Boris Johnson issues a stay-at-home order sending UK into a complete lockdown to fight coronavirus. California issues a stay-at-home order. In India, PM Modi requests for a Janata or people curfew and later almost all cities are going into complete lockdown.
Stay-at-home orders make us experience first-hand what it means to stay at home fully and completely locked down!
With most of the things closed in the city, I know everyone is already asking “when should we come to the office!!” I could hear some people shouting “Folks please open the office, tomorrow!”. We are already started missing the ‘aroma-filled’ office coffee & tea and team lunches!
With Corona days extending, it is realistic to assume that working from home will become the new norm for most of us, for a while or for some more days or months to come. So there is no quick escape from our ‘house arrests’!
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Though we are used to occasional work from home, coronavirus is pushing everyone into extreme working from home situation, in a fully locked down situation. This is a little unprecedented.
Many of us are working from home for the first time on a
full-time basis.
Hence, figuring out how to stay focused on work, tasks and assignments can
be tricky and challenging.
Without your boss supervising you, without asking for updates frequently and driving you every alternate hour face-to-face, it may be little difficult to stay productive and stay focused in working from home (WFH) situation.
A new environment, like home, which is normally not designed for work, may not lend itself to good productivity immediately. Home is designed for relaxation, spending time with family members and preparing food and so on.
How do we convert this home environment to work environment, quickly, so that we can continue to work and produce meaningful results?
Luckily, there are ways, tricks and methods to stay focused, be productive and deliver results and avoid going crazy. Below are few insights especially for small businesses, entrepreneurs, start-ups and sales teams.
1. Setup a room or work space
If you don’t have a proper set up at home for a proper ‘home office’, do as much as you can to create an ad-hoc, temporary, reserved space, specifically for work.
If your home has a spare or extra room, quickly convert that into your office room or work room. You may even put a A4 sized poster on the door which says “HelloLeads” or “Your Company Name” and specifies the work times, say 9.30 am to 6.30 pm. You may add a funny tag line that suits the taste of your family members.
For example,
In case, you are not able to find a spare room, choose a quiet and possibly an un-used or less-used corner. Set up a table and comfortable chair to work. If you do not have table, buy a small sized table.
A 2 feet by 1.5 feet foldable table should come for USD 10 or 15 or INR 500 or 800. A chair with back rest is good. My suggestion is to avoid stools. Stools are not ergonomically designed and not productive for more than 30 minutes of sitting.
Sitting on floor is not a great idea, considering the stress it creates to backbone and body. Avoid working on sofa or lying in bed with a laptop. This can be done very rarely but not regularly. Sitting on a chair (with table) in upright position sends a signal to those who live with you that you’re ‘at work’.
2. Get organized with electronics
First of all, arrange for few electrical power points, so that you can easily connect your laptop and charge your cell phones. If you do not have one, you may think of getting a 5 socket power extension cord or spike guard. Get your laptop, phone, chargers, and modems all into one place, preferably on to a small table.
If you are in noisy home with children, you can also look at having a noise cancellation headphone so that you can attend conference calls comfortably. Remember the all-of-a-sudden cooker whistle sound or a juicer sound from the kitchen.
Use a mouse for better efficiency, do not resort to the in-built mouse pad in laptops. They are not good for long time working.
3. Keep laptop and other electronics safe
Please keep your laptop, phones and other electronics safe. If you have kids at home, do not leave the laptop on the floor or at a place which is easily accessible. Keep it little high and away. Accidents can happen any time. Some thing can fall on the laptop accidentally. Keep coffee, tea, water or other liquids away from laptops or phone
In addition to the hardware, please keep the data safe. If the data needs a backup, talk to your computer admin team. Please keep the work and data confidential. It is very easy to discuss the work we do or a project we do, with a friend or visiting relative, but it may violate the data security and NDAs signed with clients and companies. So please take care.
4. Make sure your Internet is OK
Internet is the back bone if you are WFH. A reasonable and good internet speed will help in improving productivity of working from home. In some areas T Mobile or Orange may work, in some areas AirTel or Jio may work and in some areas Idea may work. So please experiment and find out which telecom provider works best for you. In case, if internet speed is a show stopper, please inform your boss or admin team so that they can figure out what can be done.
5. Treat as if you are in office
There are few WFH tips that are ever green. For example, just because we can roam around in our shorts and pyjamas it doesn’t mean we actually should do. Take a good bath, eat breakfast at 8.30 am or 9 am, and get dressed up for your ‘work from home’ job. Do treat WFH like a real office job.
While working from home, it is easy to get things mixed up. Taking bath or washing clothes or cooking during working hours should not be done. International studies show that WFH is successful when you demarcate and segregate time as well as space clearly for WFH. You have to put yourself in a frame of mind that you’re really working.
6. Communicate to your family and children that you are WFH
Communicate clearly and multiple times to your family members that you are working from home. Tell them clearly what your work hours are and when the tea break and lunch breaks will be. If you leave these to assumptions of everyone at home, be rest assured, that you will not have a productive and happy WFH experience.
If you have children, sit with them and explain the new situation. Start with Corona and say because of the virus we all need to work from home and request their understanding and support. Ask them to remind you about work start and end hours etc. and I am sure they will happily do it!
They will be happy to support you by bringing water and other materials you may need, time to time! Seeing you working will be a great learning experience for them. It is a kind of ‘internship at-home’.
Seeing from another angle, the biggest challenge in WFH is the presence of other people at home. You need to prevent distractions from people by agreeing on few ground rules with them. Pretend that you are not at home while following rigid work hours.
Do not get involved in casual conversations, personal calls or housework. Use separate workspace or headphones to create ‘boundaries’!
7. Improve communication with your team and managers
All of us spend our days in office in close proximity to our boss and team leaders and hence communication is easy and effortless. But this effortless communication breaks down when we start working from home. Even managers may not be used to WFH or managing or leading people remotely.
The key to working from home is clear communication with your boss, team leaders and rest of the team. Talk to your boss and know what exactly is expected from you. Do not assume or leave things to a fluid state.
Always have a quick 5 minutes start up call when you begin the day and quick 5 minutes wrap up call at the end of the day with your boss or team leader. This will help in keeping in sync and doing things which are important. Prepare a list of things to be accomplished for a week and have it validated and approved by your boss.
Are your team members comfortable working from home? What possible support they need. Ask feedback from your team. Please feel free to use this template as it is or a modified version of the survey. You can also download the WFH survey document here.
8. Get used to remote working tools
When we throw face-to-face communication out of the window, we need tools for communication in WFH situation.
We use Slack for team communication. It is a good idea that everyone signs in to Slack promptly at the start of work hours i.e. 9.30 am in the morning. You can add a picture to your slack profile and update your details. Spend an hour exploring slack and understanding how to use it.
WhatsApp has become an important tool for communication. All of us working at HelloLeads use small groups for quick communication. Please join the official groups and avoid creating your own groups in WhatsApp or other social media.
We also use Zoom for video communication and conferencing. Since not every one was familiar with zoom, we requested Caroline our Sales Manager to set up a company-wide zoom call and explain to everyone how zoom can be used and the nitty-gritty of using Zoom.
If you are small business owner or part of sales team, you also need to manage leads and keep track of prospects. Working from home, you should know which doors to knock today. We would recommend using HelloLeads Sales CRM for this. We use HelloLeads internally and it serves as a great tool for sales follow-ups and sales conversions.
Other tools you can keep in your radar (if the WFH extends) are Google Hangouts for a team video call, Asana for project management, Trello for help in organizing our day.
9. Get up. Dress up!
Just voice alone is an inefficient way of communication when we work remotely. Seeing each other makes communication effective and better.
I encourage all of you to use video calls as part of WFH so that you can see each other face to face and hence communication is better and work coordination is even better.
It is possible that your boss or team leader or someone else invites you to a video call all of a sudden during next few days. Or your CEO request all of you to join a zoom meeting with videos turned on. So it is better we are dressed up and in proper clothing to take these calls.
Inform your near and dear ones, that as a part of the work, you may go on video calls once in a while in a day and hence they also understand and cooperate. When you are on a voice call or video call, please make sure there is no disturbance. If you have children at home, request other members to take care of them so that the meeting is not disturbed.
10. Out of sight, out of mind!
Out of sight and hence out of mind is a real problem for many of us who remotely work because of corona virus. Working from home can be unstructured and isolating.
Luckily, WFH is not new for us at HelloLeads. Thanks to some of the team members who have perfected the science and art of WFH. If you have questions on how to manage WFH situation feel free to have a one-to-one call with our experts.
The best WHF or remote workers are those who reach out to co-workers and managers regularly through a variety of tools – voice calling, video calling and using emails or slack.
11. Plan your work and day
When you WFH, plan your work before you start the day. Have a task list or to-do list in front of you for the day. Also, have visibility into next one or two weeks of work. Prioritize your projects and schedule time slots including extra time in between to cater for emergencies and unforeseen work requests from your manager.
When you begin a task, continue it till the end. Do not get pulled away by your need to respond to a new email or a message. Multi-tasking frequently is a productivity killer.
It is important to keep a track of time that is consumed by each task or activity. Toggle is a good tool for time management.
12. Work timings and leaves
Since the entire company is working from home, it is important you work at the same time zone (!) most of time.
For example, every one working from 9.30 am to 6.30 pm can be productive. Schedule most of the meetings at start of the day say at 9.30 am. Request people to login 15 minutes earlier so that they can check their email or slack messages and be ready for the meeting.
Though WFH seemingly offers flexibility (since we are not supervised face to face), do not get in to late night work hours. This can make us go out of sync and impact communication – which is a key to survival in WFH situation. Always ask a question – Do we over work when we work from home?
In HelloLeads, leaves are planned and taken in the same ways if some one works at office. We follow 2x rule i.e. if x days of leaves are required by some one, he or she informs his boss or team 2x days in advance.
13. Tea, Coffee, Water and Fresh air
You may not have access to coffee or tea vending machines or someone who serves coffee or tea at office (in our case Shantamma, makes wonderful coffee and tea for all). But I am sure folks at home are kind and considerate! Request them to serve you a cup of coffee or tea twice or thrice in a day. This can help you to keep your energy and enthusiasm up.
Keep a bottle of water next to you so that you can keep yourself hydrated. Stand up and walk around for 5 minutes, preferably in sunlight and fresh air, every 2 hours. Listening to good back ground music is an option if you think it improves your productivity and not distracts you.
14. Stay focused and keep the enthusiasm up
We are living in stressful times. Most of the cities are getting locked up due to corona virus. There are hundreds of WhatsApp or Facebook messages which are sufficient to do a PhD in 3 months on coronavirus. So know your limits. Do not get distracted with WhatsApp, Facebook or IG while you work from home. If you start looking at FB or IG or Social media, it will put answering your work emails or work requests on the back burner.
But the more effort you put into communicating with colleagues and team members, the more effort you put in in your work, the better chance you have of avoiding feelings of isolation and depression.
15. In a way, work from home (WFH) is not different
Work from home is not different from working from office. We continue to earn salary in our WFH situation. We need to stay committed to our timings and deliverable. We need to avoid home chores or personal appointments during working hours except during scheduled breaks. We should not abuse WFH freedom by being unavailable or else we will compromise our professional respect.
We can be more productive when we work from home, if we understand above nuances and properly plan our work environment and work scheduling. Work from home (WFH) provides reduced stress from travel to office, fewer interruptions from colleagues and also minimal office politics!
Most of us are new to work from home model and we all have more questions about remote work. Get answers to all questions about remote work.
If you are new to working from home, it will take few days for things to settle down. Week one itself will not be very productive. Each one of us will figure out issues and find solutions as we move on and to make WFH more productive.
16. What should managers do?
As managers, we need to share more information than usual because we are missing the face to face interactions. Managers need to make sure availability of internet and availability of other tools required for WFH. We need to organize digital social interactions and discuss how the teams are coping with the situation, frequently.
Wishing all of us great WFH, super productivity and #Winthecorona
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Really sir, it was a great post. Today i arranged WFH in my house. Thanks again
(expecting such articles more…)