How to work remotely?

As a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic, for most of us, today’s reality looks far different than it used to. According new guidelines and updates, many of us are working from home because safety comes first for each and every employee. The main concern right now is the health and welfare of our families, our customers, partners and ourselves.

Are we ready for remote working? Do we know how to organise our new daily routine?

We are now forced to manage additional responsibilities for childcare or eldercare. At the same time we meet regardless of where we are and where we work from. We can meet and work online. What is more, companies keep hiring and onboarding while working remotely.

Some advice

For this reason we prepared for you work-from-home effectively guidelines made of 10 rules:

1. Work on the daily routine. Solid plan will help you to stay on the track. Both, your goals and time schedule should be planned and taken into consideration before you start working from home.
2. Keep working hours so other coworkers know when you are available to work. Otherwise some people may think that you are always available. The best idea is to set your hours weekly and inform about them in the business notifications.
3. Set your short-term and long-term goals to stay organised and focused on the priorities. Remember that self discipline is very important so we advise you to keep a log of your hours to help you manage that.
4. Use remote tools (e.g., MS Teams, Zoom, WebEx video conferencing- more of them we will describe in the next article). That would help you to stay connected to your customers and deliver uninterrupted remote support.
5. Limit interruptions and distractions from family members, email, tv and social media notifications. Observe what distracts you the most. Once you know that, make an action plan to limit these distractions.
6. Prepare your own working space, relax space, meal space, etc. These steps would help you to create a productive working environment.
7. Give full attention to what you are doing now. Even if you are multitasking, please focus on one thing at a time. It can be tempting to mix work duties and housewrok but set the boundries to avoid mistakes at work.
8. Be available to prove that you are really working so answer your calls and emails as soon as possible. That would help you to build trust with your work colleagues and business partners.
9. Remember about travel restrictions now to prevent non-essential travel and travel all together in high-risk locations.
10. Keep confidentiality of the information - in the business environment, it’s very important follow all policies and procedures regarding the data safety. You may feel comfortable when working at home but ensure nobody can see or acess sensitive data!

We believe these are best practices for remote working and we hope you will benefit from them. Even though it’s challenging time, we need to make use of the technologies we have available to stay in touch with the family, friends, work colleagues and business partners.