Wrote this on a lazy Sunday afternoon… what started out as a “10 things on working from home” turned into a hypomanic-adjcent mega post . Sharing here because, hey, it’s the internet and I can. I’m too lazy to bookmark headings rn but you’ll be strong.

There is little debate that the Corona-virus has changed the face of the work place significantly, with many predicting that the new normal will be remote work. In some respects this move to remote works seems long overdue. For many years now the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” has called for a major shift in what we work on and how we do so with many tools to support working remotely.

Working from home is the new frontier that organizations will in all likeliness need to grapple with, in particular, how this new normal will be accommodated and ensure that workplace productivity and innovation continue to function uninterrupted. In making these plans and setting up policies to support continuity it is vital that organizations also consider the entire organization’s nuances and individual requirements of its workforce.

I’ve been advocating for some time for a work from home arrangement due to my own particular circumstances. I felt and continue to be of the opinion that working from home will not be the same mold for every person and make no assumption that what follows will necessarily be the experience of everyone. Note too that while freelancers may well work from home this, obviously, isn’t going to hold true in many instances for you being both

Humankind is diverse and it should be expected that the policies and plans for large scale work from home initiatives should be flexible to the unique circumstances of a diverse workforce.

What follows is my own thoughts on the subject, informed largely by my own experience working remotely including: possible pitfalls, best practice and pragmatic solutions to ensure workers remain working.

Let’s jump straight in then.

Communication Expectations

Effective communication is, in my opinion, absolutely vital to work from home success. While the freedoms of working from home lend themselves to new means of communication over different mediums it is imperative that all role players can consistently rely on one another to be available and contactable at all times that are expected of them. Defining those times is vital.

Contact with your principle

Ultimately, everyone reports to someone in the work place – for very good reason. Principles are the nexus of teams, help craft the direction of projects and are, very often, responsible for the nitty-gritty of managing teams: including leave management, supplier co-ordination and often set a team’s ethos and work attitude.

Keeping one’s principle in the loop builds trust in this relationship which will help ensure that micro-management is not a feature of working from home. Everybody hates that. Furthermore trust opens the door for the inevitable times when work is interrupted by some or other crisis in the home. Resolving these little crisis at home (a burst pipe, a baby with croup, a dog who ate your homework) are far more likely to be resolved quickly when managers trust that their employee is telling the truth and can afford the employee the necessary time to deal with crisis unburdened by the stressors of helicopter management.

Departmental communications

Here too one’s colleagues need to be able to trust the remote worker. Trust with one’s colleagues avoids unpleasant grudges that one is working harder than another, bubbling in resentment or perceived unfairness.

Once a team can trust one another they are far more likely to be comfortable in each other’s presence, even when that presence is over video conferencing tools. Being able to talk freely and openly allows for teams to collaborate better, individuals feel more comfortable making suggestions or proposing innovation.

Usually one would spend eight plus hours at an office and a large part, if not most, of this experience is social connection and stimulation. This builds comradery and promotes a sense of belonging – we are after all social creatures. So it’s important that remote workers and their teams make a conscious effort to retain this relationship with frequent interaction – not all of which need be work related.

Communication mediums

Work from home arrangements can be devastating to a team’s productivity if there are a plethora of tools are being used by different members of the team.

Having to fish around for where meetings are happening is frustrating and when channels of communication are constantly changing one might feel that they’re being cut out on purpose.

There are heaps of tools available to communicate online and coordinate teams: Teams, Slack, Jira and many others are all viable means to collaborate – but only if everyone is using the same tool. Teams should decide on a suite of tools that will be used and for what purpose. For example, one might send an e-mail only to place on record a policy or decision taken, use Teams to have ad-hoc chats and leverage SharePoint to collaborate on files and ensure document management is efficient and effective and lends itself to collaboration from the outset.

Team principals should be weary of tangential mediums. If the team decided to use Dropbox then it must be used by everyone on the team always and team members should be reprimanded for going off on their own to use some other tool that exists outside of the decided ecosystem.

These rogue tools are hugely problematic for organizations the least of which is IT security. Additionally needing to create profiles and learn new tools constantly is a production killer and an irritation for everyone. Usually rogues use tools outside of the ecosystem because they aren’t trained, have little experience of the tool, or find it difficult to use. All three of these are often resolved by effective training and proper planning (or changing tools to something easier to use).

Availability expectations

There are two notable variants in managing and setting availability expectations: the first is ensuring that remote workers aren’t burdened by abusers of the flexibility of working from home and the second is that teams rely on one another to work and therefore require some semblance of ‘working-hours’.

Remote work lends itself to flexible work hours where the employee is able to work on projects that they are able to at odd hours outside of working hours. This is flexibility is great for those with kids that need carting to and from school, lunch-times and such and also for those without kids to get odd jobs done around the house or complete some admin like standing in line at Home Affairs. This flexibility however introduces an opportunity for predatory time practice: where principles and colleagues expect ‘always available’ from the flexible worker. This is an untenable expectation that must be avoided at all costs.

On the flip side employers, their management and workforce need some structure in order for the organization function cohesively.

It is imperative that workers and employers find balance between flexibility and structure. This can only be achieved by a consultative process of bedding down hard time periods where an employee must be available, and this availability should ideally overlap with the availability of other members of a team.

An effective way to coordinate availability is calendar management and sharing. The employee should make available their calendar for other members of a team to view and invite others to import these calendars into their own viewport. This will give a good overview of where team availability overlaps and presents good opportunities for meetings etc. A team collaborative calendar is very useful to build set specific times for hard availability hours for both an individual for the team generally and for the whole organization to book time with a whole department. Other iterations of availability planning might also call for a shift based system – Shifts on Office365 is very useful in this regard.

Rules of Engagement

Approval to work remotely

It might sound obvious, but this one is often overlooked. In the age of the organized workforce documenting agreements between companies and employees is imperative. It is not acceptable that an employee starts working from home (even post-Covid) of their own volition.

Specifically one should have the approval of one’s team lead at the very least helping them effectively manage the team and is aware and sensitized to a revised working relationship.

Tacit approval is not enough for employees (or employers for that matter) legally either. Should one party feel aggrieved they should be able to refer back to the approval and ‘rules of engagement’ that accompany it to prove their grievance on a balance of probabilities in labor court.

Hours of work, flexibility and time spent

Dovetailing with the previous section, hours of work and flexibility should be well documented to ensure that all parties understand and respect one another’s expectation of work hours and to ensure protection of personal time.

However, there should be a nuanced approach to working hours. Working from home can also mean that an employee is expected to contribute more to their family at home during work hours – if only to ensure that the house is functional and a suitable workplace. To this end a typical nine to five may not be the best formula. Perhaps an employee can work in an extra hour outside of these typical working hours to ferry kids or even work for a period over weekends to make up the time. Whatever it is, communicate.

In work from home situations weekends become less rigid since family and personal time are able to cohabit and any day, feels like any other another day. Employees are less inclined to feel aggrieved working on a weekend or after-hours when their time has been properly documented and the expectations of time spent and actual work are properly recorded.

To this end it is important that employers and employers decide on a method of time tracking for both actual work done and expected work, or actual hours. There are many tools available for this, but again not all employees or teams need work the same way.

Some teams may prefer a project or task based approach where a work unit needs to be completed by a specific date or time. If this approach is communicated and documented upfront then all parties should be comfortable with the arrangement and the consequences for missing deadlines. It goes without saying that this requires a robust trust relationship between employer and employee since the employee is effectively working blind to the employer.

A tool that works well for project based work is Office365’s Planner: setting out all the milestones in a project and their subtasks to ensure that work completed is transparent and team leaders can follow-up where a project is behind schedule. Other more explicit time spent tools such as Jira allow for team leaders and individuals to estimate the required time to complete a task (and on completion, actual time worked) thereby avoiding unrealistic expectations and promoting effective planning.

In the event that a rigid number of working hours arrangement is required then this too should be well documented and the terms of this arrangement are understood by all parties. It might be the case that a nine to five schedule is required which will require time tracking to be absolutely transparent. Mechanisms for ensuring the required hours are worked tools such as Shifts or Clockify can be used, the latter is especially useful for tracking time against a specific project. An often overlooked tool that many tools have built in are access logs – which can be used to work out whether an employee was actually working (click tracking) rather than just clocking in and out but doing nothing during those hours.

Human resources and policy

It is important that all employees in an organization feel that their colleagues are also singing off the same hymn sheet and that there is a consistent policy message from the employer. To this end the employer should ensure that policies actually exist around all aspects of work from home situations.

Policies should build in some degree of flexibility for teams to work with some autonomy and make arrangements that better lend themselves to their specific circumstances. Nevertheless any non-negotiables from the employer should be documented and the parameters of that flexibility should be well understood by all parties.

It should be noted that policies should be more than instructions with punitive consequences. A policy should also serve as an enabling document that provides clarity on the scope of working from home and the extent to which the organization will support such an arrangement.

Employers should be weary of policy written in legalize and should strive to have these written with a plain language approach so all parties can reasonably be expected to understand and comply with a policy. It is also important that employers avoid superfluous policies – policies should be specific and each should have a single purpose to avoid a situation where employees experience policy-fatigue and non-compliance because a plethora of policies exist.

Specific and documented roles and responsibilities

In the normal course of one’s working life at a company roles and responsibilities change over time. However these changes happen over an extended period of time and are slowly adopted as the norm.

Work from home arrangements are however less able to organically shape one’s roles and responsibilities. Here again is where communication is absolutely vital – both employer and employee should from the outset define specific roles and responsibly that are considered non-negotiable.

Having a rigid roles and responsibilities agreement further entrenches the spirit of effort coordination in teams so everyone is on the same page about which tasks should be done by whom. This is juxtaposed with the process that occurs in the traditional workplace where there is a constant interchange of ideas and a fluidity of roles.

Collaboration should not be confused with roles and responsibilities. Collaboration is implied in any team but how projects and their subtasks tasks are completed by one individual is a role. If everyone in the team is sensitized to one another’s responsibilities the risk of task shedding to less assertive members of a team are less and a framework for better collaboration and planning is possible.

As far as is possible an employee’s roles and responsibilities should be measurable against some or other metric.

Mental Health

Working from home is a huge shift from the societal normal and it is undisputed that change is difficult for most. This new way of working may introduce new anxieties for the newly inducted work from home employee. Even if the employee successfully navigates this initial anxiety the toll of working in isolation for those living at home or working around a demanding family introduces stress and disconnectedness: both productivity killers. Mental health is everyone’s business and both employee and employer have a role to play.

The employer should apply their mind to creative ways of ensuring employees feel that they are a valued member of the company both as a contributor to the companies output and the ethos of the company as a whole. In the same way that a company doesn’t expect someone with COVID-19 to come into the office the same should apply for mental illness and mental health.

That said, however, an employer cannot reasonably be expected to make accommodations for mental illness unless they are made aware of its existence since the illness does not necessarily present physically. To this end the employer should make available channels of communication for employees to safely disclose their illness to a select group of people that would be in a position to make said accommodations.

Routine

The power of routine cannot be overstated. Routine is built into our very existence – lack of routine can have physical and mental consequences. Employers should support their employee’s natural circadian rhythm by encouraging a routine as far as possible.

Daily check-ins at a predetermined time support building routine as habit. If conducted first thing in the morning, a little after coffee has been had, one should check in with their colleagues. This could be the catalyst for someone suffering depression to actually get out of bed and face the day.

It would also be prudent for employers to host structured virtual ‘therapy’ sessions. These sessions should be conducted by a registered therapist well versed in occupational psychology or an actual phycologist. This individual need not be employed full time, rather contracted to hold regular sessions for anyone to join or in response to a ‘cry for help’, so to speak, from an employee.

Routine online meetings also help managers and principles get a sense of where the team is at in terms of motivation and if found wanting can then take measures to improve the situation. Not every morning meeting need be an interrogation – a quick 15 minute ‘hello’ with the team builds an ethos of effective communication in a team despite physical distance.

These meetings could include a brief round the room for everyone to share with a team what they are is working on that day, and if an opportunity arises to collaborate, then it can be identified and perused. Again, these shouldn’t be interrogations – rather friendly get to know each other type meetings that builds trust and transparency with a team.

Ongoing social calls

A physical workplace is usually a very social place with frequent, natural interaction. Working from home can be isolating and can even switch even the most extroverted person to a somber, recluse.

Organization’s should actively pursue means to connect the whole organization with one another. There are many benefits to having whole of company interactions, especially online: virtually introverted individuals might feel more at ease sharing, while different divisions and departments are sensitized to the work being done by other departments and, vitally, they bring a sense of belonging, the feeling of being part of a team, one that appreciates them.

Again creativity is the name of the game. And mix things around so activities don’t become stale.

In tech, socialization might happen over online gaming – promote that all employees that play the same game sign up for the same teams when gaming online, possibly even have a leaderboard for gamers.

For the less gaming inclined hosting trivia sessions is a great way to get people talking with each other: this can effectively be done on BigBlueButton or other tools that have breakout room functionality.  Post a question to the group, then let them discuss among themselves, before rejoining the main chat with their answers.

Then there’s the chat roulette option, a particular favorite of mine. The idea is that every few days people are randomly selected to have a call with one another where they can just talk about where ever the conversation goes. More introverted people might find this difficult, so consider having smaller group chats of randomly selected people first and slowly build confidence in the shy to have one on one conversations (and be OK with those that are just not into it).

Plan for balance

As mentioned before employers and employees should set boundaries about when a person is available and when not. When working from home it is very easy to slip into ‘always-on’ mode where the employee is unable to unplug from their work and get on with self-care. Everyone needs selfcare.

Employers should respect the boundaries of a person’s time and home responsibilities. Productivity is a direct function of an employees ability to think coherently and produce quality work. By encroaching on this time as employer or failing to respect working hours or a set routine could result in burn out – it’s far less expensive to maintain a healthy work live balance than to pick up the pieces of a burnt out employee.

Focus, recharge

Inevitably in the workplace we all wonder the passages, get a cup of coffee, have a chat in the kitchen etc. These are all opportunities to recharge during the day and they are usually social opportunities too.

There are many techniques one can use to build in rest time during the work day. One is the Pomodoro technique: loosely this is focused work for 20-25 minutes followed by a five minute break and a 15 minute break after every 4 cycles of focus.

These resting times are also great opportunities to get some sunlight, possibly the biggest contributor to a healthy mind.

Open line

In larger workplaces something that can be hugely beneficial is to have a place to vent, or ask for help, or listen to other people’s problems to diminish one’s own problems (not joking).

There are a number of methods to get people to share their frustrations and crowdsource advice. Perhaps have an anonymous Microsoft form to submit frustrations and post these on a forum accessible to the whole company soliciting advice. Be sure that someone is monitoring the forum though. It’s important for employees to feel less alone as much as possible, so by sharing frustrations etc. with a large audience someone else might identify with a posted problem and thus feel just a little bit less alone. The responses to submissions need not be written, they could serve as the basis of discussion topics for group therapy and coping sessions hosted online.

Tools of the Trade

Obviously, employees can’t work via telepathy… yet. They’ll need the right tools to perform their jobs properly. I need to stress that this is not an opportunity for employers to piggy back on a crisis to cut costs for the sake of cutting costs – in fact if employers skimp on the little things like enabling equipment they stand to lose far more than any bottom line saving over a discouraged, disenfranchised workforce.

If an organization is going to allow work from home then they should fully commit to doing everything reasonably possibly to ensure employees feel that commitment and will in their turn produce quality work.

Disenfranchised employees

Tools of the trade can easily become a defining factor on the success of a work from home plan. It should be acknowledged that often the people that ratify work from home plans are in a position to easily transition to this new way of doing work. It is highly likely that many in a company’s workforce are not as privileged to have the capital to equip suitable spaces for remote work.

A disconnect between management and on the ground employees regarding the ability to fund equipment can quickly build resentment in a workforce. Non-executives and non-managers are less able to make the switch with ease and splash out for tools that would ordinarily be available in to office.

Organizations should do everything they possibly can to level the playing field for all employees such that no one is disenfranchised by a lack of resources. Office equipment in a physical building is a level playing field, pretty much everyone has a standard set of equipment and it is difficult to discern those who are less privileged from those that are.

A standard toolkit

So, it is vital that all work from home employees be entitled to a standard and consistently applied set of resources to complement their work from home efforts. Some of these tools are:

1. A laptop that works properly and not one that’s been through the ringer – everyone gets the same spec laptop.
2. Access to the same software that would be available at the office should be part of the deal, employees should never have to pay for enabling software themselves. Remember, not every employee can afford a buy now claim back scenario and actually live hand-to-mouth.
3. A webcam (if one’s not included with the laptop) and a decent headset with adjustable microphone. This is vital if online meetings are going to be a feature of working from home, usually they are. If the intention is to work from home indefinitely invest in this headset to last long term. A quality headset should help the employee to have online meetings with ease and comfortably.
4. File transfer tools, such as Dropbox, box or SharePoint. This might sound obvious, but don’t expect employees to splash for these tools because it can be used in their personal capacity – maybe the employee already pays for one tool and having another is an additional unnecessary expense.
5. Plenty of screen retail. Screens should be supplied on the same basis as the laptops – everyone gets the same one, preferably wide screen and LED which is suitable for most lighting conditions – more expensive, yes, but less expensive than an employee waiting for the sun to set before they can see anything on their screen.
6. A contentious one: mobile and internet connectivity. Again employers should not jump to the conclusion that any of these are ubiquitous in the average home. To this end as a show of the company’s commitment to working from home it would be prudent to subsidize some of the cost of internet connectivity up to a certain amount that is suitable to working from home. If an employee does not have the infrastructure for this connectivity, the installation costs should be borne by the company entirety.

Note that those that have the means to procure these items themselves or already have their and are willing to do so should be allowed to. These people should also be willing to subject these devices to group policy.

Financing options

How a company arranges how to finance these items is varied. As a guiding principle any decision on financing these tools should be rooted in ensuring equality and discourage the disenfranchisement of anyone. BYOD should not be assumed to be a viable option for everyone in a company.

An empowering way to finance these items is to offer employees options in the procurement of these items: the option to use the tools on loan indefinitely or an option to rent to purchase model (which would also have tax incentives for both employee and company).

Insurance

Insurance is worth a mention too, companies should investigate all avenues to insure all property for off premises use where that property is loaned or on a rent-to-buy scheme. Once an employee has paid off said device then they should, in most circumstances, be insuring their own equipment.

IT Security

All organizations should be paranoid about the security of their internal systems, more so when devices are being used offsite.

The list of options for IT security is endless and this can be a very expensive exercise. With security solutions, as with most IT solutions one can opt for the Rolls Royce version or the Volkswagen model, what is important though is that all vulnerabilities are covered as far as is reasonable.

Not all solutions are offered at a reasonable price, and even more solutions are designed to entangle themselves in the organization such that at some point in time the provider can essentially price gauge the organization, effectively holding them hostage.

A secure VPN

A VPN that is easy for employees to connect to quickly is vital to eliminating man in the middle attacks. This is especially important where employees are connected to public WiFi: password protected or not.

Every byte of data sent and received over the public internet can be intercepted and this could have catastrophic consequences for an organization, least of which are IP ransom attacks.

Don’t be stupid. VPN.

Insist on in house managed software

No information should be processed or otherwise worked on unless this is done using the organization wide available software. Employees should get into the habit of working on a virtual machine, or if that is not available, at the very least to be willing to have their devices managed by group policy.

It is naïve to expect employees to keep their own software up to date, but as far as is possible software deployment and group policy should be implemented to ensure patching of critical security threats.

Phishers are going to fish

Everyone has tried asking nicely to look for padlocks and other variety of checks for authentic requests. It’s not happening, people are going to fall for these things so plan for at eventuality.

Ensure that multi-factor authentication is mandatory for connected devices and where possible apply same to the VPN solution. If devices are managed by group policy (recommended) then insist on app based authenticators to avoid sim-swap fraud.

Group policy and its adoption are, luckily, outside of the scope of this document. There are very polarizing opinions on this policy. One quick word of advice: ask before assuming employees will use their personal devices for work purposes – even to authenticate.

Up to date IT security policy

It’s likely that an organizations IT security policy is out of date in the time it takes for the policy to be distributed by e-mail to all employees. Be aware that IT systems are constantly evolving and require frequent vigilance and an IT team with their finger on the pulse of trends and best practice.

Training and Compliance

Working from home presents a fantastic opportunity for everyone to better their trade, be informed on the best use of provided software and, the one everyone moans about, staying compliant.

The scope of what employees should be trained on should be informed by the organization’s methodology of working from home and how this intended to work. Additionally employees should seize this opportunity to brush up on soft skills too.

Crash course to working from home

Employers should be looking at providers of online learning for content that speaks to the culture of the company and how it intends implementing working remotely. The information should be informed by experts and should leverage the insights of others in the company that have been working from home for some time.

The experiences of old-hat work from home employees is invaluable to setting the right authentic tone for training, and ensures the training comes from a credible source that the organization trusts.

Importantly, it should never be the case that one department or person create course material for a diverse organization. This training should be a collaborative effort bringing together a commitment to making remote work, work by all departments. Executives could perhaps have short videos expressly supporting the work from home endeavor, a collection snippets of insight by veteran work from homers, and professional content designed by subject experts; which may well mean spending some money to purchase off the shelf material.

Software training

Organizations should never assume the entire workforce is familiar with the software being promoted for use in the new era of work from home. As mentioned earlier the organization or individual teams should outline which tools they intend on using to facilitate communicate and collaborate, and this determination should be accompanied by training on the use of said software.

However software training should go beyond entry level introductory stuff. This is a good start, but again the use of most software is dependent on how it is intended to be used and each team likely will have a nuanced use of software.

Managers and organization decision makers should lead in this regard and make concerted efforts to standardize use of software and use it themselves so that all employees use it consistently.

Soft-skills

An unfortunate name for something that could improve an organization’s productivity substantially. Soft skills include the run of the mill ones like effective e-mail communication and time management, but should be far more expansive.

The remote worker is now chartering entirely new waters and they are primed to learn about anything that will make transitioning to this new style of work easier. Training is an effective means of managing change in organizations and it is imperative that this aspect of training in ‘soft skills’ not be overlooked.

Course titles should include: managing time, ergonomic considerations in setting up your workspace, effective virtual meeting preparation and participation.

Information should be packaged into bite sized chunks so employees can revisit these training interventions. Small packaged information is also easier to digest and adult learners are more effectively taught if a message is clear and concise.

Compliance

Working from home introduces a plethora of new compliance considerations. The usual suspects remain important, some have an elevated importance when working remotely.

Titles that should be included in the suite of courses available to a work force include: IT Security, privacy considerations including POPIA and GDPR, vigilance of corrupt practices with a distributed workforce, legislatively compulsory courses including health and safety regulations, employment regulations including workmen’s compensation for remote workers, fair working conditions and expectations from employers.

Organizational Connectedness and Coordination

There has been little coordination or transition phase to working remotely since COVID-19 happened, and for many, working from home is both challenging and an opportunity to redefine how they do work. This redefinition requires a whole of organization approach, every stakeholder needs to contribute to the conversation about what the new workplace will look like and how it operates.

The attitude of an employee in embracing work from home and remaining productive will mirror the organizations enthusiasm and commitment to making it work.

Sense of Belonging

In some respects the physical work place is a shield from the distractions of a society in disarray, it unites a group of people around a common goal, and this sense of belonging will become important, if not the most important, factor in the success of a new work from home strategy.

It’s therefore imperative that organizations foster a culture of community, in the face of a disconnected workforce. Where people feel they belong, and are valued allows for better communication and drives innovation through a diversity of experience because all members of a group feel comfortable sharing.

Little gestures go a long way to build this sense of belonging. Executives and managers should take the time to attend virtual social activities, and join those meetings where open discussion happens. Doing so says to an employee that the leaders of this organization care, not only about output, but also about how employees are feeling about this new arrangement and the challenges they face. Often if employers wait for an employee to come to them with problems, it might be too late to fix – an expensive mistake.

Executives should further live and be an example of the commitment to make remote work, work. Employees will not embrace and give their best effort to support the new environment if they perceive their endeavors to either be short lived or fruitless entirety if they do not see executive support of this transition.

Collaboration Tools

Productivity, innovation and work ethic are all functions of how collaborative a team is. It is vital that teams are given the tools to collaborate effectively in a manner where all voices carry the same weight. Remote work promotes equality of opinion, but this is lost if teams cannot communicate with one another.

The collaboration tool should not frustrate and complicate the process. These tools need to be intuitive and employees should feel that they are sufficiently proficient at using said tool such that they aren’t disadvantaged when contributing to team efforts.

The collaborative experience needs to provide enough space for individuals to own an idea, have it validated by a team and produce results. Taking ownership of an idea, it may not even be one’s own idea, brings a spirit of determination to complete a task despite the obstacles that remote work presents. The feeling of accomplishment when the completed task becomes a component of a team’s effort is a great incentive to collaborate again. Employees will innovate more when they are mentally incentivized to challenge themselves when the reward is respect from their team.

There are various tools that can be used for collaboration, each have their own perks and pitfalls. Ultimately though the team needs to decide on the tools that they want to use and then stick to using only those tools.

Engagement needs to occur as naturally as possible. Here is where continuous engagement can play a huge role: ensure that engagement platforms are utilized extensively and encourage free flowing chats and stimulate conversation. Once an employee is comfortable with the space and people they’re collaborating with they will be more willing to consciously make an effort to collaborate – much of a collaborative team effort is better suited to organic interactions that follow familiarity.

An e-mail is not a conversation. Ever.

Information Sharing

Productivity and innovation in remote workforces rely heavily on effective and efficient information sharing. Apart from the obvious avoidance of duplication of effort, the company should ensure that information and knowledge sharing is part of the company culture.

This point cannot be overlooked: institutional knowledge is the single most valuable asset of any company. In work from home situations where for the most part employees sit in isolation, the transfer of institutional knowledge can be slow or might not occur at all. In the typical work environment people in a team pick up on knowledge bites all through the day that will someday contribute to an efficient organization and ensures business continuity with built in redundancy.

In traditional work environments finding information is usually quick and easy – peer over your cubicle or swivel your chair and a colleague has that information at their fingertips. Clearly this is efficiency at its best, so this level of efficiency needs to be emulated in a distributed workforce – not an easy task.

Again this is a company culture thing: employees need to feel that the information they have produced is valuable enough to be shared with the entire organization. Fostering this culture is difficult, but an effective way to give value to someone’s contributions is to ask for it, simple.

OK, perhaps being so forthright might not be the best strategy. There are other ways to encourage and value contributions to the body of institutional knowledge. One such way is to provide specific online spaces for individual employees to put their work, where it can be noticed and feedback gived by their peers.

Information sharing has huge benefits for any company especially for employee development. In tandem with a culture of sharing is a culture of responsiveness and peer feedback, and here executives can play a vital role leading by example: putting their own work in a public place and asking for feedback from the entire company on a public forum.

Public information sharing is often met with trepidation, but it shouldn’t be. Publicly sharing one’s knowledge builds trust between employees who are initially exposed and vulnerable – only to be validated by constructive criticism. It is highly unlikely that feedback to someone else’s work will be critiqued harshly or in an unbecoming way if that feedback itself is going to be judged by everyone reading the feedback, too. To encourage employees to actively seek critique and in their turn provide feedback for others, an incentive program would be beneficial particularly if the feedback can be rated for its usefulness to the review sought by the person initially sharing the information.

Internal Communications

With a dispersed workforce internal communication needs to be top-notch. The occasional e-mail blast is not going to cut it. Employees have been discarding communications decorated in marketing collateral for a while – these are impersonal and are rarely read in their entirety.

Adoption of change is strengthened by robust and genuine engagement efforts. Employees need to feel heard and see that the organization respects their concerns and adopts good suggestions when they arise. Deep engagement needs to become an organization wide norm, no longer can employees have chats in the corridors to keep up to speed on developments in the company and, left to their own devices employees will always, without exception, fear the worst when consistent and communication is not forthcoming, sowing the seeds of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

Always remember: in volume, over time. This is the one way to ensure that a positive ethos becomes part of company culture.

Commute paradox

This can be both a blessing and a curse for the remote worker. The initial sentiment is “great! No traffic, happier me”, but this may not necessarily be the case.

The starting gun

What we don’t always acknowledge is that we all need some time with ourselves, and for many people commuting allows a person that 30 minutes to sit with only their own thoughts and work through their emotions before stepping into the office.

Time spent alone in one’s own head is valuable time. Instead of the 30 minute commute take the time that would have been spent commuting to go for a walk – a walk, not a run – so that you can spend some time with yourself thinking only about your own inner thoughts. Some call this mindfulness, and doing this consciously is very difficult.

Allow the mind to drift and when sitting in front of a desk again after your run  consciously make the switch to work mode, as you would when arriving at work.

Drive

Not metal drive, but one’s an actual car. Cars need to be driven and they’re designed assuming that you’ll actually drive it. Working from home means that you’ll likely not be traveling any huge distance very often, as you might do driving to and from work every day.

Quick dashes to the shop down the street wreck hell on diesel engines, but I’m sure petrol cars are just as susceptible to settled sediment clogging up filters and all manner other problems.

The long and short of this one is that you should stretch your car’s legs once in a while – it’s good for the both of you.

Virtualization

It has fast become the defacto means of communication for companies and their employees: the video call. The new hello is “can you hear me?”. While this is a great tool for closing the gap between people, it is also a source of great stress and frustration for many.

Video calls are exhausting

Something about video calls make them really hard work. There are probably a dozen reasons for this but a few that come to mind,

The lack of visual ques that would normally happen during in person meetings mean that participants of online meets are constantly sitting on the edge of their seat. Should they be called upon to participate, the must be ready at the unmute toggle and have something worthwhile to say despite the fact that you’ve been moonlighting as childminder during the whole call and aren’t paying as much attention as you should. This is stressful.

There’s also an element of the nakedness in an online meeting – when you’re talking the entire call is listening to you and you alone. The nuances of interjection and regular conversation is often lost in online meetings and this starkness can be intimidating and taxing on even the most confident person.

Tips to avoid stressful Zoom meetings? Keep them short so the torment is short lived. Focused meetings are productive meetings. Aim to tackle a single subject in a single meeting, being sure to send an agenda with your meeting request. A meeting without an agenda is a social event. It is really stressful for those that are invited to find themselves unprepared for the meeting, not from lack of work ethic but because they’ve been ambushed and alt-tabing for a meeting from another task at hand is a skill few people can master.

Be professional

Again, an often overlooked point.

Not only will putting pants on trigger your mind to focus on the task at hand but it will also ensure that whatever you contribute to a conversation is taken seriously.

No one can take you seriously if you’ve still got your curlers in. It’s seriously not all that difficult to look presentable: get out of bed and put on a shirt, any shirt that doesn’t have holes in will suffice. And pants. Put pants on.

Be prepared

This extends beyond having your ducks in a row when asked to present or contribute to a conversation. Ensure that you are familiar with the tool you’re using to have the call.

Participants on the call will easily become tired of the incessant scratching picked up by your computer’s built in microphone. Get in the habit of muting yourself when you’re done with the essence of your contribution, but don’t assume that after you’re done contributing you won’t be called on to answer follow up questions – so mute and make sure you retain attention to the conversation.

Highly recommended: a headset with an adjustable microphone. Not only will you hear your peers far better, your peers will be able to hear you far better too. When people can actually hear you, they are likely to understand and are in a better position to take your opinion seriously. Speak slowly, and confidently and audibly so your audience can hear you. Please buy a proper headset with microphone.

Webcams

Do not underestimate the power of facial communication. One’s particular nuanced conversational tone presented by how your face says things, not how you say them. Turn on your webcam. Your face tells a story all of its own: if you’re a sarcastic type, your face conveys this message better than a lone voice spoken from the blackness of a unoccupied square on the participant list.

Sharing your webcam also makes everyone a little more comfortable sharing theirs and when everyone shares their webcams the authenticity and flow of conversation is improved dramatically.

Again one’s face speaks a thousand words: when you’re done speaking your face tells everyone that you’re done and that they can start speaking. It is most frustrating trying to discern the natural breaks in conversation in the absence of facial ques. Conversations with faces over video call become more natural giving rise to everyone being more inclined to contribute without fear that they might interject another speaker mid-sentence and come across as rude.

While we’re on faces. You should angle your built in laptop camera at parallel to your torso so your face is shown flat on rather than from below where you expose your nostrils to the call. Rather sit further back from your screen, with your headset on, so we can see more of you than a less than flattering lugie.

If you’re sharing your webcam be cognizant of your surroundings. Avoid having other people milling around performing tasks in the background, it’s distracting for everyone.

Remember too that the camera is unforgiving in poor light situations, aim to have as little light behind you, perhaps angle your desk lamp to light your face for the call.

Conclusion

If there is one message that anyone should take home from this read it’s this: these are uncharted waters; the transition to a remote workforce is new to most and it’s OK to make mistakes along the way, but; learn from them, communicate often and with gusto – warts and all.