Working from home - my experience
Disclaimer: The lines below do not pretend to be the ultimate guide on remote work. These are some of the things that I learned in the last 10 years doing it and I want to share with you in the hope that it will make your lives easier given the current circumstances. This text is aimed at people who can do most or part of their job from a computer.. I hope it helps.
Making (part of) your home into an OFFICE
In order to work from home besides a decent internet connection, a laptop with a webcam and a microphone here are some things worth considering.
First who do you share your living space with? If you are by yourself it will be easier and lonelier, if you have flatmates or a partner things become a bit tricker and if you have kids especially below 5 years old it’s even more challenging. It’s still doable but requires a lot discipline and flexibility.
For the solo worker the hardest thing is self motivation. Why get up early? Why get out of bed at all when I can drag the laptop and sit in bed?I had days like this over the years… its not pretty. You waste most of your day and feel shit at the end.
So get up, do whatever you do, sports, breakfast, dress up as if you were going out and then sit at your work desk/couch/place at home. The psychological effect of being dressed as if you were going out helps (me) a lot.
For the ones sharing the apartment with other people you have to have an understanding with them about when and where in your living space you work from. Then on one hand you have to make them adapt to you and on the other you also have to adapt to their reality.
If you like music and they don’t, use headphones. If one of you is having a call, the other should take that into consideration.
If you sit in front of the computer then don’t waste your time browsing if the people assume you are working. (I am not sure if this is an advice to you or if I am talking to myself..)
If you you have kids then it becomes more tricky. Right now my daughter is 9 and when she is with me she is very considerate when I work. When she was younger if there were things that required me to concentrate for long periods of time I either worked after she went to bed or before she got up and left the small tasks for during the day.
Set rules and explain them to your children. Try and do it in smaller blocks of time. 1h work, 30 minutes play etc. Try different options and see what works best.
Be always open to ever changing circumstances. I can’t explain how important this is. You will plan the day and in 90% of the cases things won’t happen exactly as you foresaw them. Just accept it and keep going without getting frustrated about it.
Once you have the basic rules at home lets think about your “home office” space. Try and make it as comfortable as the situation allows. The best case scenario is to have a dedicated room for this, the worst is not having rooms at all. I have done most of those and the headphones help me a lot to create a bubble and isolate myself.
One of the advantages of working from home is that when you remove, the time it takes you to go to the office, the physical contact with your colleagues, the lunch, sitting in pointless meetings and commute back home suddenly you can accomplish similar results in much less time. That’s when you have the discipline not to “quickly put on the washing mashine”.
I would divide the digital communication in the following categories and focus on the IM (instant messaging) for the time being.
IM — for short written messages, calls, file exchanges, etc that require more or less immediate attention.
Project management platform — Where you manage projects divided into smaller tasks and assign and monitor the progress of those tasks.
File repository — to store and access all your files and media
E-mail — the last resort :)
How to communicate with your colleagues/team mates/employees.
If you haven’t used a IM (instant messaging) application before in your office now is the time to choose one. They can substitute some of the office atmosphere. I don’t pretend to know them all or to have tested them, you can do that on your own. I like Slack and used it in my previous company for many years. Regardless which one you choose, look at it as the digital equivalent of walking into the office and saying hello to your colleagues.
For the managers. You have to set some rules that work for you and for your employees. We started by not requiring anybody to log on a certain time and realised after a while that some people need others to be online at the same time to ask them questions etc in order to complete their tasks and then made a rule that everyone should be online between 8 and 10am (we had people working from different time zones), should take a 1 h lunch break and are expected to work 6 hours per day. You should do whatever works for you and your team.
We also had one HQ room for everyone (10 people) in the company then many other rooms based on projects and/or hierarchy.
We used the HQ room for practical information that concerns everybody and to socialise by sharing youtube videos, music, books, movies, photos etc.
When you log on, you type: “good morning” and this way let your colleagues know you are sitting in front of the computer and ready to work.
If you leave the computer for a few min, let them know with a “brb”. When you are back also let them know.
When you go for lunch let them know, have rules of the approximate duration of your lunch breaks and around what times they should happen.
You can use different status messages that explain to your colleagues what you are doing. Online, Away, Super Concentrated, Offline or preset anything that works for you.
When you communicate in writing you loose the intonations, emotions, visual contact with the person and you have to be very detailed in your communication, over explain, give examples, use emojis, gifs and anything which will leave the least room for misinterpretation of what you want your colleague to understand. Sometimes it might be easier to just call him/her and explain yourself talking and then follow up with some of the important details such as numbers etc in writing.
When chatting in rooms with more people, think which messages are relevant to most people. If what you have to say only applies to one or two of them then consider letting those people know in a smaller group to avoid distracting everyone. You have no idea how often this happens.
You also have to judge which type of information is for a quick message and which one should go into something more traceable like a todo in project management platform or god forbid an e-mail :)
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any specific questions or challenges working remotely and I will try and help you out.
