Many of us at Snipply work remotely. There are a ton of reasons working remotely is awesome. Any place can be your office, coffee breaks relaxing with the pooch, calling your pajamas your suit — all amazing things. However, there is a flip side to everything. If interested in how we set our team up for success make sure to see our top habits and workflows here, and let’s explore what we think are the 5 biggest challenges of working remotely.
There are the same amount of distractions, just different types.
In a physical office, we understand what distracts us from our work. Whether it is chatting with coworkers, coffee breaks, coworking space noise, etc — we know what will be there to distract us and how to avoid it.
It’s much different when you’re in a completely comfortable place — your home environment. Family and spouses can interrupt work, pets can demand attention, or a gripping debate on ESPN can lead you away from your tasks at hand. The number of distractions doesn’t change, but the types of distractions do and require remote workers to be proactive in avoiding them.
Communication can be a challenge.
We have all become accustomed to using technology to communicate in the workplace. Email, Slack, Skype, Asana and dozens of other tools allow us to communicate fairly effortlessly with coworkers, collaborators, and clients. Expectations are the tools get used appropriately and everyone is reachable and responsive.
In reality, the easiest way to get in touch with someone is being next to them.
If there is an urgent issue, like a project that needs last-minute changes before submission, getting a hold of the right person can be a challenge. The Harvard Bussines Review found that when remote team members encountered common challenges, 84% said the concern dragged on for a few days or more, while 47% admitted to letting it drag on for multiple weeks.
Teams need to understand the importance of communicating with and resolving issues for all team members, including remote workers.
You are always at work if you work from home.
If you work from home, you are essentially always at work. Melanie Pinola of Zapier describes this phenomenon when she writes “One of the reasons many managers don’t approve of remote work is they fear employees will slack off without that physical, in-person oversight. But, in fact, the opposite tends to be the reality–remote workers are more likely to overwork. When your personal life and your work are both under the same roof, it’s harder to ‘switch off.’” Burnout from working from home is real and can lead to the next challenge as well.
Cabin fever is real.
The definition of cabin fever is irritability, listlessness, and similar symptoms resulting from long confinement or isolation indoors. Sometimes when working from home you get the feeling of isolation, especially if you aren’t located in the middle of a bustling city.
You definitely need to be proactive about this by scheduling time to make it outside, having more video meetings, and taking your work out of the home and into something like a coffee shop or coworking space.
Either a lack of company culture or lack of it transferring over digitally.
Company culture can be incredibly difficult to plan for and implement successfully. The challenge exists for colocated teams and is even more present with remote teams.
Greg Digneo of Timedoctor explains “Within an office building, a new employee can watch his or her coworkers to see how things are done. They can learn the backstory of the company and why things came to be through casual conversation. However, in a remote company, these serendipitous conversations and observations can’t take place.”
While remote work as a part of a flexible work environment can lead to more productive teams, the necessary steps need to be taken to have culture transfer over to team members that aren’t colocated. And for freelancers, this is especially challenging.
The good news there are a bunch of easy ways to combat these challenges. Recently our team collectively shared all the ways we fight through the roadblocks in getting work done as a distributed team, and laid out some practical steps to set your team up for success. Check them out here and make sure to sign up below to keep receiving more insights.
Suffering from editor fragmentation and collaboration headaches resulting from it? Love using Excel but hate Sheets? Want to put an end to your team’s friction over Office and G Suite? Join our waitlist here.
