As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic wreaks havoc worldwide, businesses everywhere must deal with some of the most difficult challenges ever. They must try to continue operating and find ways to keep their employees productive while being quarantined at home. Suddenly, remote work has become mandatory for industries to survive.
To shift from the conventional workplace to a business enterprise with remote workers does take time and preparation. And making the transition without ample time to prepare usually results in adverse outcomes.
By knowing the basics of how to work from home, you’ll likely learn that remote working does work, and it can be observed for the long-term. This article will help you–as a business owner or a manager–to go through that critical stage of preparing your business to initiate and benefit from the work from home scheme.
How to Work Remotely from Home Table of Contents
Perhaps still unknown to many, working from home is the new commute. Even prior to Covid-19, home-based work or telecommuting has been on a steady increase, even gaining a 22% increase from 2017 to 2018.
Along with the changing demographic lifestyles and consumer behavior, this emerging trend is riding high on technological advancements. With the advent of cloud-based solutions like file-sharing, video conferencing, and project management, being physically present in the office all the time has become pointless.
We’re at the crossroads of a new era of workplace flexibility and convenience. Among millennial workers in 2019, 69% cited a willingness to forgo other benefits just to have flexible work alternatives. Also, even Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are also opting for flexibility in their job arrangements.
Financial activities Professional & business services Information Manufacturing Public administration Other services Education & health services Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2017–2018, September 2019Percentage of Workers Who Can Work from Home per Industry
Financial activities: 57
Professional & business services: 53
Information: 53
Manufacturing: 30
Public administration: 30
Other services: 28
Education & health services: 26
Remote work or work from home is nothing new. In fact, home-based work came first long before the current 9–5 work became prevalent. A hallmark creation of the Industrial Revolution, the 8-hour office, or workplace-based setup has long been the norm.
But history seems to be repeating itself, but this time as something that must happen fast. Within this scenario, let’s dive into the important details about work from home. We’ll first discuss its key benefits, misconceptions, etc., and focus on working remotely tips and tools before diving into remote working best practices.
Work from Home Pros and Cons
Implementing work-from-home arrangements with your employees will open doors to new opportunities for your entire organization. However, it is not something that can be done easily and fast without making even the smallest preparations given the abrupt need to do so. And to do so, one needs to familiarize with remote working techniques.
Before diving into the work-from-home frenzy, it’s best to know the advantages and drawbacks of this work setup first.
What are the benefits of work from home?
According to an analysis of over 4,000 case studies, work from home offers both employers and employees numerous advantages. Among the most crucial benefits, this work setup:
- provides businesses cost and resource savings
- lessens employee attrition
- boosts collaboration among remote work teams
- enhances employee satisfaction
- improves worker productivity
- supports employee empowerment
- offers new job opportunities for the unemployed and underemployed
- cuts unscheduled absences
- makes your talent pool bigger
- removes the need for the daily commute
- guarantees operational continuity even during times of crisis
What are the cons of working from home?
Since there’s no such thing as a perfect technique or measure, home-based work also has its share of downsides. The most crucial of these are as follows:
- It is not suitable for all jobs
- Management mistrust
- Jealousy among the ranks
- Career-related fears
- Need for reliable IT infrastructure
- Data security concerns
- Double taxation
- Collaboration issues
It should be noted that both work-from-office and work-from-home have their own benefits and drawbacks. However, in light of the current pandemic, work from home has become a more compelling option.
Step-by-Step Guide to Establishing a Remote Work Setup
The success of a work from home worker primarily depends on the worker’s actual performance. Crucial to this is the employee’s skill set and overall efficiency. However, work from home will never be realized without a suitable home-based office or work station that facilitates the worker’s productivity. So what’s the best setup for remote work?
Within the current context to quickly implement a work from home setup, companies that are remote-work friendly already have a good grasp of how the work from home setup works. This is why these companies either already have existing strategies in place or can easily transition into one.
1. Make the business fit for remote work
The first thing to consider is to assess if your business already has the systems and tools to support a work from home setup. If you’ve already allowed some job functions to be done remotely, this is a big plus.
Businesses also can turn to their disaster recovery and business continuity (DR/BC) plans, which provides a definitive roadmap to arranging for a remote workforce. Whether it’s a pandemic, a hurricane, or other natural disasters, these organizations are assured that their employees have laptops, wifi, VPN, and other provisions to continue work at home.
However, this isn’t the case for other companies with little experience or no existing provisions for a remote work setup. The challenge can be overwhelming, although it’s something that should be addressed. These business organizations should plan and act fast regarding vital technology and other tools their staff will require to continue their work outside the workplace. Managers will also have to prepare themselves for the unique challenges of remote team management.
Different departments make up a company, with each department composed of various job positions. Some business devices like PCs, laptops, and phones are generic. However, there are job-specific applications and technological tools that must be provided to fully support their remote tasks.
2. Require employees to designate a permanent workspace
If every long journey begins with that first step, well, your first step in your remote work journey starts with having the employee assign an actual office area in their home. This is critical because the location of the home office will spell the difference between productivity and doing less than planned.
If the employee has a spare guest room or an empty space, that’s a good place to set up a home office. However, if they have limited space, the best recourse is to set up a home desk for their PC or laptop and office materials.
Wherever they decide to situate their home office, they must stick by that decision. They should commit to working in that precise area in their home to facilitate familiarity. This is one of the best ways to transition to a work from home arrangement.
3. Don’t settle for less than a company-approved home workstation
On top of any “how to work remotely” setup list is a workstation that your company approves for home use. To economize and ensure that the specs are met, just allow your staff to bring home the PC he/she is using. This is the fastest and cost-free approach to addressing this need.
But if your company uses a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, you can allow your staff to use their own laptops and other devices. It is good practice to provide them with the minimum system requirements to ensure their workstation complies with company standards.
If your staff will be using their own laptops, it is advisable to provide them with an external monitor, as well as an external keyboard and mouse. Laptops are great for mobile work but are not ergonomic for a whole day’s work at a home office.
Finally, if you’ve allowed your staff to bring your company desktop, make sure every cable and cord is included in the transfer. A robust home-based workstation will be useless if it doesn’t have, for example, a power cable to make it run.
4. Ensure that required software solutions are installed
After taking care of the hardware, the other important consideration is the software. If your employees use cloud-based apps in their jobs, you need to provide secure access to both the apps and company data. It is also good to require them to use a good VPN solution to provide them secure access, especially when accessing data behind a business firewall.
When it is not possible to transfer a desktop or software program outside the office. There are a number of ways to do this. You can deploy a remote desktop protocol solution. An RDP tool is a default app in Windows and is also with paid and open-source editions.
If in case some solutions or proprietary systems are impossible to be used off-site or accessed remotely, options are still available. For instance, you could arrange for using a similar baseline solution to allow them to perform their tasks while at home. Adjustments can just be made at company headquarters to make their completed tasks suitable to the in-house systems.
5. Get WiFi and security protocols in place
Another essential requirement is a fast and reliable broadband internet connection. When your remote staff uses a slow and erratic internet connection, your business workflow isn’t only disrupted, but your staff’s concentration and productivity are also affected.
To practice safe internet access, you should oblige your staff to use wired connections over wireless. Using a CAT-5 ethernet cable has lesser latency, is more reliable, and more secure.
However, if a Wi-Fi connection is the only option, a newer 802.11ac router is the best choice. It offers throughput of several hundreds of megabits, which is more than enough to ensure a seamless internet connection and smooth workflows.
6. Check for auxiliary devices and gadgets
If your staff requires printing hard copies of documents in their task, you can either let them bring a portable company printer or provide them one for remote use.
Another common office gadget is a headset. Provide them with a good USB headset to allow them to easily participate in online meetings. In case there’s none available, they can temporarily use their own wireless earbuds that can connect their laptop or smartphone via Bluetooth.
Finally, an often overlooked office equipment is the UPS with AVR. In times of crisis, power fluctuations are more prevalent, so a UPS will not only ensure continuous power supply, but it will also protect your staff’s devices from sudden power surges. Unlike laptops, desktops have no internal batteries, so having a UPS ensures that they’ll have ample time to save their work.
7. Ensure other needs are met
If you can provide all these requirements, your work-from-home team is good to go. Preparing the hardware component does entail financial costs and relocation needs. But the more significant challenge is ensuring that employees have access to the software systems and business data that they’ll be working with.
It’s good that there are numerous cloud-based productivity tools, communications apps, project management solutions, and collaboration platforms to make home-based work easier and productive. Without these software solutions, remote work will be very difficult, if not entirely impossible, to have. If you’re looking for a reliable project management tool that numerous companies worldwide trust, monday.com is a good choice. (We’ll discuss this more in a separate section below.)
Run this Remote Work Checklist
The common notion that a work-from-home scheme involves setting up a similar office workplace environment in your home has considerable truth in it. The basic premise of this system is transferring the existing traditional work setup into the employee’s dwelling unit.
Another important principle that must be followed is that your organizational culture should also change to embrace remote work. While the current demand is unexpected and immediate due to the pandemic, your business should begin thinking of operating in a distributed work arrangement. This will make the transition more bearable and become a long-term mindset.
And in case some jobs are simply very hard or even impossible to do in a work-from-home setup, that job or process should be fixed. So we’ve prepared this set of key questions that must be addressed to ensure your work-from-home setup will be an effective one:
1. How can we make sure we can have people working from home?
This, undoubtedly, is among the most common questions that come to mind when considering the need to implement remote work setups.
Yes, shifting to remote work is more of a total disruption of how a business operates. However, today’s generation of software and hardware tools have already demonstrated that this setup is feasible, effective, and even more beneficial in the long run.
Simply put, all companies today are virtually ready for remote work arrangements. However, the more challenging aspect is really not in a company’s structure. It’s more about the readiness of the corporate culture and policy to embrace the shift.
2. Do we need to change how work is organized and assignments are allocated?
Chances are your teams had been using project management solutions for years, usually when dealing with mobile members and suppliers. This time, these platforms will increasingly be used for managing a dispersed workforce.
Tools like monday.com, Jira, Trello, and Github have proven to be indispensable for this purpose. But adjustments must be made as these tools will be used more extensively than before. Knowing the latest project management trends will help in using these tools to your advantage.
Safeguards should be set in place when sharing privileged information and business docs to ensure security. Likewise, file access must be properly controlled using user-based credentials.
3. What can you provide to ensure your remote staff will be productive?
More than ever, people need as much support that they can get during these trying times. While you’ve ensured that salaries will still be given on schedule, it’s crucial to provide an accidental budget to cover for the new expenses that working from home will entail.
Depending on the extent of work arrangements, this can be for the short-term or on a regular basis. How much this new set of costs vary from one business to another and from one job to the next. However, these things are worth considering:
- chair and desk costs
- IT-approved workstation
- Internet costs
- headset with microphone
- babysitting costs
- desk light or webcam light
- webcam
4. How can we transition from in-person to virtual meetings?
Let’s face it; one of the first things any newly dispersed work team must do is how to keep everyone on the same page by conducting meetings. However, the shift from in-person meetings into online, virtual team sessions do require considerable adjustments.
As a manager, conduct online meetings that are absolutely important. As such, virtual meeting protocols should be carefully prepared, evaluated, and implemented. Choosing virtual team communication tools with audio/video conferencing capabilities is a must.
So you and your team have to make the most of every voice or video call or conference that will be held. In case you still don’t have an organization-wide communications system, it’s time to explore the top options like Skype (for web-based texting and international calls), Zoom (for webinars and online training), and Slack (for team messaging and collaboration) and identify which is most suitable for your needs.
5. Will work from home tasks run smoothly?
Companies ordinarily have highly-restricted IT protocols. This practice is understandable, given the need to constantly safeguard company documents and systems.
However, during these extraordinary situations, your IT unit should make the necessary adjustments to allow seamless work from home processes. Still, it is problematic to provide guidance on this matter, considering the unique context and complicated requirements of each business.
One effective approach here is to learn from experience, i.e., have your IT teams work from home so that they’ll know firsthand how to design a functioning, yet still secure IT protocol. This will also allow your IT team to provide better support in case of technical issues.
6. How can we ensure productivity among work from home teams?
Thousands of dynamic organizations have been benefiting from the work from home model for years. But despite this, many companies still refrain from doing so because of the lingering fear that people will likely stop working when they’re at home.
From a management point of view, this problem stems from two major reasons. First is the lack of management trust in employees. Second is the wrong focus on the time spent rather than the work outcomes of employees.
Again, this is something coming from a company’s culture rather than from its structure. And to address this will take time, but it should be dealt with carefully. It is suggested to hold a series of discussions to gather as much relevant data as possible.
Relevant insights can then be derived, which will help design effective plans of action. These would include needed changes in workplace policies, workflows, processes, and management style.
7. How can we ensure we won’t miss anything important?
Even the most prepared and well-designed remote working plan is bound to fail when a program is set in motion the first time. Or when something that was missed earlier finally emerges.
A good practice to make sure that all bases will be covered when implementing a work from home setup is by setting up a continuous feedback system. By providing an accessible way to share problems fast, managers can quickly respond by referring the issue to the concerned teams.
When a process or software system doesn’t work correctly at home, an efficient reporting protocol should be in place. It will be helpful to use tech tools like Crowdsignal or Google Form to share feedback and incident reports easily, quickly, and in an organized manner.
Problems should be expected for teams that are new to remote work and these problems will likely reduce over time. Key to this will be stakeholder visibility and communications to allow for fast resolution.
Must-Have Tools for Work from Home
Now that managing a remote team is becoming the norm, you will want to make sure that your team is productive. The good thing is there are many types of remote work software that you can use to manage a remote team and ensure that they are working.
1. Communication and collaboration software
Work from home employees cannot physically approach their colleagues and engage in face-to-face discussions about work-related problems. However, these off-site workers have their own advantages in terms of fewer unimportant meetings and distractions from co-employees.
They can also benefit immensely from the advantages that communication tools and collaboration software provide to remote workers. These software solutions ensure important messages quickly reach the proper recipients so that tasks are completed on time.
These tools also allow screen sharing and quick team room creation, which are a must for remote work.
Top Example: Trello is an all-in-one, cloud-based team messaging tool that provides you a single hub that helps simplify all your communication needs. It offers a wide array of smart features tools and functionalities as well as helps you efficiently monitor multiple work statuses from start to their completion. It can be accessed using any device, be it a desktop or mobile device.
A popular app when it comes to team communications, Trello is an complete business communication hub for businesses big and small.
Good Alternatives: Pushnami, Speakap, and Asana.
2. Project management software
These tools are already a staple in completing millions of projects worldwide for decades. Today, they’re now becoming a go-to tool for work from home teams.
Effective project management software helps remote workers monitor all their projects and tasks. It also keeps every team member on the same page despite the considerable physical gap.
Top Example: monday.com is a robust platform that syncs all project information, from team communications and task details, in a single convenient dashboard. This smart design makes it easier to keep everyone in the loop, thereby facilitating better teamwork and faster task completion.
monday.com
Try out monday.com with their free trial
monday.com’s centralized dashboard makes it easy to keep every remote team member on the same page.
Good Alternatives: Wrike, Jira, and Smartsheet.
3. Measuring and monitoring productivity software
Until today, many business owners continue to have some doubts that remote workers can remain productive even outside the workplace. This concern is a reasonable one, but you can definitely do something about it.
The best way to address this is by deploying an application to monitor and measure employee productivity. Using productivity software to measure and monitor remote workers’ performance is just a few clicks away using the best productivity software.
Top Example: ProjectManager is an award-winning cloud-based productivity and project management tool that integrates robust planning, scheduling, and collaboration functionalities. It is trusted by thousands of project teams across the world, including the U.N., Volvo, and NASA, for helping track employee performance.
ProjectManager simplifies new project creation, task planning, asset allocation, and progress monitoring of all your projects using a unified platform.
Good Alternatives: Mavenlink, Flock, and Workboard.
4. Time and attendance software
There are lots of time and attendance monitoring solutions in the market today. While the previous type of tool focuses more on managing the quality of team output, time tracking tools mainly function to monitor the time and attendance of remote workers and home-based employees. You should look for those that can:
- monitor whenever a remote staff is working or on a break
- track and send reports of work hours rendered on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis
- verify that tracked time and breaks are accurate
- provide home-based employees some level of flexibility in their work schedules
- enable work from home staff to use their workstations to track time and validate the precision of their tracked time without compromising their privacy.
Top Example: Time Doctor is a reliable time tracking solution that provides a high level of accuracy in monitoring employee work rendered. It also allows both managers and staff to simplify numerous time tracking-related tasks, including daily/weekly/monthly time monitoring, time use (per task or project), attendance, and a host of reporting and analytics tools.
Detailed Time Doctor Review
When it comes to precision and reliability, Time Doctor is the time tracking tool of choice.
Good Alternatives: Clarizen, Zoho Projects, and BigTime.
5. Job-specific solutions
The above software applications are for generic remote work use only. Specialized solutions for particular jobs (e.g., accountants, HR, engineers, marketers, etc.) should also be provided by the company to ensure process continuity and individual productivity.
Has Your Work Finally Found Its Home?
Planned changes in the workplace are easier to address than unplanned ones, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. The mere management of home-based workers is already challenging, and ensuring that these remote employees are productive makes it more difficult.
Numerous factors should be taken into account. Aside from the hardware and software requirements, other tangible and intangible aspects must be addressed. For instance, your home-based staff should have good lighting, enough space, and an ergonomic chair to make their home offices comfortable, safe, and healthy. Likewise, placing a “Do Not Disturb” sign while working at home can do wonders.
Businesses should use today’s Covid-19 pandemic as the perfect opportunity to try and benefit from the work from home setup and implement it, perhaps, for the long term.
The tips discussed here will help you and your remote workers to gain and sustain the correct mindset. Working from home used to be a privilege but is now a necessity. Indeed, home is where the heart is. But with the current and other pandemics that have come our way, the home is where our work is.
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