Remote Working Tips — How to Embrace Remote Work & The Virtual Workplace With Your Team or Company

Keep your daily routines
Standups, one to ones, etc, keep them going, keep familiarity, humans crave routines. Sit downs work well at the end of the day if you need a new approach.

Check-in with people
It’s a new way of working, check in with people, ensure they are ok and if they need anything. Although most will be working from home, it will feel different and odd not to interact with teams in person. Many people end up missing the water cooler moment, find out a way to encourage this to happen.

Always set agendas for meetings
Make it clear why the meeting and what you would like to discuss, ‘the why’ is vitally important when remote working

Get into the habit of sharing updates
People hate meetings, remote meetings can be chaotic without guidance and often many voices, cut through this by creating a habit of updating a centralised document, with what you and your team are working on and what status they are. The trick is to make as simple as possible, something like a Google doc or a Sharepoint (onedrive file). I tend to recommend a word based doc not a spreadsheet but whatever works for your team, department or fellow leadership team.
This approach allows the ability to focus on decision making not updates. Here is how to use the DAN framework to run effective meetings.

Problem Solving: One problem, two solutions mode
If a problem arises arrange a time for the team to dial in have solutions to the problem at hand, come ready with your preferred solution. It’s how you save time and energy of the group.

Video meetings over just calls
There is a science to seeing emotions and expressive reactions, use zoom, google hangouts, facetime, WhatsApp, even Webex.

Set expectations with comms & feedback loops
Typically new remote workers expect instant communication and feedback to a problem, a brief, an email, a slack or teams message, or my worst trait a “quick question. Like in the office use statuses and block out time to show when you are busy. Or bring back the BRB 😉

Reduce down meeting times
I recommend 25 minutes as the default time slot — this enables toilet breaks and allows people a chance to catch up and compress.

Working times
Working remotely often doesn’t match up to office hours, ensure there is clarity on work times or when you are working and when you will be finishing.

Work Mode
If people struggle to remotely, suggest they put on their work clothes or their usual outfits, this shifts mindsets and enables people to feel in work mode.

Get out and walk
Being stuck inside or at home can really restrict some people, get out and go for a walk, a run or if you cycle a ride, it is proven to improve your thinking and creativity and reduces down the stress of being at your screen all day.

Here are a handful of free to freemium tools you can use to embrace remote work:

• Loom for video calls and screen sharing, chrome extension you can use
• Google docs / drive for centralised docs, centralise with agendas, updates, etc
• Dropbox paper for notes collaboration or open documents for progress
• Notion.so for a wiki, collaborative efforts with embeds from across the web.