What is one best practice for teleworking?

If you're teleworking, it's still important to find ways to connect with your team members at work. Without connections, it's harder to collaborate and everything is just less enjoyable. Join employee interest groups, invite team members for virtual coffee, and when you do make it into the office find time to connect with peers in person. Those relationships will make work more enjoyable, even when you're teleworking.

One tip for teleworking is sharing your schedule so that your coworkers can see when you are available. Feel free to add in blocks of focus time to your schedule too so that you aren't bombarbed with slack messages when you are trying to grind through a project. Allowing your team to see when you are busy and when you aren't should mitigate the back and forth of when you are available to meet or message. If you are using a messaging platform like slack, integrate it with your online calendar so that when someone goes to chat you, they can tell if you are in a meeting.

Working from home can feel isolating, but communication breaks those barriers. Whether you use slack or another form of chat, make sure that you are creating a communication flow. Fostering communication even if it is just socially, will lead to collaborative ideas. Creating a communication flow keeps employees engage while working from home and allows them to feel more comfortable to talk during meetings freely. You can even create different chat channels, about unrelated and work related topics just to keep your employees enjoying their telework experience.

The best practice for teleworking is to organize in-person meetings every once in a while, as face-to-face meetings aren’t effective from a communication standpoint. But it allows the remote workers to create a sense of faith among themselves. Therefore, you should motivate in-person meetings with your colleagues to create a personal connection with them. Mainly, it’s the liability of a team leader to schedule face-to-face meetings among teleworkers. However, you can also take charge and organize such meetings with one or more remote team members. Lastly, limiting such meetings to once a year is the best option for bigger teams.

Our company uses video tutorials to teach essential processes or how to use company software. When working in an office, it is easy to ask a quick question to the colleague next to you. In an online environment, primarily when your team works across different time zones, it might take time to get an answer. As a result, the work process gets disrupted. With video tutorials, it is easy to do training at any time of the day. Even if you forget something, you can always re-watch a specific part. We've also created chapters, so navigating through a longer tutorial is more user-friendly.

It's easy to get caught up in the grind of the workday and forget to take a break. This can lead to headaches, eye strain, depression, and more. Taking breaks not only helps you stay healthy and focused on your work; it also helps you avoid burnout. Be sure to take care of yourself to prevent getting sick or burnout from all the time spent working from home without enough breaks between tasks or projects.

Time management. Teleworking can be convenient because a team member can set their own pace and have more flexible hours. However, that flexibility also means a less structured schedule and environment than the rigid hours of an office provide. It is essential to manage your time as well as you would do in an office environment, with all the perks of working remote. Keep a clear schedule of time sensitive meetings and tasks, so you can better take advantage of the flexibility of the day. Time management is essential even when teleworking.

One of the best ways to stay connected is to join a few online groups that are relevant to your work. There are lots of online groups for remote workers — from gardening to programming. You can also join professional networking groups, like Remote RE, which has over 17,000 members.

Teamwork is paramount to the success of any endeavor that involves a remote or dispersed workforce. Teamwork that is built off of healthy communication is necessary to make a teleworking team successful. Being active listeners, being focused during calls, and making the effort to reach out throughout the day are hallmarks of great teamwork. Without teamwork, things quickly run off the rails, especially with remote teams. Work doesn't get done, communication, suffers, and overall failure to achieve becomes the reality. It can be easy to silo oneself off from the team when teleworking, and at first it might feel okay, especially if you're getting your own work done. But, you lose sight of what the other pieces of the puzzle are doing. Staying engaged, communicating often and clearly, and working together by focusing on the tasks and goals at hand, will be foundational to a teleworking team's success. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Optimizing time management is key when working from home. There are countless background distractions outside of the office. Working from a home space can present a variety of cues from one’s personal life that can interrupt a working session. Only a few distractions can add up to a significant amount of wasted time if they recur throughout the day. The flexibility that working from home offers may fool some employees into thinking that they operate in a distracted environment and still be as productive as they need to be. Time management is necessary to avoid the distractions that are present while working from home.

It's important to create a team environment especially when working remotely. Build a culture off of collaboration and communication. While the face-to-face interaction is no longer present, employees need to work together and be on the same page. Schedule collaboration sessions and weekly check-ins with teams to ensure both parties are working off of each other and not individually.

Communication should be the top priority. It's nearly impossible to over communicate with remote teams. You don't have the opportunity to collaborate in person, check-in at each other's desks, or chat in the break room. Misunderstandings are likely to happen because you aren't all working together in an office setting. This means you'll have to come up with new ways to communicate effectively and clearly. Determine early on how your team will communicate, as well as the best channels for various types of work and topics (e.g., performance reviews vs. project updates). With remote work, it's better to make sure several times that everybody is on the same page and has good communication.

There is no one best practice for teleworking, since it can be done in a variety of ways and depends on the individual and their work situation. However, some tips for successful teleworking include communicating regularly with your supervisor and coworkers, being organized and disciplined, staying focused and productive, and taking breaks periodically. It's also important to have a dedicated workspace where you can focus without distractions, and to schedule regular check-ins with your supervisor to ensure that you're on track.

While it might be tempting to sit in your pajamas when working from home, doing that will harm your productivity and general well-being. You'd be surprised how much more efficient you are once you put some effort into preparing for your workday. Our mind likes routine and works better once it knows when to switch from leisure time or household chores to work-related tasks. My advice is to dress up for your workday at home as if someone from work were to knock on your door and enter your house unexpectedly. That means you look presentable and neat, and so does your place. The good idea is to devote 5-10 minutes to put on some make-up, do your hair, and dress up in clothes that are comfortable but presentable. Following this simple tip will make you feel better and give you extra confidence when performing your tasks or participating in virtual meetings.

It's important to emphasize teamwork when telecommuting. We're all in this together, and a collaborative environment is important in any setting. Try to work in teams and host meetings where all employees opinions are heard and encouraged. In doing so, it creates an engaging and productive work culture.

Give yourself regular breaks and schedule them in advance. Surf the web for 5 minutes, chat with a friend, get a snack, go for a walk. Schedule them in advance so that have structure to your day. You are less likely to get sidetracked and more able to focus.