I don’t see teleworking succeeding in this era.
The reason is due to the monumental shift traditional office-work will need to endure for society to catch up and for traditional management to untie many decades of learned behaviors. It was 2007 when I started a company completely from a cafe and wrote a book from that same cafe and joined a co-working space to have meetings and went into an office once a week at most. I continued this behavior until joining my current employer in 2010 where I reported to a boss for 3 years who strictly forbid remote or teleworking. I grew accustomed to being in an office but I never forgot how possible distributed work was because I lived it and succeeded at it.
Let’s focus on the worker-bees, the doers, the 80% of the workforce that can remotely work in those industries where it’s possible (primarily office jobs). These individuals would like to work remotely but often for the wrong reasons. They want the freedom of being able to hit the bank before it closes, pick their kids up on time and not have to pay for daycare and save wear & tear on the cars and stay in their PJs. This approach to remote work will eventually grow stale and normal and the person must desire remote work for completely different reasons and treat remote work just as they would their office job. Here are some tips I have for my colleagues who are today for the first time, executing on their job from somewhere not their office..the individuals who never took their laptops home or put work email on their computer:
- Dress for the day. Get up at your usual time and follow your AM routine of waking up at your time and you’re free here to sleep an extra half hour since you’re not going to commute but I don’t think this should be embraced because you have now found 30 extra minutes this morning to spend time with your kids, go for a walk and tidy up around the house. Shower, shave, skip the perfume but other than that, dress for a casual Friday. Don’t stay in your PJs and roll over to your computer.
- Set office hours. You were in the office from 8:30-5PM last week. Do that today but with one caveat, take at least 1 full hour with the computer off and take lunch. One thing you’ll notice is that by 4PM, you’ll have gotten everything done that you normally do because the distractions are so few that it actually allows in productivity increases
- With that extra time, go get some exercise. Working from home should yield an adjustment in your diet to reduce caloric intake because the act of preparing for the day, commuting, walking between meetings and offices and out to lunch, these burn more calories so if you’re not going to take an afternoon jog, note you’ll burn less calories
- Setup a work space in your house that is for work if possible. I’ve never had that ability because I’ve always rented (and now own) 500-700 square foot homes. My current home is 700 square feet so I work at a desk 12 feet from everything else but I also started a company in a busy coffee shop. If you’re new to remote work, creating a space free of distractions is a great idea. If you can get a standing desk, that’s even better even though I don’t personally prescribe to that.
- Schedule more meetings…hear me out, you’re going to start becoming more disconnected so bring all of your normal watering-hole colleagues into a Slack / Teams / IRC chat and just keep things going throughout the day. Make a channel that is specifically for non-work and be social there. Don’t be afraid to break-out into 1:1s and with permission, give them a call and ask how things are going. Be social even when alone because….
- You will begin to starve for people time. Remote work can be lonely if you let it and amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, we are even mores starved for time with others so just know your colleagues are going through the same emotions and you should reach out to them and keep things social. This is why the work space is so important because you won’t have a worry about doing video calls with a dirty house behind you. In your work space, things are neat and orderly and if you followed my first advice, you’ll have your hair done and be wearing a collared shirt and so the video chat will not feel like you’re taking it from home lounging on the couch.
- Be productive and identify areas of unproductive situations and discuss these with your manager. What tool or methodology or task is strained or impossible from home? What can we do to mitigate that? Once you begin breaking down remote work barriers, we’ll have a clear path to making this whole distributed thing work.
- Finally, do not forget office hours. When you are done for the day or 5PM, log off. Keep up your work life barriers. Set Slack or other messaging apps to not push notifications to your phone after 6PM, ignore messages after hours and allow yourself time to unwind.
A crazy thing happens when you do what I did and fall out of your bed in a 150 square foot apartment in San Francisco and on to your tiny folding desk with a PowerBook and external mouse….you start to go a little bit crazy. The separation from work and fun and hobbies and business get blurred so despite COVID-19, if there’s a “work location” you can go to be it the mother in law suite or a nearby park just for 1 day a week, spice things up, change locations and try to not get stuck in the seriously sinkhole of a mentality where your days and hours blend together. By week 3 of remote work, you’ll feel a bit of depression if you don’t get out and exercise and remain social and your productivity will suffer as a result and this whole distributed work necessity will go back to being a blip that trust me, a lot of corporations are tracking to see if it even works. They’re watching and we need to work very hard to show that this can work for some roles and people.
For managers, you have to take up everything written above but also you need to trust your employees. Don’t react to lower productivity of someone who has never worked remotely before with a punishment or firing. Don’t think they just slacked off because they weren’t in an office. Be respectful of this major shift for them in how they get their job done and understand there will be inefficiencies.
You also need to be even more mindful of their mental state and how they’re doing. Do more regular check-ins but be clear that you’re not spying on them, just making sure they’re coping okay and adjusting to this new world. Some of my colleagues have gone to the same office every day for 25 years to build maps and they’re not being asked to take their 14” laptop home and they’re trying to work today without their external monitors and deal with VPNs and tools and communications that always came 2nd to in person discussions and meetings. Be aware of that and offer your support.
Finally for managers, don’t assume that remote work will be hugely successful or fail miserably. Look for people to make adjustments and then rise to the occasion to their previous productivity levels. I will say that some people will soar remotely and others will suffer so be there for your employees. I personally break-even when working remotely because I know when I’ve done my best work and I log off, sometimes even slightly earlier like 3PM instead of 4Pm because I know I’ve put in a good day of work. I log back in like I usually do from 8-9PM to address anything else before I get ready for reading & contemplation. Some people will adapt their own schedule but as a manager, you can simply ask that they keep you informed of their hours and let them figure it out for themselves. Given the true higher ups are looking for distributed work to fail, don’t force your methodologies and allow employees to determine their best way of getting things done and see how it goes then discuss and improve.
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I started this post out so negatively because the thing is, there are companies that are not setup for remote work. The tech and business just aren’t designed for it and they haven’t implemented tools like Slack. Then there are employees who lack the tech acumen to evolve how they do things to make remote work possible and I think these two factors will ultimately make the month of March 2020 a set back for distributed work. I hope I’m wrong but I spent 3 years honing remote work from 2007 – 2010 and it wasn’t without failure and now we’re asking an entire industry not just tech but finance, insurance, HR, legal and on and on to all go remote with a 2 week notice? Good luck with that.
I would have preferred that over the next 15 years, we keep moving more and more people remote because this month will be just a test, a failure and a set back for the concept where the last 10 years have been incremental improvements and growth to what I still believe is the future of technology work. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to live in New Hampshire where my house cost $93,000 and work in a San Francisco based workforce where they’re spending 1.5 million on a home. I shouldn’t have to be in the most expensive real estate market in the world to perform a duty and that goes for most of us.
I wish us all luck in this test and I hope we don’t get set back too far in the distributed work revolution.