Remote Work – My Take

Ironically, I’d been planning on writing some travel-related posts here – never quite got around to it and now as pretty much everyone must suddenly work remotely thanks to the pandemic, I decided instead to write up some tips for those companies and individuals working remote for the first time.

I have worked remote for the majority of my time since 2002 or so. Most of that time has been either working at home, or wherever I happened to be at the time. My experience includes working for myself, or for an organization that was mostly not made up of remote employees. Of those organizations, one handled it pretty well… the other not so much.

You do You
So, nearly every remote work article I’ve seen talks about building a separation between your “work mode” and “live mode.” That’s great, but if it’s not working for you – find out what does. Everyone’s needs and job requirements are different. What makes sense for one may not for others.

I’ve been working remote for most of two decades. I’ve never had an office where only job stuff happens. I’ve always tended to migrate around the house and yard as I work, I find that a change of location and scenery helps me focus. That’s what works for me. Experiment, and see what works for you.

Learn to work with basics
Because I travel so much, I’ve learned to work with just the laptop. I’ve tried using giant monitors, or multiple monitors and honestly it doesn’t work – for me. One advantage I have then is that I can work pretty much anywhere I can sit down relatively comfortably – couch, hotel bed, desk, etc. All I really need is internet access.

Getting online is a key requirement. Our home wifi is decent but can go down. Hotel wifi is notoriously bad. It pays to know how to use the mobile hotspot mode on your phone when you need it – hopefully your phone and provider makes that possible!

Set up your app and mute yourself!
Do yourself a favor and learn how to set up whatever app(s) you use so that it starts up with your camera off and your mic muted. You can always turn them on manually once your meeting starts. This can prevent embarrassing mistakes!

And please, please mute yourself when you’re not talking. Zoom likes to change view to whoever it thinks is speaking – so if you have a dog barking or other noises in your background, it can be quite annoying to everyone else.

Apps like Zoom are very bandwidth intensive – you may get some mileage out of turning off your video if your connection is struggling. I know the pundits like to tout the benefits of being able to see the other people in your meeting, but in my experience most meetings revolve around a screenshare and having all the other people transmitting video does seem to strain a poor connection unnecessarily. So, in my opinion, it may be better for organizations to ask their employees to not have their video on by default.

Trust your employees
This brings up another much discussed element of the our new remote work world -some companies and managers can’t seem to figure out how to handle workers who aren’t in the office.

If your organization can’t seem to figure out if an employee is contributing when their not sitting in an office… you have a larger problem than how to handle remote work! Figuring out the right way to measure this is not an easy task, especially for developers. This is not a new problem – and there’s tons of discussion out there about it – but a very important one for leaders to focus on and continually try to improve. This pandemic may be just the chance to figure this out and reap the other benefits that come with having remote workers!

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