Working remotely
Dream come true or living nightmare? Whether you be a business owner, an employee, or even someone looking for a job, 2020 has drastically changed the way most people work — and probably for a pretty long time if we’re being honest with ourselves. Many people pre-pandemic wished they could do all of their work from the comfort of their own home, but living the reality of this dream has brought some interesting challenges we’d never previously thought about to light.
How are you to perform your best work with no one physically there to keep you on track? If you are the only person looking over your shoulder, it is a lot easier to cut yourself some slack. Consequently, that also shows up in the quality of your work, and affects the outcome of not just you, but additionally your colleagues. In this day and age, especially with social media as a factor, it has become very easy to get distracted from your initial tasks. So how do we combat this? How do we stay go-getters in a time where we are the main person holding ourselves accountable?
The best way to stay involved in taking action is by keeping in communication with your peers on a week-daily basis. Communicating your ideas, goals, accomplishments, and deadlines to others will help hold a sense of accountability between you and whomever you share those with. This is a two way street, so have your co-workers check in with you too for the best overall results. An entire company holding each other accountable will not fall behind on tasks.
Remote workers need to perfect the art of communication. Communication comes in all shapes and sizes, and all should be utilized. Typing out all of these things mentioned above is great, but having weekly phone conversations, or zoom meetings is even better (and more time efficient). Schedule these in, and don’t miss them. Holding yourself to these helps build the dependability muscle, and that is a muscle that should always be exercised.
If you can, have the entire team meet once a week to refresh face-familiarity. One of the problems with working from home is lack of connection to the outside world — including your co-workers. Catch up on work, and also things happening outside of work as often as possible. Team mentality is strongest when the bonds between colleagues are kept up with.
At GGI, we use a tool called “Agile Ax” to collaborate with each other, monitor tasks, track metrics and facilitate monthly meetings from a single dashboard. It makes delegating work and checking things off the board easy to do — even more so now that everything is remote!
Finally, on the other side of the spectrum, make sure you dedicate your off time to yourself, and stick with it. Getting into the swing of working again can be hard to effectively time-manage, especially when we have the freedom of texting our employees, bosses, and/or co-workers new updates or projects the second we receive them. In my last article, I touch on burnout and how important it is to steer clear of it. Continue practicing your “off button”, but make sure to turn it back on when it’s time to come back. Combining all of these suggestions into one big work-flow will ensure a healthy, happy, and balanced way to become the best remote worker you (and your team) can be. Power forward, and lead the way into the new format of our at-home workforce!
