“The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a menacing form. Lock-down and social distancing seem to be the only way of preventing the disease in the present. This has forced several employers to ask their workers to operate from their homes. The remote working concept has quickly spread across the globe allowing businesses to operate as usual”.
Remote work enables employees to work from their homes at fixed timing or with a flexible time schedule. To be equally productive while working from home, it is essential that the workers make necessary changes in their work style. This is to ensure that their managers get the expected work output in time.
Here are a few tips to help remote workers in this epidemic scenario:
Communication
Communication is an essential component of any successful work activity. While working remotely, it is important that all team members are in regular touch with each other.
Over-communicate whenever required:
It is required that you make your point clear to each and everyone on your team. With multi-generational teams, communication gaps can easily ruin a project or part of it. Use voice, written and visual communication to convey your message.
Get to know your company’s remote work policy:
Every company has guidelines for remote work. Get to know them. Contact your HR department for more information on processes, procedures, policies, and expectations.
Managers need to tell how and when to reach them:
If you are managing a team, you should clearly tell your teammates how they can reach you.
Also, it is better to inform them of the preferred time for an online discussion or telephonic meeting in advance. Proper guidelines will help you manage the team with lesser difficulties.
Prompt reply to emails and voicemails:
Reply to your emails and voicemails well in time to avoid creating bottlenecks for your co-workers. This creates a positive impact among your colleagues and helps work go smoothly.
A prompt reply is of importance for people working in different time zones as well.
Keep communication casual:
For a lighter work atmosphere, use simple, friendly language while communicating with your co-workers. Use humor wherever possible.
Support and help your colleagues when you can. Remember – a friend in need, is a friend indeed.
Prepare a place for video conferencing:
You may often need to have video conferencing with your teammates. Create a proper space for it. Use a plain or professional background, have adequate lighting, and make sure that the webcam and mic are working properly.
Standardize a file-sharing mechanism:
Discuss with your team and decide a standard file sharing mechanism. Use any pre-decided, file hosting service, or your company’s cloud hosting facility instead of a random method every time.
Taking care of yourself
Work from home requires you to take care of yourself. You do not want to fall sick and miss any important deadlines or even reduce your work quality and throughput.
Take scheduled breaks:
It is important to go on scheduled breaks to fight fatigue. If required, walk inside your house or listen to some music. Go away from your work area while you take a lunch break or tea break.
Maintain a time table:
While working from home, it is easy to deviate from your targets. After all the odd Netflix show or the mundane laundry work can delude you from your work pattern. So prepare a time table to schedule your office and housework. Interleave them or group them in small clusters as per your liking.
Have a proper workplace:
This is important. Create a small, comfortable, exclusive place for work at home. Avoid using the family couch or the bed to do your work. The comfort zone deviates you from your work and reduces your quality of work and throughput.
Divide your work at home:
Since you will be focusing on your work for certain hours, divide your housework between yourself and family members/ flatmates. It pays to decide in advance rather than having to do a chore in between an important meeting or presentation.
Get proper work tools:
Invest in a comfortable chair, a proper work table and get correct computer hardware. Noise cancellation headsets are a great choice if you are living in a busy area. Invest in a stable internet connection and if required, get power backup to keep working during power outages.
Look for a work buddy:
If you are living alone, look for a work buddy to share your working hours. This will help you alleviate your sense of loneliness increasing your productivity. In case you cannot get a work buddy at your physical location, try staying online with a remote work buddy.
Keep your morale high
Due to the pandemic situation, it is possible that your morale can fluctuate affecting your work. Do not let this happen.
Work as per your company culture:
Even though you are working at home, work as per your company culture. This will help you keep up with your workload and the quality of work output expected from you.
Stay in touch with your friends from work:
Always keep in touch with your friends at work. Remember to drop in a message every now and then or catch up with them over the phone. This will help you keep a tab of what is happening behind the scenes.
Dress professionally:
Even while working from a home, dress, and groom professionally. It helps you get the feel of working in an office. It also keeps you ready for the unscheduled video conference session.
Ask for feedback:
While working from home, take feedback from your manager and colleagues on your performance. This will help you get your bearing right. If required, discuss any problems during the team meetings or in one to one with your supervisor.
It is important that remote workers have adequate tools for optimizing their output.
There are several such tools available that help teams working from their homes track and perform their productivity. These are useful for communicating with team members and manage the projects.
Here are a few of them:
Slack:
Slack is a communication tool that is simple to use and loved by the remote working community. It allows team members to share ideas and have discussions. It uses channel-based communication per topic and has a history option for reviewing the chats later. You can also have one to one chats, share files, and even have voice calls over Slack.
Zoom:
Zoom is a popular tool for video conferencing. It is suited for remote teams, webinars, and business conferences. It has a host of features and is widely used by remote workers towards staying in touch with each other.
Toggl:
Toggle is a time tracking app which runs in the background while the workers work on tasks. It is useful for time tracking and maximizing productivity. Managers can see the time spent by each worker on tasks and take informed decisions accordingly.
Jira:
Jira is an Agile-based project management tool. It can be used for planning, tracking, and reviewing work on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It helps you keep track of your team’s performance and work throughput.
Trello:
Trello is a Kanban based project management tool. It has an easy to use visual interface and is made for big sized projects. You can use its feature-rich environment to manage a complex project with ease tracking the progress of each task and members of the team.
Instagantt:
Instagantt is a Gantt chart based project management tool useful for visually planning and managing a project remotely. It helps you to communicate with your team members allowing you to create tasks, subtasks, projects, guidelines, milestones, notifications among many other things for them.
Google Drive:
Google Drive is a free file sharing platform. It is useful for creating, sharing, and storing files on a cloud hosting platform. The paid version allows large file sizes as well.
Dropbox:
Dropbox is another cloud-based file sharing platform. It is available in free and corporate versions.
Timezone:
Timzone is a simple tool that helps you keep track of the local time of each team member. It is useful for planning and scheduling online discussions.
Grammarly:
Grammarly is a web-based writing and editing tool. It is useful for writing and correcting text important for proper communication. It has attachments for all major browsers and can be used to checking email text directly.
In the end:
COVID-19 pandemic has created a global shift in the work pattern of organizations.
“People are working from their homes to avoid getting infected from the deadly virus and in the process are discovering an alternate way of earning their livelihood”.
Work from home concept existed previously and COVID-19 has accelerated the migration towards remote working.
People are fast discovering this less stressful way of working. If work from home is done truly, it is equally productive. The tips and tools mentioned here will help any aspiring remote worker to do and provide quality output for its organization while staying at the safety of their houses.
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