Tips on Working From Home

I’ve been working from home full-time for about 8 years, and part-time as a consultant before that, so I thought I’d offer a few tips for those of you who are new to it. I’ve seen other lists like this, but everyone has different things they emphasize, so I thought I’d offer a few of my own. This is by no means complete, much of it will be obvious to people used to working remotely, and not everything I say will apply to your situation. But maybe one or two things will help you out.

• Working from home is still your job. Take it seriously. Get up in time, get yourself clean and ready, get dressed for work, and get to your desk on time, even if no one can tell you’re there. This sounds obvious, but you really need to own it.
• Under normal conditions, I’d say don’t mix work with taking care of young kids. Unless you control your own workload — like a solo professional or a freelance worker — it’s going to be impossible to put in a full day of work and provide good care for your kids. Every full-time remote worker I know either has someone else in the household to take care of the kids or else takes them to daycare. Obviously, in these difficult times, that may not be an option, and everyone needs to understand that, but it will make for some very busy days for some people.
• Speaking of clothing, you don’t have to wear a full business outfit — unless you think it’s important for video meetings with customers/clients — but make yourself presentable. All of us who work from home joke about not wearing pants, but really, we all wear pants.
• If possible, have a work area distinctive from where you normally hang out at home. It helps keep you in the mental zone for getting work done. I have my work and home computers at separate desks in the same room, so to help keep me in the zone, one of my tricks is that I use bright daylight-balanced lighting during work hours and switch to warmer lighting in the off hours. You might want to find a similar trick to help you remember it’s “work time.”
• There are three vital communications technologies you need to operate as a fully remote team:
  • Chat. Slack or something like it. Obviously useful for sending quick messages to people, but even more useful for providing a place to share announcements and shout for help — “Does anybody remember how to…?” You’ll probably end up needing several chat channels:
    • A general business chat channel.
    • A channel for fun and silliness.
    • Channels for each team to discuss team business.
    • A channel for team leaders to coordinate.
    • Channels for business-specific topics that cross team boundaries.
    • Channels for handling major incidents, either shared between incidents or temporarily created for each incident.
  • Audio Meetings. Chat is unwieldy for free-ranging discussions. You need to talk, and you want to be able to launch an audio meeting, paste a link to the meeting in chat, and have everybody join the call quickly to keep from losing people to distractions. Most meeting software also allows you to see each other’s faces, but it’s not as important as you might think.
  • Screen sharing. When you’re in a meeting, you need to be able to show each other stuff. You do this by sharing your screen. You can use this for everything from formal presentations to showing someone how to solve a tricky formatting problem in Word.
  • (Other technologies are also useful — email, shared calendars, issue tracking software, shared repositories for things like internal company documentation or customer work folders — but if you need those, you probably already had them when you worked in an office.)
• Use a headset for computer audio. Your computer probably has a microphone and speakers, but (unless you have a podcast-quality setup) your voice will sound distant and tinny, the mike will pick up a lot of environmental noise, and your listeners might hear a stuttering echo of their own voices if the mike picks up the sound from the speakers. A headset makes the conversation much cleaner.
• Remote meetings are an especially important situation:
  • All-virtual meetings can be surprisingly productive compared to real-life meetings because everybody is at their desk with their full work computer setup, and can instantly share information on their screen with everyone. In addition, if you need an answer from someone not present, you can probably pull them into the meeting in a minute or two.
  • Virtual meetings also tend to start really fast. Like, if the meeting is scheduled for 3:00, nobody will be on the call at 2:59, because their calendars haven’t popped up the reminder window yet, but by 3:02 almost everyone will be there. And if you’re not on by 3:03, people in the meeting will start pinging you in chat to remind you.
  • If you’re going to be late to a meeting, drop a chat message in the appropriate channel so the host knows.
  • When you’re in a meeting, be in the meeting. Because you’re at your desk, it’s tempting to try to multitask, but if you’re involved in the meeting you should stay focused on the meeting.
  • However, when you inevitably do get distracted and miss something, just admit you got distracted and ask to have it repeated. Getting distracted occasionally is totally normal in virtual meetings, so don’t make a fuss when someone else does it.
  • If you’re the one running a virtual meeting, call out people’s names when you get to subjects you need them to pay attention to. Lots of people get pulled into meetings that might not be relevant, or where they might not have a lot to say, and it’s normal for them to try to do something productive while everyone else is talking. (This is one reason virtual meetings aren’t as time-wasting as real-life meetings.) Just say “Alright, this next thing is why we asked John and Mary to be in this meeting…”
  • Mute your microphone, and unmute it only when you’re talking. Background noises in your environment that you barely notice can be surprisingly distracting to other people in the meeting. This comes with two warnings:
    
    • If you notice that people keep interrupting you, or they’re not answering your questions, you’ve probably left yourself on mute.
    • Conversely, if you ask somebody a question, and they say nothing, ask them if they’re muted.
  • End meetings on time. If you didn’t finish the agenda, schedule a followup meeting. Virtual meetings are pretty light weight, and this is why you have all that fancy calendaring software. (Obviously, there are sometimes good reasons for extending meetings past the scheduled end — incident response, approaching deadlines, and so on, but try not to make a habit of it.)
• Because remote work communications are so abrupt, concise, and to-the-point, you need to make an effort to add back the human relationship and communicate company culture.
  • Concise chat messages often sound harsher than intended. Make an effort to keep chat messages light, but remember that sarcasm and irony are difficult to convey in a short message. Emoticons are there for a reason. You want a productive business conversation, not Twitter.
  • Managers need to make cultural communication more explicit, not just by talking about it, but by demonstrating it. For example, if your culture focuses on fixing problems rather than finding people to blame, when you ask someone in a chat message “What went wrong?”, you don’t want them sitting there trying to figure out if you’re angry. Make the cultural context explicit: “I’m not looking to find fault, I just want to know what we need to do to keep this from happening again.”
  • When someone helps you, thank them. When they do a good job, praise them. If someone apologizes for a minor inconvenience, say “no problem.” In a live workplace your attitude comes across in tone and facial expression, but in remote communications, it helps to make this explicit.
  • Conversely, if someone is not meeting expectations and needs correction, your displeasure may not be coming across in remote communications either. They may think they’re doing just fine. You might have to be more explicit about their need to change their behavior than you would normally feel comfortable with. This is probably best done in a phone call to keep it human.
  • On the other hand, don’t only call people to scold them. You don’t want them dreading it every time you text “Got a minute?”
  • Your regularly scheduled meetings should include a little time for company culture issues and should include some unstructured time for people to bring up issues that weren’t strictly on the agenda. 
  • Managers should have regular one-on-one calls with their subordinates. This is not for receiving status reports and issuing action items. This is for discussing personal welfare, annoyances, plans for vacation, cool news stories, crazy ideas, and other stuff that keeps the relationship on a human level. Again, this is something that needs to be more explicit in remote work.
• More on headsets: If you’re on calls a lot, consider investing in a call-center quality headset intended for long use. (“Executive” headsets sound like something special, but the call center stuff is actually more comfortable in the long run.) There’s a real difference between a $50 gaming headset and a $400 Plantronics Savi wireless headset when you have to wear it for 6 hours a day. (Gaming headsets work, and have great sound, but you don’t need the weight of those 50mm drivers on your head all day. There aren’t going to be lots of cool explosions. Hopefully.)
• Because you’re at home, you can work at all hours of the day. Wake up at 2am with a great idea? You can “go into the office” and work on it a bit. This is pretty cool, but don’t let it turn into you working all day long, because that’s a recipe for burnout and an unhappy family life. Try to work your regular business hours. And if you’re a manager, watch for your employees who are working too much, and make sure they understand you don’t want them burning out.