Don’t worry about working from home, just practice
If you are facing the prospect of working from home in the weeks and months ahead and if you manage a team or organization, you’re probably wondering how to keep people and projects moving forward. What about all of the scheduled meetings? Won’t productivity come to a grinding halt? Nothing has to stop or even slow down when your team works remotely, especially if you practice in advance.
A NOTE FROM IbD: This blog was posted prior to the major shifts that now have millions of people working from home without an opportunity to “practice” and then come back together. We recommend that your team still make time to check-in, debrief, and continue to improve how you all are working together as we have outlined below. Think of your first days and weeks as a “pilot” and go from there….
What does it mean to practice remote working? Before circumstances demand it, have your team or entire organization pilot telework by doing it for a day or two. For example, tell everyone that you all will be working from home next Thursday and then plan to debrief on the experience.
Sure, it may feel like you’ll lose some precious time if you have everyone pilot working from home for a day, but this will ultimately save you a lot of time in the long run. By working out the kinks of telework ahead of time, your team will be prepared to charge forward when the need arises and not get caught up in the endless delays of figuring out how to stay efficient and effective. A little investment of time now will save you time and headaches later.
If you are an organization responsible for animal care you clearly can’t have everyone work from home all the time, but having some employees work remotely may become a reality. Pilot this dynamic to figure out how to keep all staff connected and working well together when some are in and some are out of the building.
Tips for Piloting Remote Work
As your team or organization embark on a pilot of remote work, here are some tips to get the most out of the experience:
Set up a meeting beforehand to answer questions and strategize logistics. Those of us on remote teams have already established our social and professional norms for working from home, so this is a chance for you to build some of your own. Ask your team to brainstorm a list of all of the considerations and then tackle them one by one. You will want to consider things such as:
What is the platform you will use for meetings? Should everyone be on video? (We recommend it!)
Does everyone have the technology they need - headphones and microphones for meetings, laptops, and necessary software installed?
Is there a digital way to sign forms for those who don’t have printers and scanners at home?
What are the expected working hours? (Things can start to get very loose very quickly when folks transition to working from home, so it is good to be clear up front.)
How will you keep staff engaged and in regular communication? Will you use e-mail, text, phone calls, or a platform like Slack?
Try it out and see how it goes. When you pilot remote work, don’t reschedule meetings and overturn the plans for the day - the point is to figure out how to make things work as scheduled. Some of the logistical issues you’d tried to iron out will run smoothly, and some additional challenges will arise. If you really want to surface all of your team’s challenges with remote work, try it for a few days in a row.
Debrief and fix the glitches. This is where the power of piloting comes in – take the time to sit down and figure out what worked well and how you can maximize that going forward, as well as what the challenges were and how you can avoid them in the future. If your team or organization makes agreements around working norms, policies, or practices, make sure they are written down and well understood by all.
As you and your team explore what it can mean to work remotely, here is some really good news – about 4.7 million employees in the U.S. alone work from home at least half the time[1]. Telework is not new, which means there are some tried and true practices that remote workers have been using for years to stay as productive as their office-based counterparts. With a short pilot, your team can build and establish these practices for yourselves.
At IbD, our entire team is comprised of individuals who came from office working environments and are now thriving as remote employees. If you have any questions or concerns about how to make it work for you, please feel free to reach out.
Interested in more ideas about how to make remote work a success? Check out these other topics:
[1] 2005-2018 (released in 2019) American Community Survey (US Census Bureau) data conducted by GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com.
