How To Work From Home During Coronavirus

Thanks to the Coronavirus outbreak, lots of people are now going to be working from home for the first time. This can be quite daunting if you’ve never done it before and aren’t quite sure how to change the way you work.

For the majority of my working life, which is over 30 years now, I’ve worked from home or remotely. So I thought it was worth sharing my hints and tips of how to make it work for you, and your employer.

Hopefully, your employer will help guide you through this. If they haven’t got anything in place yet, feel free to share my homeworking guide for employers with them.

Have A Plan

It’s really important to have a plan of how this will work for both you and your employer. They should be clear about their expectations, how you’ll communicate with your colleagues, how your performance will be monitored, and how to keep people updated with your progress. If they haven’t said how this will work yet, ask them.

Do please remember that your employer may also be managing people working from home for the first time. This may lead to either over or under communication or a feeling of them checking up on you. Don’t think that they don’t trust you, they’re probably just figuring out the status of everything. It can be a scary time for everyone and it’s in everyone’s best interests for this to work well.

Also, remember that if you prove you can successfully carry out your role from home, there is far more chance of you being able to do this in future if that option appeals.

Working hours

Part of what you should agree is your working hours and any revisions that need to be made to them. Please take into account anything you may need to do during these hours that you wouldn’t usually have to do such as school runs etc.

Be completely up front with any commitments you have rather than trying to hide it. If something unexpected comes up and you do have to pop out for half an hour (it shouldn’t but sometimes can’t be avoided due to ill children or similar) let people know. Otherwise, they may think you are either ignoring them or aren’t working when you’re supposed to be. People can sometimes assume the worst if you go off the radar.

If you do need to take some time off, please make sure you make this time up to be fair. Flexibility and trust is a two way street.

Equipment

Do you have everything you need to carry out your role? There are obvious thing like a laptop, but has that got all the software, tools, and access to the files you need?

Is there anything physical you need like paperwork? This isn’t ideal for obvious reasons, but you can usually just use something as simple as your mobile phone to take photos and distribute etc. Again, your employer should be able to advise you on the best way to handle some of these issues.

There are of course security implications of both hardware (laptops etc) as well as customer data you may need to raise if your employer hasn’t already spoken about this aspect.

Workspace

Your workspace is really important. Most people work far better in a dedicated space. If you have a home office or area at home that can easily be made into a dedicated workspace (even if temporarily) then I’d highly recommend it. Being able to shut a door or physically move away from that workspace really helps trigger that you are either in or out of “work mode”.

Even if you have no other option but to use a dining table or work in your lounge you can still get this space to work. At the start of your working day, switch off TV’s or anything you associate with relaxing at home, and setup your workstation for the day. At the end of the day, remove all your work and laptop etc and put it away out of sight. Again, this really helps define your home and work time.

One thing to bear in mind with your workspace is to try and find somewhere that is quiet. You will no doubt have to make and take calls throughout the day so this is important. One thing that may help with this is to wear earphones (most smartphones earphones also have a built in microphone in the lead) as that helps with the clarity and eliminating background noise on any calls.

Communications

Following on from the above with communications and calls. What will be your primary method for communicating with colleagues and customers etc? These days most external communication is still done via email and the telephone.

But internal comms may be done using a company wide tool such as Slack or even just a Whatsapp group. Your employer should lead this and let you know what you should be using. However, you should make 100% sure that all these tools are working. Another thing to double check is that the tools automatically start if you reboot your computer. Otherwise, nobody can get in touch with you and you’ll miss messages without realising.

When working from home, communication is vitally important so overdo it rather than underdo it. It is very easy to just “disappear” for a couple of days which isn’t good for anyone. Your colleagues aren’t sure what you’re doing, or where you are up to, and it’s not good from a mental health perspective either. Hopefully, your employer will have systems in place to ensure decent ongoing communications but if not, help drive this yourself and pick up the phone to your colleagues.

Distractions

Once everything is setup, this is one of the biggest things that people struggle with while working from home. There are so many things around that can distract us all. You can see the washing that needs doing, the washing up you didn’t do last night, Netflix calling you to watch the end of that film, and some of us have young children running around. It’s no surprise that it can be a distracting environment!

You need to eliminate these distractions. Out of sight, out of mind, definitely helps here which is why I advised to try and have a dedicated workspace behind a closed door.

If you have no choice but to work in your living space then you may need to tweak your usual behaviour at home. Maybe make sure you do finish the washing up, and get the ironing done the night before. That way, it won’t be there nagging you in the background.

The other big issue can be getting some peace and quiet. I’d mentioned earphones before and for me, this is one of the best ways of eliminating distractions. I find that it really helps to listen to music through earphones when working. Strangely, silence isn’t as good as you tend to then pick up and get distracted by the smallest sound and go off to investigate. Some people even get distracted by their music so prefer some ambient background noise. There are plenty of tracks on YouTube and even dedicated websites/Apps that play background noise from coffee shops (check out https://coffitivity.com/).

Of course, the biggest distraction is on your laptop or smartphone. Being able to browse the internet or check social media is a huge time suck. I’ve written various articles about productivity on here so do look through some of my previous articles. If you don’t trust yourself not to look, there are some great pieces of software that will limit your access to specific websites etc at certain times of the day. A couple of examples are Freedom and StayFocusd.

Breaks

Sitting down for hours on end at home and not moving isn’t the healthiest thing to do. Often people do exactly that while at an office and all this advice still applies there, but I think it’s worth adding as a reminder.

Do make sure you take regular breaks. I typically get up and move around every 30 mins or so. I also keep a large glass of water on my desk which I sip from fairly constantly. This also helps make sure I get up and move around by forcing regular visits to the toilet!

Having a proper lunch break is also really important. Taking that hour away from your laptop really helps from a productivity point of view too. And please go and have your lunch sat somewhere else and not just in front of your laptop browsing the internet. This is also a good time to take advantage of being at home. Spend some time with your family, hang the washing out, clean the car, just do something that isn’t work related and keep your laptop shut.

Meetings

Obviously, physical meetings are pretty much off the agenda for now but you still need to keep in touch with people and keep relationships going.

Your employer should guide you on what tools you should be using for all communications. This should also include access to tools for online meetings. There are plenty of options for this including software like Skype and Zoom for video calls and screen sharing if required.

Just because you can't physically go and see people, don’t cancel your pre-booked meetings, try to move them to be online meetings. If they really can’t be done online, agree to have a call (and schedule it) every couple of weeks until it can happen. Nobody knows how long it will be until physical meetings can begin again but at least this way the lines of communication are kept open.

Any online meetings, even regular daily ones with your manager or colleagues, should be in your calendar with reminders. Don’t be the person who is always 5 minutes late to the meeting. Even being just 5 minutes late to a team meeting with 5 other people adds up to the company wasting 30 minutes.

Progress Updates

You hopefully already have systems in place to keep track of everything you are working on. However, it is sometimes not the case as if people are all in an office it can be done informally. Obviously everybody working from home makes that a bit more tricky.

One of the best ways to keep your colleagues informed is with a quick daily catch up at the start, end, or both ends of the day. This should be a very quick 5–10 minute catchup just to keep everyone up to date. Your employer should really be driving this though and advising when and how this should be done.

Even with that, I still think it’s worth keeping track of everything you do each day. One way to do this is to have a document you use to make notes throughout the day so you can refer back to this. Other tools can be used to help with this such as Rescuetime which monitors what you do and how long you spend on things, or even Toggl where you can add task lists and then mark time against these as you go. At the end of the day or week, you then know exactly what you’ve done and what progress you’ve made.

Switching Off

Just as important as everything above is to actually switch off from work at the end of the day. Whatever time you’ve agreed to finish work, do try and stick to it. Obviously, if you’re finishing something off then do so.

If you have a dedicated room then shutting the door behind you at the end of the day massively helps. If you just have a workspace setup then do remove it at the end of the day. Don’t leave it setup with work open on your laptop as it is sometimes too easy to slip into the habit of then working all evening.

And Finally

Hopefully all the above will help you successfully work from home. Working from home really can be great, and work extremely well for both you and your employer if done right. So although the circumstances may not be ideal, do try and make this a positive change for everyone.

If you have any feedback or questions then please do feel free to get in touch with me at richard@tenminutemarketing.co.uk

Thanks

Richard

P.S. Here’s the link to another article I’ve written to help guide your employer through the process of everyone starting to work from home.