Best practices when working from home

Because I am currently working on a change assignment for a company that will face 4 weeks of home office, it made me reflect on how their employees might be coping with the change. My daily reality and routine of remote work is new territory for most employees. Sure, some have their regular home office days but most employees are completely unequipped when it comes to working from home (involuntarily!) for weeks.

The basic principles of remote work and best practices have been covered in 5 tips on how to work from home. I like Cary Bailey-Findley‘s blogs – they are personal, informative and well-researched.

In essence the article covers:

1) make it feel like work, 2) video chat everything, 3) use cloud collaboration tools, 4) set clear rules of how to work together and 5) go the extra effort with colleagues.

Here are my 4 add-on’s:

6 Deliberately schedule breaks

Remote work is tiring. You don’t have the natural breaks from colleagues stopping by for questions, coffee breaks with the team or walking around to get to meetings. In order to stay engaged you need to take breaks. Put a timer for 20min, grab a beverage, open the window and stay away from phone and computer. Even better: go for a walk.

7 Challenge employee mindset

This is by far the hardest one. Say you normally work until 5, but already feel burned out at 3. It will likely be challenging for you to put aside work earlier but that’s exactly what you should do. If you are working from home you exhaust your personal resources differently than at the office because of lack of diversity in tasks (e.g. team meetings or other exchanges that boost interaction). Home office is an invitation to work at best capacity, not at office hours. Vice versa that also means that if you hit a productivity reserve, ride the wave all the way and work longer. Side note: for companies it’s an invitation to finally start measuring output instead of input (hours).

8 Find an accountability partner

In the absence of visibility, direct feedback and recognition it can feel like your work doesn’t matter. Sharing with someone what you intend to achieve / work on helps to stay motivated. It can be as simple as sending a daily text in the morning and at the end of business. I’d recommend to hope on a call on an interval you and your work buddy agree on. I have a an agreed set up with my business buddy Linnéa Säll Sidén in Sweden. We call each other daily and share for 2 minutes each. The whole thing doesn’t take more than 10 minutes in total and has a real benefit.

9 Task-based working

This may be more personal to me as I like and need change, but play with it and see if it also gives your work a boost. Depending on the task I change location. I have morning practices with writing and planning that I usually do first thing in the morning in my practice room with a coffee. Thereafter I change to the desk for more dedicated client work with power point and excel. For dedicated reading I switch places again. In the future companies will more and more also introduce these kind of work concepts at the office. Dedicated spaces for collaboration/ideation and quiet zones next to the normal desk set-ups.

Wishing everyone a quiet mind in these turbulent times!