Building Remote Working: Tips

In the last few weeks I spoken with many people from different industries about remote work and answered their questions. I see that people even from IT industry, have difficulties with remote work setting up. Most difficulties usually produce different time zones, but in case of the US the maximum lag is tree hours which shouldn’t create major problem, and in general, when manager organizing remote work of the physical office the time difference is not an issue. So the main problem is vanished :)

Let me do not go deeply into this problematic and based on my experience put here just some basic things, which probably can be like stepping-stones and make manager’s life easier when he is organizing remote activities of the office.

As soon as any laptop or smartphone has mic and camera, you may try next simple steps to make remote work more effective:

1) Start every day with short online conference meeting. It lets you discuss plans/questions and goals for today. If you see it is excessive or not enough, you may tune up meetings’ quantity.

2) Use camera. Eye contact and emotions will add to your online meeting presence effect.

3) Make your team always available online for the office hours.

4) Create in your team culture of personal online video calls not as something exceptional, but like people talk in the office - just any time you have question which must be discussed.

5) Every member of the team should always set the correct status in the conference application like Online/Away/Busy etc.

6) Let people use online calendars to show and see each one's availability.

7) And use online services as often as you can! - People will finally become used to it.

It looks like not a rocket science, but maybe these simple things could help someone to avoid at least part of stress in transition period.