Remote Working 2.0 Tips

According to labour market think tank Eurofound, Ireland had one of the highest rates of employees working from home during the Covid-19 crisis.

Their Living, working and Covid-19 survey tracks labour market shifts, and found that roughly 40% of paid hours worked by employees were performed from home at the height of the crisis.

With people now more comfortable working from home after a tumultuous shift to get us there, we at Accelerator Team wanted to explore how we can generate greater efficiencies, effectiveness and productivity in our new normal.

Background

We all found a number of challenges to working from home in 2020 - building camaraderie, creating a work-life balance and project management, to name a few.

For us at Accelerator Team, with employees working intimately together but spread physically across Ireland, France and Israel, the concept of remote working was already familiar long before it became the norm for most non-essential workers. However, to ensure that productivity levels remained high, we still had to determine what adjustments were necessary now that our entire team and our clients were fully working from home.

Tips

We asked our team for some of their top tips to optimise the remote working experience in 2021.
Here are some of their suggestions.

Tip #1: Have a dedicated place to work
Find a spot in your home where you can fully set up a workstation that you will centre yourself at when working. Ensure that you have reliable hardware and effective software. Spend the money upfront on good, reliable, and well spec’d resources – you’ll thank yourself for this investment in the long-run!

Tip #2: Keep your office-based schedule
While it may be tempting to get those extra couple minutes of sleep, try to keep the same schedule you had when you were going into the office. This helps keep structure to your day, but also frees up the time you used to spend commuting. Use that extra time to exercise, listen to a podcast, make breakfast or spend time with your family.

Tip #3: Plan your day for efficiency
Since it is much easier to get distracted from your tasks at home, plan out your day each morning. Figure out what you need to do to help the team reach its goals, respect the start/end times of your teammates’ days and get dressed as if you were going into the office to get yourself in the right mindset.

Tip #4: Communicate, communicate, communicate
This cannot be stressed enough. Since you won’t be sitting next to your team, make sure you find ways to communicate in an efficient way. Leverage tools such as Zoom, Skype, etc. to still see your team live and make sure you are on the same page and building trust in each other. Keep these meetings relatively brief – we’ve found ourselves to be more productive at home, so don’t schedule unnecessary calls for too long or you’ll end up finding a way to fill an hour when you could have accomplished everything in 30 minutes!

References

Eurofound (2020) Living, working and COVID-19, COVID-19 series, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.