Some tips from someone who hasn’t worked in an office in fifteen years

In the twenty-first century, many of us work in offices. In the EU and the US, the service economy represents roughly 80% of GDP. This growth of service work is a relatively recent phenomenon, compared to the past when most employment was in agriculture.

Office work comes with a number of perks over farming. For a start, it’s done indoors, generally in fairly comfortable surroundings. There may be perks like free refreshments, and if you are lucky you may even have fun colleagues that you like to hang out with during coffee breaks. You’re also fairly unlikely to be in any sort of physical danger, as long as you are careful with the stapler.

The problem is that the self-isolation protocols that governments and companies are putting into place require, among other things, that people work from home instead of going to the office. This is a new development for many employers and employees. In the spirit of helping out, I wanted to share some tips based on over a decade of working from home. I last had an office-based job in which I worked elbow-to-elbow with my team-mates in 2006. Since then, my situation has mostly involved team-mates and managers spread around the world, across many different time zones. Here is what I learned.

Day 1 of working from home:
I might make myself some nice food as a treat.

Day 5:
Forgot to shower again, but that's not a problem for I no-longer wear people clothes. Lunch was sweetcorn I scooped up with a biscuit. At breaktime, I snarled at the locals from behind my bins.

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) March 6, 2020

Save your Space

One of the good things about travelling to a physical location is that it enforces separation between work and not-work. If you’re in the office, you’re generally expected to be working – and if you’re at home, generally speaking you’re not working, apart from perhaps checking email or whatever.

When you work from home, you lose that separation. The risk then is that work and home life bleed into each other. On the one hand, you may find yourself working through meal times and into the evening, but on the other you might also get distracted by housework or errands.

If you can arrange it, physical separation is best. Don’t work from the couch; apart from anything else, that’s an ergonomic nightmare if you’re doing it all day, every day. Go somewhere to do work, and don’t go there when you’re not working. I’m lucky enough to have a home office that is physically separate from the family home, which is ideal, but not everyone will have that option, or be able to set it up at short notice.

At the very least, work from your laptop at the table, and close the laptop when you’re done. Even if you do dip into work after hours, do it from your phone, not from the laptop.

It might seem silly, but try to stick to office hours and dress: get out of bed and get dressed as if you were going to work. You have years of reflex telling you that when you shave or put on makeup (delete as appropriate to your own personal morning routine), you are going into "work mode". Take advantage of those reflexes even if you aren’t leaving the home.

If you are able to do so safely, i.e. without close contact with others, you may also consider replacing your commute with a run or a bicycle ride, just to start your day off.

Protect your Space

If you live with other people, you may need to negotiate this separation with them. If they see you in the house, they may ask you for your help, or to join in some activity, or just ask you questions. A physical indicator that you are working can be useful here. Again, if you have a specific location that you work from, that can be simplest: "if I’m in the spare room with the door closed, please don’t bother me; if the door is open, I’m available for coffee or a quick chat".

Make your Routine

On top of physical routine, it’s good to break up your day into units of time, and dedicate each one to a specific task. The method I use is the Pomodoro Technique, which is simple and fun. Basically, get a kitchen timer, and use it to time your tasks and breaks.

My Pomodoro timer on my desk

Over-Communicate

It can be very isolating to work at home on your own, if you are used to working cheek-by-jowl with your team. At least if everyone is self-isolating in their own homes, you don’t feel that you are being left out of impromptu conversations that happen in the office. There are ways of helping the team continue to feel and work like a team even when they are remote.

The absolute bottom line is that you need a chat platform of some sort. Slack is fast becoming the default, and has a free plan that is enough for most organisations at least to get started. Probably the biggest alternative is Microsoft Teams, but there are many other options.

Do not try to use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or similar mobile-only, single-threaded tools for anything beyond the smallest groups and simplest needs. Slack and similar tools allow you to create many channels, each dedicated to specific topics, and within a channel you can split a discussion off into a thread without cluttering up the main channel.

Another benefit of dedicated work chat tools is to further that separation between work and personal time. Train yourself to stop looking at the work tool after hours. Managers, be sensitive and avoid abusing personal channels like SMS outside of actual emergencies.

Catch my Video

Text chat is great for many things, but if you’re feeling lonely and isolated away from your team, turn on that webcam! We are social animals, and seeing people face to face really helps strengthen those team bonds. The coronavirus crisis is driving a huge uptake in video chat tools, especially Zoom, which has a useful free tier.

Another benefit of video meetings is that it reinforces your work routines, if only because you have to be presentable and ready to be seen on camera.

Track and Assess

Finally, it can be hard at the end of the day to work out whether you "got anything done". There’s a simple fix for that too: track what you do during the day, and assess the results at the end of the day. You can do this as part of your Pomodoro Technique, jotting down a quick note about what you achieved during each Pomodoro interval. Depending on what type of work you are doing, this can also help you track your time, if that is a requirement. Even if you don’t have that kind of need, though, it can be good to close out the day by looking back on what you have achieved.

Plan for the Long Term

The final reason to think about this topic now is that I suspect that many organisations that were only forced into supporting remote work by this crisis will find that it’s actually a great option, at least as a complement to their ordinary setup. Don’t fall into any bad habits because you think this setup will only last for a few days or weeks. Remote working is going to be much more prevalent in the future, so it’s worth getting it right straight away.

Do share any other tips that you personally know of or that work for you. I can usually be found on Twitter.

🖼️ Photos by Dillon Shook, Harry Cunningham and Andrew Neel on Unsplash, except tomato timer – author’s own

I was reading an interesting blog post about working from home, by Julia Evans. I also work from home, so it was interesting to compare my experiences of remote work with hers.

The two main benefits are the obvious ones – I get to live where I want (Montreal) and have the job that I want. And San Francisco tech companies in general pay a lot more than Montreal tech companies, so working for a SF tech company while living outside SF is great.

I can confirm this 100%. I live in Italy rather than in Canada, but the same factors apply: I’d rather be here than there, and the salary is very competitive with what I could make locally.

• I have a lot of control over my working environment. It’s relatively easy to close Slack and focus.

True! I hated working in an open-plan office, and wore headphones a lot so that I could get some peace and quiet. It did not help that none of my team were in that office, so I was only going there to satisfy some HR mandate.

• I basically haven’t had to set an alarm for 4 years.

Ha. Nnnope – I still have my alarm set far too early every weekday to take the kids to school. On the other hand, I can have breakfast with them and take them to school, and still get a full day of work in in. Part of that is down to time zone shift, which is both good and bad; more on that later.

• There’s a nice community of remotes across the company. I’ve gotten to know a lot of wonderful people.

Yes! My team is spread out across four sites and three time zones, and so are many other teams, so there isn’t the sort of downside to being remote that there can be if it’s an exception.

• I can work from another city/country if I want (like I went to Berlin for 6 weeks in 2016 and it wasn’t disruptive, especially since my 2 teammates at the time lived in Europe).

I haven’t tried this one (those kids and their schools again), but I know other people who’ve done it very successfully. This also works if your area of coverage gets large enough. I knew someone who was in charge of one particular technology alliance partner across the whole of EMEA, which meant that he spent a lot of his time flying. Soon, he realised that this meant he didn’t have to be anywhere in particular, as long as he was near an international airport – so he decamped to Barcelona for a year. Why not?

• I live in a slightly shifted timezone (3 hours ahead of many people I work with), so I can get stuff done before anybody gets to work.

I am shifted a lot more than that: the difference from Italy to San Francisco is nine hours. The upside is I get a nice quiet start to my day to read, write, and think, and then the US wakes up and I start getting into conference calls. The downside is that there are only a few usable hours of overlap in our schedules, so compatible time slots go quickly. Sometimes you have to do careful triage of what actually needs an interactive voice call, and what can be discussed asynchronously over email or Slack. I make it a hard rule to keep family dinner time free, but I do take calls after dinner several times a month, when we can’t work out other slots.

Shout Louder

That last point is important: I joined a team that had previously been able to shout across a table at each other, and suddenly half the team was remote. We had to figure out how to communicate and manage projects across the time zone gap, and there were some stumbles and false starts along the way.

What we ended up figuring out was that different channels work for different tasks. Perhaps not revolutionary, I know, but we took the time while we were all together in person and thrashed it out with a whiteboard: what type of requests should go to which channel, what response times could be expected, and so on.

This is what is known as a "communications charter", and is recommended by HBR for virtual teams:

Communication on virtual teams is often less frequent, and always is less rich than face-to-face interaction, which provides more contextual cues and information about emotional states — such as engagement or lack thereof. The only way to avoid the pitfalls is to be extremely clear and disciplined about how the team will communicate. Create a charter that establishes norms of behavior when participating in virtual meetings, such as limiting background noise and side conversations, talking clearly and at a reasonable pace, listening attentively and not dominating the conversation, and so on. The charter also should include guidelines on which communication modes to use in which circumstances, for example when to reply via email versus picking up the phone versus taking the time to create and share a document.

Get In Their Face

Note that when we were working out our communications charter, we did it with a whiteboard. This is because we made it a goal to get together in person once a quarter or thereabouts. Don’t skimp on this! It’s not cheap: airfare, hotels, and meals all add up. However, the time you spend together face to face will pay off over and over. There is so much that gets done when the team is together, and the benefits continue after the remote team members fly out, because that face time has strengthened relationships and clarified questions.

In fact, face time is so important that it’s the very first point in that HBR list:

It may seem paradoxical to say in a post on virtual teams, but face-to-face communication is still better than virtual when it comes to building relationships and fostering trust, an essential foundation for effective team work. If you can’t do it, it’s not the end of the world (focus on doing some virtual team building). But if you can get the team together, use the time to help team members get to know each other better, personally and professionally, as well to create a shared vision and a set of guiding principles for how the team will work. Schedule the in-person meeting early on, and reconnect regularly (semi-annually or annually) if possible.

Feed The Mind

However, there is one final point that I have not seen listed anywhere else, and that is food. When I work from home, I can make my own meals, and share them with whoever else is around: my kids if they don’t have school, my wife if she is also working from home, or friends who might be taking their lunch breaks at the same time as me.

What do you think? Beats a soggy sandwich at your desk, right?

Top image by Seemann via Morguefile; bottom image courtesy of author.

Teleworking is back in the news!

The very technology that enables telecommuting and working from home could be destroying its value. Although productivity may increase in the short term, working from home may prevent your teams from working effectively.

I've had both office-based and home-office jobs, so I have an idea of the upsides and downsides of each. I last wrote about teleworking more than a year ago, when Yahoo first banned the practice. Here's what I said at the time:

... the office is where I go to have impromptu conversations and face-to-face meetings, but it's not where I am most productive, even with my headphones on. I am much more productive at home, in aeroplanes, or in hotel rooms without distractions.

I think the sort of togetherness that the Forbes piece describes is real. I work in a team that is entirely remote: no two team-members share an office. For the type of work we do, this works well. It's great to meet up, and we take every opportunity to do so, but mostly we're fairly loosely coupled, so we get on fine as is.

There is another dimension to consider here. If companies gather all their employees except for local field support into one central location, they may have all sorts of serendipitous conversations around coffee machines, but there is a significant risk of an echo chamber effect developing. Silicon Valley is all well and good, but what works there will not necessarily work elsewhere in the US, never mind Europe, Asia and so on. If everyone involved in deciding and communicating the strategic direction of the company lives their entire lives in Silicon Valley, surrounded by people doing exactly the same thing, the company will develop a huge blind spot to the realities on the ground.

Not to mention all the employees spending their bonuses on noise-canceling headphones just so they can get some work done in the office again...