I've been working remotely since before the pandemic and love it. For those of you that work remotely, what are some tips or great things you've seen an organization do to facilitate remote work life?
I'm always looking to up my remote game and as well, the comments here could help newer folk to remote work level up.
Latest comments (35)
You can find some tips here: kanbantool.com/blog/6-remote-work-..., hope they'll be useful for you.
Best thing someone can do as an employee: minimize distractions. This was a problem in the office, with open office space, conversations happening constantly, etc. It can still be a problem at home. I now have a dedicated office room with a door that I can close. My productivity has never been higher.
Best thing you can do as a team: intentional connections. This was done very well on my previous team -- all of our daily standups were done over slack, but we had a dedicated time blocked off on Mondays (to share about our weekends, and talk about what we were excited to do this week), Wednesday afternoons (mob programming if anyone was stuck on any issue whatsoever), and Fridays (to discuss how the week went, what we learned, share weekend plans). Because the nature of these meetings invited us to share personal things as far as each person was comfortable, it built strong bonds, trust, and made us amazing at collaboration throughout the week. We not only got each other through the worst of the pandemic but were also top performers as a team. I no longer work on that team but we still keep in touch and meet monthly to catch up.
Always keep your teammates up to date because you will leave, and suddenly they have something important :)
For me the most important is to have some kind of "hello afterwork ritual". When I'm finishing work in my office I go down to my car, turn up some loud metal tunes and drive home. So when I am arriving I'm also mentally home. In the first weeks when remote work started during the pandemic I just closed my notebook and well - I'm home but my head is stucking at work. I realised I need to do something. Mostly I go for a walk outside or listen to some records of my vinyl collection, otherwise I can't finish work
Use a Kanban board to keep focused and prioritize work! It helps make yourself accountable so you don't end up playing video games all day :)
Join a Co-working Space
For people that don't know, a co-working space is office space that you rent and where other random people rent and work close by as well.
I'm a full-time web developer and I've worked out of my co-working space cubicle most days. It's great because I:
Obviously this works best if you can afford it and the commute is short.
Wrote about it here.
Great article, with a lot of good info! I work remotely for a major US bank so I don't have options like customizable work hours or a choice of what team I work with, but there is still room for personalizations that make remote work better.
For me, that really comes down to: 1) Much better office furniture (re: chair and desk monitors) than I would be working with in a corporate office space, 2) Better headphones than what they were providing at work, and 3) Break time with my cat. Some of the more open-minded employers still allow people to bring dogs to work, but for pretty obvious reasons, I have yet to hear about a technology workplace that welcomed cats (and cat boxes) on premises.
Cheers,
-->S.
For me: have an end-of-day routine to separate work from personal time, make sure to have pauses along the day, and connect with others away from screens...
I feel that you are asking about working from home, not working remotely. Having been working remotely since 2015 (with 3 years break in between) I'd say the challenges with remote work are mostly organizational and there really not a lot you, as an individual contributor, can do about it.
Sure, there are some small things around communication you could implement (mostly revolving around communicating much more than you'd do working on-site), but it's not really essential.
Definitely I was referring to a lot of what you can do as an individual, but how your org works for sure as well falls into the discussion, e.g. async communication first etc.