More people are encouraged to work from home if they can due to COVID-19, so we thought we’d share some best practices about how to do it well. I live in rural New Brunswick and almost half the GU team is remote, so we’ve learned a few tricks along the way.

First off, let’s address a question that I know niggles at the back of managers’ minds: are employees productive at home? Turns out they are. According to a two-year Stanford study, employees who work from home are 13% more productive, which is massive.

Here’s how you crank that productivity up a notch with good a workspace and Microsoft Office 365 tools:

Tip 1: A comfortable physical space with the right equipment

Even though you’re at home, home doesn’t need to bleed into work and vice-versa.

Create a space where you dedicate to work, and that’s not your bed or couch if possible :) That way, you can still ‘walk away’ at the end of the day, and your brain builds a habit that this is a place to stay focused on work.

It’s also nice to make it comfortable if you can. After all, you are spending a significant portion of your waking hours there. I asked my colleagues what they do for their physical spaces and they have some great ideas to make it comfortable such as:

Ergonomic peripherals
Diffuser to add uplifting scents to the air
Great coffee machine
Heated footrest
Set of curtains to control the lighting
Last but not least…a good quality headset with a solid microphone and speakers. I like mine to be wireless so I can get up and walk around if I want.

Take a moment and assess what works for you!

Tip 2: Set your availability

Knowing when you’re available is critical when you’re remote, because people can’t look over at your desk and see if you’re there.

I make it a habit to be consistent with the times when I’m online and communicate with the team if those times change. My calendar is usually up-to-date, and since we use Microsoft Teams to primarily communicate internally, I update my status there if anything changes. This seems like an obvious thing, but I’ve worked at places where people don’t take the extra minute to let people know where they are. It’s worth doing!

For example, if I’m away, I set a message for the day or week and use the ‘clear status’ feature to remove the message when it isn’t relevant:

*Setting your status is a little extra step that helps the team out.*

We also have a handy calendar on our intranet which functions as our Time Off tracker:

*A shared time off calendar on Gravity Union’s intranet*

Everyone knows to add to this when they have days off.

If your staff is spending more time working remotely work, it’s worth investing in a solid intranet is so that employees can stay connected and know where everyone is.

Tip 3: Remote meetings are better than you think

It’s easier to have a meeting where everyone is remote, rather than if only one or two people are dialing in. If everyone is remote, they all dial into the same experience, and you don’t have to deal with muffled conversations in the corner of a boardroom. Now that more people are working remotely, embrace the fact that your virtual meetings will be better!

My recommendation here is to pick a technology that is intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. At Gravity Union, we use Teams for meetings instead of Skype because it’s reliable and so simple to use. Meetings are easy to start, it’s easy to add info to Outlook calendar invites, and everyone can figure out how to share screens and start recordings. One little thing I like is that it tells me when someone has started a meeting, and it takes one-click to join:

*Notification when someone starts the meeting*

Microsoft is offering anyone its premium version of Teams for free for six months and has lifted existing user limits on its free version. I highly recommend checking it out as an alternative to Skype or Slack.

Tip 4: Facilitate with online collaboration tools

I’m one of those people that likes to grab a whiteboard pen in a meeting to make things visual. It helps people to have a visual guide during a discussion and helps me remember what we talked about. However, you don’t need to be in person to do something like this.

While there is a Whiteboard add-on for Teams, we use XMind, a mind mapping tool for virtual collaboration. We share the screen on Teams and use Xmind to easily move boxes and lines around and capture a discussion.

One specific way we use this is for online card sorting to help design an information architecture. Card sorting is a facilitated technique where subject matter experts provide input into grouping or organizing content. It’s a useful approach for developing  information architecture, simple workflows, navigation, and content metadata. 

Other things you can try: Share your screen during a brainstorming session where you take notes, or use Meeting Notes to capture action items or decisions. Virtual collaboration keeps people on task, and you might just have a more productive conversation.

Tip 5: Communicate, communicate, communicate.

I like to say that people need to hear something seven times to have it sink in. I don’t know if that’s scientifically true, but in my experience too much communication is rarely a bad thing.

When working remotely, it’s important not to be shy about messaging people to ask questions or check-in. Chat in Microsoft Teams is great for this, and once a chat is started it’s easy to jump into a quick call. This is actually more productive in the long run because you can revisit a written chat later, search, save it, etc.

At Gravity Union, we have monthly all-company touchpoints which help people understand company progress and updates. These are recorded within Teams, and automatically uploaded to Microsoft Stream. We can then easily post the videos on our intranet for anyone who missed it. If people are sick, you can still move forward for key meetings or training and record it for people to catch up on their own time.

*Latest videos hosted on Stream on the homepage of our intranet*

Finally, practice your written communication. It might feel like you’re overcommunicating sometimes, but being clear in text is a key skill for remote workers. Scott Berkun, a writer and former Wordpress employee sums it up like this:

“One of the great discoveries I made when I worked for WordPress.com (Automattic Inc. is 100% remote) was how thoughtfully everyone wrote and read, and at every level of the organization. It’s taken for granted that most organizations in the world consistently hire people with good communication skills, but in reality good/mature communication skills are uncommon, and the price paid for poor communicators is amplified for remote workers.”

— Scott Berkun

Tip 6: Take the extra time to setup video

I appreciate it when I can talk to a colleague face-to-face. After all, most of our communication is non-verbal.

Video is optional for most of our meetings, but I’ve also noticed that people are more likely to pay attention if there is video and their face is also visible.

So, if you can, I recommend taking the time to setup video properly in your space by:

Get ready in the morning
Set your camera so you’re in the center of the frame
Sit in front of a neutral background, or a fun bookcase that can spark conversation
Setup good lighting
The most important tip: Have a good headset so that people can hear you well and you can hear what’s going on.

Video doesn’t totally make up for face-to-face interaction, but it can help to maintain connections and get to know people better. It’s worth the effort!

Tip 7: Limit distractions

Someone once said, the greatest enemies of working from home are “the fridge, the TV and the bed.”

“The greatest enemies of working from home are the fridge, the TV and the bed.”

— Someone, somewhere

I’ll admit that it does take some self-discipline to work from home. For me, it’s not doing chores around the house instead of working. I now have a rule – no cleaning until after the workday. Make your own personal rules if you need to.

Another tip to keep your focus is to turn off notifications. To keep from getting distracted, I turn off most notifications on my computer except for Teams. Any new emails, social media updates, etc. are all turned off because those don’t need immediate responses. I set aside time in the morning and late in the day to deal with those.

I’m experimenting with setting focus time a few times a week as well. Insights seems to be a helpful tool to help with that. After a few weeks of using it, it started suggesting focus time to add to my calendar.

*Suggestion for a “focus plan” from Microsoft Insights*

It adds this time to my calendar, in a different shade of green, and sets my status automatically to Do Not Disturb. It also gives you a reminder in Teams that you’re in ‘focus time’ so it was also a subtle dig to not let myself get distracted :) As a next step, it should probably shut down my Internet browser!

*Microsoft Insights adding ‘focus time’ to my calendar based on my meeting and working habits*

I don’t know if this will work for me long term – it’s easy to ignore these things. It’s not perfect, but I get what Microsoft is trying to do here to help people focus.

Tip 8: Get input in other ways

With remote work, since you can’t walk up to people in the lunchroom to ask a question, you might need to get input in other ways. Recently, I tried a Microsoft Form.

I wanted to find out what people wanted to learn about in an upcoming lunch and learn. I used a Form for that and got some great summarized results. I was pleasantly surprised how quick it was to setup the form and see the results summarized:

It’s a great option if you want to ask your team a question and you don’t mind waiting a day or so for input. I like it more than asking live in person because you’re not interrupting people during their focus time, and you can go back to the comments and results later.

Wrap up

As my colleague Mami says:

“If you sign up for working remotely then I feel that it’s on you to be flexible, organized, (somewhat) self-disciplined, and that you’re not shy about reaching out under any situation. And, you really do have to be mindful of the rest of your team since you’re not physically there.”

— Mami

Remote work is possible in most work environments these days, and I encourage you to give it a try if you don’t already. The digital tools make it easy, and in some ways, better than physical office work.