Working Remotely: Be Effective and Stay Connected

This video explores some of the possible different kinds of experiences you might have when working from home and working in the office with remote colleagues.

Introducing the challenges people face when working remotely. 

Some of the more frequent challenges that people report are:

Loss of daily routines, loss of the physical connection and presence, a sense that change is coming fast and unpredictably which feels threatening, uncertainty, disorientation, stress, and loneliness and isolation.

How many of these resonate with the challenges that you have or are experiencing?

Download the workbook and use it to capture your thoughts, ideas and actions to take as you listen to all the videos in this section on the Challenges of working remotely.

Social isolation and loneliness are very common complaints because people miss the social interactions at the office.

Lack of access to information is another key challenge people talk about when working remotely.

Exploring some of the challenges around communication when working remotely, including the technology, and challenges with video conferencing such as screen fatigue and background noises.

The last group of challenges are around your mindset and ability to focus on work despite the distractions of your home environment and the expectations of other people around you, including family and work colleagues. 

We start looking at practical things you can do to make it easier for you to work more effectively from home, starting with shaping your physical structure and boundaries. In this section we focus on your workspace and your physical environment. What do you need around you? What environment helps you to focus and ignore distractions and be at your best?

In this lecture we look at how you can set up your workstation - a separate room? A dedicated table? or do you have to share a workspace with family members? what can you do to help you focus and concentrate there.

Download the PDF of notes to accompany this whole section and also the workbook to capture your ideas, thoughts and actions as you listen to all the lectures in this section.

What do you need to have easily at hand, so that you're not disrupted and distracted out of flow /focus / concentration?

A ritual is a behaviour but also it can become part of your space and the physical environment that you create for yourself to keep you focused and in a work mindset.

Have you got the right technology? What technology do you need? What will make you more effective? What help you focus and concentrate?  - including computer/laptop/tablet, mobile phone with sufficient minutes/data, wifi/broadband at sufficient capacity for video conferencing, software, access to your company intranet, etc.

How can you manage your time in a way that builds up your energy rather than just draining your energy bank, so that you can work much more effectively, while you're working remotely, and create a structure and be really focused on your intention for the day. 

Also vitally important is to know how you personally work with time – are you best first thing in the morning – an early bird? Or late at night – a night owl? When are you most able to focus, concentrate and get into flow in your work where you can ignore distractions?

In this lecture introduces the topics which are then covered in more detail in the rest of the section.

Download the workbook to capture your thoughts, ideas and actions as you work through the lectures.  Think about what will encourage you to actually implement your ideas and do the actions you identify!

We are now going to focus on your priorities – the things that are important to you, that you care about, that you are passionate about and your goals and the things you need to do to achieve them. Do you actually know what your priorities are? Can you identify your top three priorities? How clear are you on the task, and also with your manager and with the team as to what is the most important thing you need to do.

This lecture outlines some useful tools to identify your priorities.

This lecture takes a brief overview of goal setting and and how to break down your goals to small and tiny steps to make it easier to just get started.

One thing that can help you be extremely productive is to create a dedicated block of absolutely undisturbed time and schedule it in for your personal flow time that we mentioned earlier.  Some of the tools we look at are the Power Hour and Pomodorro Technique and also making use of tiny time blocks - 5 and 10 minutes.

REFRESH and RENEWAL TIME is very very important.  Many people put breaks in the 'nice to have' category, not important not urgent. However, to be highly productive means you need high energy so managing time effectively ALSO requires you to manage your energy.  Breaks are VITAL for you to manage and replenish your energy so you perform at your best.

Now you know your priorities, have steps for your tasks broken down to small units of time, know your best time to work when you are in flow, and can schedule your power hour for that period. Now you need to use all that to create your long tern schedule and daily plan. This lecture gives you practical tips on how to do that effectively and remember to protect your plan!

This section we're looking at the social and behavioural structure that you can set up: for yourself and for also the other people around you, and with your colleagues at work to help make it easier for you to work remotely and collaborate together.

So the first element we're looking at is your routines. You probably have noticed that when you're working from home, you have lost your usual routines that you would have every day if you are commuting into your office space. And it's surprising how much these routines make it easy for you to work and get into your work mindset. So to be highly effective when working from home you need to create new routines.   

What was your normal daily routine? What has changed now you are working from home? What do you want to do differently to draw on previous routines that helped you focus and concentrate on work?

Download the workbook to capture your thoughts, ideas and actions.

Routines that help you transition between work and home are vital for you to properly focus and be fully present in work even when you are working in your home environment, and then to be fully present at home so you are not thinking about work instead of concentrating on family or other activities you do away from work.

Continuing looking at how you manage social and behavioural structure and boundaries to be more effective when working remotely, we're looking now specifically at how are you manage expectations of yourself and other people including work colleagues and family.  What are you expecting of yourself? Have you assessed it or are you just assuming you can do everything as before?  What is reasonable? How clear are you about other people's expectations? What assumptions are possibly false?

Clarity on expectations involves having conversations about what is expected and when.  eg: at home, when is it ok for family to ask you to do things with /for them, and when you are at work not to be disturbed unless specific circumstances occur. what are those circumstances. etc.    Protecting your schedule involves managing expectations.

Arranging conversations with your boss and work colleagues helps to clarify expectations, and help everyone feel they know what is happening, which is vital for working well together.

In addition to managing our expectations we need to come up with ways to support us to collaborate well with our colleagues. And this means we need to consciously take action to overcome the virtual distance that we feel when working remotely. This lecture looks at some of the factors that contribute to virtual distance.

Virtual Distance = Physical Distance + Operational Distance + Affinity Distance

Download the workbook which also has notes to support you to work through the lectures in section 8 on collaborating with colleagues.

This lecture looks at ways of communicating with colleagues, and the assumptions they involve about when everyone is working (at the same time or potentially at different times). 

This lecture includes a very short introduction to a Team Charter.  The Managing Remotely course goes into much more detail about developing your team charter for working remotely.

This lecture looks at some ideas for how you can strengthen your social connection with your colleagues and build trust, which makes it easier for you to work well together.

This lecture gives an example of getting along while confined to the tiny space of a small boat. Some ideas of how to give each other space for doing their own thing, and making new routines to create a positive environment when you are together.

Here we look at how can you create a positive environment, where you can continue to enjoy living and doing things together, even now you may be in each other's space, all day, instead of only after work, or outside of work hours and at weekends.