Leading from Home: How to Excel in a Remote Work Environment
What’s happening to you with all this remote work? We are social beings, we get stir crazy, and screens are sticky—hard to leave once you sit down and get hooked. How can we stay sane? And motivated, effective and enthusiastic? Top takeaways from over 25 years of working from home.
I’ve always worked remotely. That’s a full career of working from a home office. I’m in my mid-fifties, which means I’ve been doing this ever since technology made it possible and long before digital nomad became a buzzword or Covid-19 forced everyone else to adopt this “new” workstyle. I’ve been known to resist going to meetings, occasionally spouting words like “what a waste of time” and soupboxing over the efficient use of my energy. I even shut down one of my businesses because there were way too many flights to participate in meetings that could have been more efficient (and less costly and engender less pollution) if done remotely.
So, it’s been fascinating for me over the past few months to participate in masterminds and work with clients to understand where the shift to home office becomes rough and how best to survive, keep motivation high, and invent personal adaptations to maintain a balance. It comes down to rethinking our relationship to work and how it fits into our life.
Mastering Productive Remote Work
Here are a few ideas that emerge from both my personal experience and this confrontation with a global experiment.
Negotiate Boundaries with Everyone
Boundaries slip away quickly. Negotiate them with your boss, colleagues, partners, children, and anyone else involved in your day. Communicate them clearly. Stick to them firmly. This means that lunchtime is lunchtime. Family time family time. And work time work time. No ifs, ands or buts about it. It helps to:
Really use your planner: schedule time for email, time for family, time for interruptions, time for breaks.
Set rules for interruptions.
Establish a not-to-do list.
Be Clear What Really Needs Input from Other Humans
People miss social interactions and face-to-face collaboration. Admit it, sometimes you just want to hear another voice. It’s human nature, which means we have to manage it. You can’t replace the coffee machine, but we can make a conscious effort to recreate this kind of spontaneous connection by being intentional and present when you see other people and through random acts of kindness among coworkers. It helps to:
Let go of what’s not adding value, what’s from other people’s agendas, and what doesn’t need your attention to function.
Be intentional.
Ask if you really need another Zoom call for this.
Savor the Difference
When my husband first transitioned to remote work a number of years ago, he used to loll around in bed in the morning and listen to the traffic reports—thoroughly appreciating that he was not longer commuting. Savoring it. There’s no question that the key benefits of working from home are less time spent on commuting, more family time and more flexibility.
Savoring the difference can take many forms: going to the supermarket during the day, when everyone is “at work.” Shifting up your hours to get in a walk when the sun is out. Enjoying an actual sit-down meal at lunch with family. Taking the “coffee break” to make a call or meditate. Listening to the silence and remarking the lack of interruptions.
The operational word here is flexibility: embrace the difference and play with it. Do your hours need to be the same? Giving space to yourself and your team to shift things around requires us all to be more responsible and trust that others will do the same.
Expect different rather than less from your teams.
As much as your inner control freak wants to assert itself, it’s really got to let go.
Focus on Focus
For this to work, you need to focus when you it’s time to focus. So:
Turn off all notifications.
Set at timer to 50 or 60 minutes to give your brain a break on a regular basis.
Outside scheduled focus time, give yourself a change of pace, let the mind wander.
Schedule time for distractions, emails, interruptions.
Use BrainFM.
Move All the Time
The shift from offices to home seriously increased our sedentary lifestyle—no more walking up an down the steps of the subway, moving between meetings, sharing wellness activities during lunch, etc. Never forget that our bodies are made to have low-level physical activity all day long. It helps to:
Buy a kettlebell, set it near your desk and pick it up whenever you go anywhere.
During your hourly breaks, stand up and alternate low-intensity stretching with higher intensity squats or other activity.
Schedule in a 20-minute walk everyday.
Top Six Remote Work Hacks
Know yourself: When do you need people and for what? Be honest.
Give yourself intentional time to really transition roles from boss to mom, from mom to life partner.
Regulate your sleep so you don’t have to use an alarm clock. It takes practice and shifting to an earlier bedtime, but the freedom is so worth it! And your body gets you up at the right moment in your sleep cycle.
Enjoy one thing every day you wouldn’t do in an office setting.
Use different kinds of sitting/working arrangements to switch it up to give your body some variety: a chair, a ball, an armchair, a standing desk (I just use a box on my desk—and regularly stand up and move my laptop on top of it).
Remember to bring extra focus into online meetings—if you can be really present and focused on the other people, you’ll have an edge over everyone else.
How to Show Your Colleagues Some Love
Don’t use Zoom backgrounds (they are really distracting)
Turn off notifications when connecting with someone, so you really are present
Think KISS: keep it short and simple
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.”