Win at Working from Home
Sharing the best practices I’ve used with remote teams
Working remotely is not a new concept. On my last team we had permanently remote workers, team members traveling constantly, and clients from around the world.
If your business is lucky enough to be able to allow your team to work from home, count your lucky stars and empower your workforce to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19. Here are some simple things to keep in mind when getting into the work from home groove.
For the Employer:
Make your WFH Policy Clear
Does anything change when people work from home? If yes, make sure your team knows how and why it’s changed.
- I recommend using Slack statuses to keep teammates in the loop about your breaks or time away from the computer.
- Add your working hours and timezone into your Slack status
- Schedule one team wide stand-up each day, and turn the video on. Show your face!
- Encourage your team to continue meeting and calling each other throughout the day just as they would when sitting next to each other in the office. It’s the fastest way to get unblocked.
Give people access to good tools:
Tools I love using for remote work (and non-remote work). You may not need all of these tools, depending on your company, but this is a good basic list:
- Slack for team conversations
- Zoom/Google Hangouts/Slack for video meetings and hanging out
- Miro for live workshopping and documentation (Google `G Suite` works well too, and typically costs less)
- Some kind of Project Management (Asana, Monday) and/or Development Ticketing System (Trello, Jira, Pivotal). Honestly if you’re not using one of these for your projects already… get on it! It just needs to be something people can onboard quickly, see who is assigned what, and figure out what is the highest priority.
Additionally, make sure your Leadership team is checking in with everyone and getting a good understanding of the team’s mental state and are taking requests for help or more resources seriously.
For the Employee:
Show your Face
- Almost all laptops and computers come with a built-in camera. If your teammates are like me, they miss you and would love to see your face! This brings an online interaction closer to what we’re missing in-person.
Check in with others
- If you’re having a good day, check-in with someone else on your team!
- If you’re having a bad day, check-in with someone else on your team!
Connecting to others helps our emotional state and reminds you why you work where you work. Use your co-workers to rubber duck your way through a problem.
Over Communicate
Especially if you are taking a vacation day! Make sure your team knows what you’re up to, if you’re feeling blocked, or if you’re not going to be available. Don’t rely on your Manager to communicate a vacation day to your team.
Work from home does not = Vacation Day.
Most of you probably don’t need to hear this, but someone reading this does.
Stay safe and considerate during this time of change and look on the brightside as much as possible. No commute! No dirty office kitchen! Work clothes can now include sweatpants!
What’s missing? How are you keeping team morale up and office culture active active during this time?
