one for me, and one of the most compelling reasons why I feel more people in more organisations ought to be able to do more work from home.

Out of sight can equal out of mind. Emails aren't always (in fact, some argue convincingly they're almost never) the most effective way to communicate and stay in touch. Phone calls are okay, but still lack the visual component and inherently carry the notion of distance.

Video conferencing tools like Skype and Zoom can make all the difference here. Essentially they allow face to face meetings to happen wherever the different team members happen to be (dependent of course on Internet access and devices and software).

On WFH days, as a manager and executive, I average 2-3 Zoom meetings a day, either into the main office to talk with a team and/or with other remotely located team members. We can see and hear each other clearly, look over documents together, even record the meeting for later note taking or wider distribution in the organisation. It changes the whole feeling of 'the main office' - you get a real sense of a multi-lens and distributed workplace.

Companies that aren't willing to make the modest investment in this sort of technology and access are just prehistoric, in my opinion.

But for you, working from home, if you and your team have or can easily get this sort of technology, you'd be silly not to use it to stay more genuinely connected.

Combine this with points (3.) and (4.) above, and you could be on a winner.

6. Report in

Making a phone call or sending an email at the end of your WFH day to report in can be extremely helpful on four main counts:

a. It's like a punch in card letting boss and/or colleagues know exactly when you finished up for the day (alleviating that unkind assumption you went to the beach or flopped in front of the telly straight after lunch).

b. Explicitly or implicitly, in combination with (1.) above, it creates evidence for both you and the people you work with about how productive you've been and where you've managed to progress to.

c. It creates a smooth and documented connection to the next work day, whether that's back in the office or another WFH day.

d. For you, psychologically, you're creating a useful line in the sand to tell yourself and others that you're clearly clocking off from work now. Without the ritual of gathering your things, saying farewells and commuting, WFH can become a dangerous 'how long is a ball of string' prospect; you need a clear ritual and signal to help switch off.

7. Reciprocate the flexibility

The whole debate around whether WFH ought to be a 'right' or a privilege is not one I want to get entangled in here. However, I think if your boss and team are being flexible enough in their mindsets to allow you occasional or regular WFH time, it's important to show some forms of reciprocation.

You might want to consider not treating WFH as some sort of God-given right that you are unwilling to discuss or work with people on or around from time to time as the organisation and work requires it. Be willing to sacrifice, shift or adapt it on occasion if genuinely important impromptu meetings, client engagements or unique team challenges arise. Just as you can't afford for WFH to become associated with MIA, you don't want it to become associated with an automatic NA (Not Available), either.

Perhaps you can come in just for the meeting itself, with WFH wrapped around either end of that appointment. Half/hybrid days can work sometimes, too.

Last night I recommended to a working mum on my team that, with all the long days she spent in the office this week working with fly-in consultants on a critical project (sacrificing some of her regular WFH schedule), perhaps she should consider doing a greater than usual slot of WFH next week as well as take some additional time off. She was willing to move her regular work/life balance around a bit for the sake of an important project, so we're more than happy to give her something back to help right the scales.

With good communication and flexibility, it's often possible to have your cake and let the organisation eat theirs.

Those are some of my tips. For those of you out there doing the WFH thing and successfully managing the 'perceptions' issue, feel free to add your own recommendations below!

Jason Renshaw is Chief Learning Innovation Officer and Executive Director at the Australian School of Applied Management, a business school that also coordinates Women and Leadership Australia and the National Excellence in School Leadership Initiative.