We’ve talked about the pitfalls of the office and how to build a good remote environment and culture. As an individual, you have a responsibility to set yourself up for success.
Remote work has a lot of benefits, many of which are obvious:
No commute
Less office distraction
Less office interpersonal drama
Flexible hours
Easier to run errands, make doctor appointments
Maintain a healthy diet by cooking at home instead of daily fast food.
Live in a low cost of living area
Make your office space comfortable
These are great benefits. It’s also your responsibility hold yourself accountable and set yourself up to be productive.
You need a home office
Your home office should not be your bed. It should be a dedicated desk in a dedicate space. Most of your work should be done at the home office. While you can effectively work from the coffee shop, I recommend that most of your work is in your dedicated space. It should be free from distraction and conducive to work. By the way, a dedicated home office space is tax deductible. Without this, it’s easy for work to intrude on personal time, and it’s easy to be distracted from work.
This is also your chance to have the “corner office” you didn’t get at the office. Be near a window! Have room to stretch!
Be presentable
I said that I once thought of video calling as weird and intrusive. But it’s a normal and necessary part of communication.
Be ready to be seen on video. Dress appropriately. That can mean a t-shirt. (Yes, there’s a good chance you will never be seen from the waist down - do with that what you will.) Consider your background. Ideally, face your desk away from the wall so that the wall is your background.
Cats are often welcome in team meetings, but I’d recommend - during the beginning of a new job - to keep the cats separated. They’re cute, but save the distraction for when you have a good rapport with the team.
Meeting etiquette
There are different kinds of meetings. You’ll meet with your team, the ones you know best. You may also have special projects or groups where you present your work. Your camera should be on for these. But for meetings where there are 20 participants and you primarily listen to leadership present information. I would consider camera optional in those meetings.
Manage your mute button. It’s a little embarrassing when you forget unmute and you’re talking while your team hears silence, but it’s way worse when you forget to mute and cause distractions. Especially in the all-hands meetings - there’s often the one guy who forgets to mute and has to yell at his dogs while the CTO is speaking. You don’t want to be that guy.
Get a solid internet connection
It’s your responsibility to have a solid internet connection. It’s great that remote work can allow you essentially move off-grid, but don’t take the job if you’re so far off-grid that you can’t actually connect. Good news is that Starlink now promises >100Mbps connections with relatively low latency almost anywhere.
That also means it’s your responsibility if you work from the road. If you take advantage of the flexibility to travel, make sure you have a high speed connection available where you intend to work.
You’re responsible for equipment
Your employer may provide laptop and require you to use it. Aside from that, it’s up to you to have what you need - external monitor(s), mouse, keyboard, headset, and webcam. You want a good chair and desk. Take care of your posture, eye strain, and wrist strain. Test your audio/video connections before you join meetings. Zoom and other software have a way for you to test your audio - speak into the microphone and listen to the playback. Again, equipment used for work can be tax deductible.
Set a schedule
Most remote work will have a flexible schedule, and hopefully they will have set “core hours” we discussed. There’s a lot of benefit to the flexibility. You can better handle child care and errands. You might be able to work while traveling. But day-to-day, you should have a set schedule to form a good habit for yourself. This will help keep you accountable, but also permit you to sign off when it’s time. It also sets expectations as you get acquainted with your team.
Most remote jobs are salaried. You won’t be punching a clock, and some weeks may require less than 40 hours while other weeks require more. You might have flexibility to make up time during off peak hours. Take advantage of the flexibility. If you’re accustomed to a schedule, it won’t be too disruptive to deviate from the schedule when you need.
Manage your calendar
This isn’t specific to remote work, but effective remote work does rely heavily on calendar events taking the place of the shoulder tapping. You should be at your team’s daily meetings every day if reasonable, as well as the all-hands and 1-on-1s. Beyond that, use your professional judgment whether someone else’s meeting requests interfere with your accountability to your team and your objectives. Consider adding “heads-down” time as 2-3 hour blocks on your calendar throughout the week to block incoming meeting requests.
Manage your status
You don’t have physical presence, but you have a virtual presence. Set yourself online or away in Slack during the day. Set your status for lunch. Configure notifications to not bother you during off-hours. You may leaving work in Eastern time while it’s 2p for your Pacific teammates, so expect that some conversation is happening while you are off.
Have fun
A big pitfall with remote work is the lack of social interaction. You can make up for that a bit by joining with team building exercises. If there’s a team happy hour or trivia night, try to join and get acquainted with folks. Teams might do icebreakers during daily meetings to help build team rapport. Maybe you can host a brown bag talk on a work-related topic. There may be a scheduled meet and greet to give you an opportunity to meet folks on other teams. Some of this interaction builds rapport and trust with your teammates, makes you more visible to the rest of the organization, and helps keep you sane.
When you start with these rules, it’s easier to bend these rules later after you’ve build rapport and trust with the team.
Extracurricular activities
You can build rapport with the team, but the lack of social interaction at work may prompt you to lean in to other activities outside of work. You may find yourself leaning more into the local tennis club or church group for more in person interaction. These are good ideas for your personal health.
Conclusion
During 2020, millions of people were sent home with little instructions on how to work remotely. As such it left a sour impression on managers and employees alike. But if your manager sets up a good remote environment and remote-friendly culture, the experience can be very different. If you follow these guidelines to hold yourself accountable to working at home the same as you would on a commute. Everything I described here is familiar to me, but it’s not the impression most people have of remote work. When we follow these guidelines, remote work isn’t just “almost” as good as the office - it’s often superior.
It’s not for everyone and not for every type of job. I can speak mostly to software engineering. I don’t know how well this logic holds up for every type of office job. My financial advisor started taking Zoom calls, and I got my last mortgage over the phone. For jobs where you regularly see clients, I can’t say how well all of this applies. But the tech industry has been leading the charge, and this is what we see working for us.
Any more tips here I missed?