For employees, remote work provides greater flexibility (allows you to devote more time to family and / or personal development, there is no need to move from work home or to another location and vice versa), leaves less distracting factors (no one talks on the phone nearby, does not conduct conversations that interfere focus on the task) and makes shorter trips to work (or even leads to a lack of trips to work). For companies, a remote work culture makes it easier to hire, reduces office costs, and naturally attracts employees with self-motivation and self-discipline.
Despite its advantages, remote work has significant disadvantages. Between loneliness and isolation, the ambiguity of the organization’s goals, the fuzzy boundaries of work and life, with complex coordination, remote work creates a certain set of problems.
However, none of these problems is insurmountable. By analyzing the shortcomings of remote work, we can carefully structure our working day to mitigate or even level out these shortcomings.
Remote work provokes loneliness
It is known that people are “social animals”. Studies show that spontaneous social interactions prevent a feeling of loneliness. When you work remotely, you skip the interactions that are characteristic of the office - conversations between desks, walking past people in the corridors, lunch together. It's easy enough to feel isolated, especially if you are switching to remote work from a noisy office.
You can feel yourself outside the team
If the documentation in your particular company leaves much to be desired, it is easy enough to feel lost in the status of a remote employee. If your goals are ambiguous, remote politicians are not clearly documented, and there are also spontaneous meetings that take place behind the doors of your office that are closed to you, it is easy to feel that you, as a remote employee, are working outside the company.
Coordinated work becomes a test
When a team works in different time zones, coordinating meetings in real time becomes a difficult task. A bright and early meeting taking place in San Francisco can be completely invisible if you are suddenly in Amsterdam and you need to put the child to bed at this time.
The line between work and life is blurring
If you live, work and sleep in the same physical space, the boundaries between this time of your work and your personal time simply disappear. In addition, the flexibility of working remotely can lead to the fact that your working hours will differ from your usual working time and will go into the time frame within which you interact with your non-working environment, which only enhances the feeling of isolation.
How to organize the work day of the ideal remote worker?
1. Determine the completion time
When you are in an ordinary office, it is clear that the day ends when people begin to leave it (usually at the same time). When you work remotely, you do not have such obvious signals, and it is easy to lose track of time and understand in time when you should stop your work.
To counter this, set yourself specific goals. When you start working, at the beginning of the day, select the approximate date by which you want to finish your work on that very day. If something in your day changes significantly, which makes you distract from work (everything happens in life, especially when they know that you don’t work from home, for example), reassess and adjust your completion time and try to stick to that time.
2. Come up with signals for the beginning of the working day
When you sit down at your office desktop, your body and brain remember that it is time to work. When you wake up in the same place where you work all day, there is no clear signal to start a working day.
Teach your brain to start work by associating certain actions with the beginning of work. For example, go for a walk, go around the house or block, and when you return, immediately begin your work. Or just stay “in your pajamas” until you are ready to start working, then change clothes and immediately start your work day.
The choice of a constantly repeating process before the beginning of the working day will be able to draw a clear line between life and work, allowing you to quickly focus on work tasks.
3. Document all necessary work processes.
Successful remote cultures always rely on reliable documentation. When the first doubts arise, you should definitely document what you are working on, even if it seems too redundant and unnecessary. Create and document public tasks for everything you plan to work on. Reserve time in a public calendar so that all participants in the workflow know what you do during your remote work day. Write down in a public document general approaches to working on each task that you are working on.
Thoughtful and accessible documentation helps other participants in the workflow to get an idea of ​​what you are working on, reduces the need for additional meetings and gives you more structural work in each of these days. In addition, the more documentation available, the less likely it is that someone will feel unaware of decision-making processes regarding what the entire team is working on.
4. Create a work area
Behavioral psychology introduced us to the concept of conditioned reflex . Just as a dog can begin to salivate when you go to the cupboard in which its food is stored, you will probably want to take a nap if you climb into the bed, deciding that it will be more comfortable to work in it.
In order for the brain to gain a working mood, it is worth consciously choosing to take a section of the house / apartment / room (or another place, such as a coworking or cafe) to start your day, which you associate only with work and only with work.
And for God's sake, do not work in your bed, otherwise you will want to sleep while you work, and vice versa - you will think about work when you try to sleep.
5. Say NO to unhealthy temptations
When we finish a small task, we often want to take a break. These breaks can be useful - they give us the opportunity to assess at what stage the work is now, recharge our batteries and focus on the next task.
However, there is a limit beyond which these gaps bring us into an unproductive fashion.
If during work there are too many temptations (easily accessible snacks in the kitchen, and in the next room the TV plays in the background), you can be constantly distracted when completing a task, regardless of how fast or simple it is.
To stay in the work area, keep snacks away from the TV, keep the TV turned off, and you will undoubtedly do more and feel a big reward when you get a well-deserved break.
6. Take time for informal communication
Spontaneous and non-binding communication with friends or colleagues makes us happier. In order not to feel lonely during remote work, pre-allocate time for your team to get to know each other outside the work context.
Moreover, strangely enough, remote work can also make you more rationally plan your personal time in order to spend it with family, friends and relatives, especially if you work in hours that are not traditional for your close environment.
Finally, it’s worth a little experimenting with your work environment. Go to a cafe or library where others can meet people like you who also work remotely.
7. Measure results, not hours worked
When you are in the office, it is natural to measure productivity in terms of the "number of days worked per week." Remote work requires much more self-discipline than just entering and leaving the office. At the company level, a culture of measuring results gives each employee more clarity about what they should work on.
On an individual level, setting measurable goals and tracking results is a great way to keep up with the global goals of the company without constantly checking with other people, as well as a good way to determine when you can stop working (when you reach a specific goal that you set for a particular day )
Completion
As more companies implement tools to provide better synchronized collaboration and manage asynchronous tasks, the process of moving to remote work will continue to scale.
For this transition to be successful, both for the company and for individuals, it is necessary to take specific measures to eliminate the shortcomings associated with remote work.
At the end of the day, you can overcome these shortcomings by correctly structuring your days to draw clear lines between work and life, encourage your mind to focus on work and cut out social time in accordance with your schedule in order to find harmony and happiness.