Working from home - five things
I have been a remote and flexible worker for as long as I have run my businesses. My office ‘base’ is at home. Until self isolation arrived, unless delivering a face to face activity, I continue to use Skype for coaching, cafes and wifi hotspots for meetings or a ‘get out the office’ slot, and have generally got used to having good habits when working from home.
There are a lot of people who will be getting used to home working in the coming weeks, including whole teams. If you are used to seeing team members every day, able to go and ask your manager for something, you are now going to need to re-configure your head space about these day to day routines and ways of working. You will need some new ones.
Here are five things that work for me and are important in making home working work:
Work space boundaries. Set and stick to a space that is deovted to being your work space. I have a ‘box room’ in my home which is a well set up and connected office. It is my designated work space. I can shut the door on it. This creates a boundary for me and everyone else. Everyone in your household needs to know and respect the work space/boundary.
Get up, get dressed and go to work. The jokes about sitting in your pyjamas are doing the rounds. For me it is important to separate the fact I am ‘going to work’, I am at work even though at home, and so getting up and being dressed is important. It is also the psychological separation of work and ‘other time’. And no sitting top half dressed in front of a webcam!
Contact with others. This is important, especially if you’re used to being in a team environment, lean over a desk and ask for an opinion, have an in the moment coffee catch up. Now we need to self-isolate, this is not going to happen anyway so get used to harnessing the power of technology and using your phone especially! Speak to people! I do a lot of this online or via the plethora of tech available as the norm. You can still hold meetings and have chats. I used to have to go to a lot of pointless, non value meetings when I worked for someone else. Now my meetings are smart and held when of value, with actions and outcomes, and they are definitely shorter - and I actually like them! Using tech such as Google Hangout, Skype or Zoom is smart for meetings when people are dispersed, and maybe this isolation will push us into all using it far more. Your contact with others will be a good thing, so stay in touch.
Technology is your friend. Embrace it. I’ve mentioned a few already, but add Facetime, WhatsApp groups and Go to Meeting. See this as a chance to train yourself up and add to your development/CPD plan. They all have online tutorials and videos.
Work on your resilience. Resilience is the ability to learn from, change and even be transformed by adversity. Practice resilience skills or learn some to help you stick at things in the weeks and months ahead. It is something that is from within and we are all capable of being resilient. We all need to ‘top up’ on our confidence now and then too; and part of being resilient is about asking for support. Ask colleagues, your manager, friends for support. Giving support is a boost too, even if it is just talking something through with someone, de-briefing at day’s end.
Working from home is a chance to press pause from the treadmill and re-shape life work balance individually and as a working nation. Things take a little while to settle down but some new habits will emerge for all of us. I think (fingers crossed) there are some positive changes and opportunities to come from home working.
I am available through the contact page on my website, or call/Skype/Facetime me if you would like some support in managing the new world of working from home.
In the meantime, stay well.