How to Work from Home and Advocate for Teleworking
/The media is reporting that thousands of employees are now working from home, as if this mass exodus represents the workforce magically adopting the utopia of telework. This could not be further from the truth.
In truth, hundreds of thousands of employees face furlough (“leave of absence”) without pay, being laid off entirely, or being told they’ve been laid off when actually, their hours were just reduced to zero (thereby thwarting their ability to see unemployment). While many employees work from home regularly (me) and many whose companies have adopted this fact are learning quickly, our in-office employees are at great risk.
In my six years experience being a “remote” team member, I’m sharing everything I know about telework, and how to advocate for telework to your employer.
Also having been an entrepreneur gives me a bit of insight into employers’ concerns for telework. The primary concerns, which are rooted in business strategy and lack of knowledge, include:
Security - Sensitive data, typically.
Time integrity - “Are my employees lying to get more hours?”
Productivity - “Employees will be distracted by children, chores, TV, etc. and not get their work done, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Efficiency - Similar to time-integrity, but also, “Will my team’s efficiency suffer when they’re not all together in an office, using our computers and our software?”
The Unknown - “I’ve never led a Telework team before and I don’t know how.”
Here are two things I know about people:
They want to look good while also avoiding looking bad.
So, if someone is asked to do something different that they don’t understand, while they are stressed (hello: pandemic), and have no idea where to start, they will risk not looking good to avoid looking bad (stupid, ineffective, poor job performance, etc.)
I explain this because the first step for advocating for yourself is understanding the reservations (listening) of your audience.
To successfully advocate for change, we can’t ask the reserved audience, who holds our change in their power, to think, create, or implement without guidance.
When you know you need to work from home because there is a damn pandemic raging outside but your employer can’t see past their existing stressors and tasks, it’s up to us to become the strategist and the leader of this project.
How to be a strategist and a leader (i.e. someone who works from home really, really well):
Be a self-starter.
Someone who self-starts is a person who does not often have to have their tasks, instructions, or methods provided to them. This is a person who knows what needs to be done - who clarifies any confusion or uncertainty before beginning - and who proceeds the best way they know how.
Practice diligent self-management.
This person is certainly not perfect, but they do not lean on others to direct their work. They keep good notes, set a schedule with reminders and alarms, and communicate their progress so their team doesn’t have to chase them down.
Deploy proactive communication as early and as often as possible.
Proactive communication is scary at first. You may be sharing your own shortcoming, a problem in a process or project, you may be asking a question that feels stupid or embarrassing, or you may be sounding an alarm that think no one wants to hear. But, when we communicate proactively, we demonstrate that our sights are set farther ahead than our next task.
You demonstrate that you are looking out for the team, the project, the process, the client, the outcome, and the health of the business.
Pursue proactive mitigation.
Mitigation is a glorious word for folks who work from home, because in the office, to mitigate is to lessen the gravity of (an offense or mistake), but it goes beyond that. When you mitigate, you are being proactive to make something better, stronger, less risky, and thereby more productive and possibly valuable.
When you work from home, you’re working alone - and hopefully, focused - for whole chunks of time, rather than experiencing the distraction and stop-and-go pace of an office. You have the propensity to see more and mitigate faster, improving your performance and that of your team.
Employ thorough process-keeping.
As someone who lives with Inattentive ADHD, I live and die by process. There are plenty of mornings where no amount of coffee or water or health tonics or yoga can calm my brain and remind me of who I am. That means I often show up to work and do not know how to do my job.
I use Asana to keep workflows - for creating content, sending marketing emails, completing complex multi-step updates,
project plans - short and long-term step-by-step project outlines that detail every task, who is responsible, and when it is due, and
lists - weekly and daily, prioritized by ‘top three,’ and timed in ‘blocks’ to compound my focus on one subject.
As I check things off, my whole team sees what I’m up to, they know where they come in, and I have a visual record of what I’m supposed to do, and what I did, on any given day.
Show your work.
Beyond tracking your tasks, showing your work when completing something large for a higher-up is a real “nice to have” when you work from home. For some managers, traversing the office and seeing what employees are doing is a barometer for competency. While I vehemently disagree with this type of management, it’s important to allow our managers the same comfort while we’re in a changing work environment. This could look like:
Daily updates with what you worked on and how you progressed.
Screenshots or samples of drafts for their acknowledgment or review.
Questions (though you will likely google them and get a faster/better answer) here and there to include them in your process.
Requests for feedback or coaching by phone on days when you do truly need their input.
Establish metrics completion, resolution, and success, monitor closely, and communicate when they are met.
This is leadership. In a nutshell. You are setting the standards for performance (yours) and communicating them such that they are mutually understood. This leaves everyone feeling empowered. They know what they’re working on. They know what they’re aiming to accomplish. They know what success looks like and how completion will be measured.
There is an “end point.”
Telework can feel endless. At the end of the day, do you know what you actually spent your time doing? Do you feel any sense of accomplishment as you close your laptop or shut down your desktop and walk into the other room to cook dinner?
When you have mutually understood metrics for success, you’ve shown your work, you’ve self-managed your time and tasks, and you’ve remained in communication with your team and supervisor, you know exactly what you did, and it feels very satisfying.
How to advocate for teleworking at your company.
Employers who have yet to transition their teams to teleworking are not stubborn - they are scared. The fear, like we discussed early, is rooted in concern for the unknown. They, like all of us, are hearing the media, this administration, and the medical reporting, which is all dramatically different. They fear for their families and their paychecks and their future.
Teleworking mitigates most of these concerns.
That is the platform from which we will advocate for ourselves in the workplace. We will ground our intention in mitigating our shared concerns for health, wealth, family, and future. As well, we will acknowledge the concerns we listed above and state only facts - free of emotion and geared mainly toward the ‘capitalist’ perspective - as we make our case.
Start by developing solutions to the above listed concerns.
Some options include:
Security (My least-familiar concern because we’ve never had a security issue and have not needed a VPN or remote server).
Research: Improve security for teleworkers using these steps and this extended list.
Make specific asks: Take your work computer home, plug into your wireless router with an Ethernet cable and utilize a VPN (these are typically $30 - $60 per year per person, but this is a pandemic we’re talking about.
Outline your plan: Create a short list of concerns that may directly impact your position (and your team) and right next to them, their immediately implementable mitigations (and costs).
Time Integrity and Productivity:
Apps: Harvest time tracking, which integrates with Asana project management. (Free and paid)
Personal time management: Google calendar, which integrates with Asana, your smart phone calendar app, and pretty much every other app ever. (Also, free!)
Old school: Good ‘ole Excel timesheet templates that you update and share daily or weekly with your employer.
Outline: the costs and workflows for implementing these solutions.
Efficiency:
Efficiency is an imaginary measurement until it is defined, recorded, and mutually understood. It is more than likely that you know how long your work takes. Recording this for your supervisor in your plan shows that you take your time spent very seriously, and that your integrity in reporting is already a top priority.
For example:
Producing a blog post from start to finish (writing, editing in Grammarly, formatting into the blog, adding image, scheduling, etc.) takes two hours.
Completing the bookkeeping for the month takes two eight-hour days, including back-and-forth communication with our accountant, and time-spent communicating, working on the spreadsheet, and producing for completion will be logged separately for review.
Responding to work emails takes up about an hour of my day for me to do my best work, and I will do this in time blocks to prevent distraction or “overthinking” and spending too much time.
By committing numbers to your own efficiency and essentially putting yourself on the line, you show your manager you’re taking this very seriously.
Addressing ‘The Unknown’ is the hardest. It’s too easy to become emotional. We are compelled by the fact that going into the office raises everyone’s risk of catching Coronavirus (COVID-19) and/or transmitting the virus to our loved ones. But, if we bring this fear and concern to the table and it eclipses our facts, we will shut down the listening of our audience.
If folks want to put their head in the sand, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
So, don’t trigger them.
Focus instead on the facts and ‘practical’ (capitalistic) concerns:
“Let’s be proactive with telework in case offices/stores/business in [your state] are forced to close.”
“Proactivity allows us to work out the kinks of adjusting to telework while we have time to figure it out.”
“Rather than risk the shrinkage of our team (through voluntary self-quarantine, immunocompromised people, exposure), let’s proactively self-quarantine and develop our ‘work from home’ model.”
“The news is currently impacting employees with mixed messages, so we may see an overall morale and productivity boost if employees are able to work from home.”
Your ‘Telework Proposal’ (strategic plan) for your supervisor should be one-page.
Make it easy for them. Make it easy for yourself. Don’t go into immense detail; only write what could be covered in a 15-minute meeting. And, when you’re ready to deliver it, accompany the proposal.
Request a meeting with your employer, as chill and as low-key as possible, and let them know you’ve put together some thoughts for their review and feedback. Treat your proposal like a draft, one that asks their input and will capture any questions they have that you have not yet answered.
Be sure your proposal includes:
Weekly (or more frequently) telemeetings to ensure clarity of tasks, outcomes, and expectations.
Use of calendar to mark all meetings, deadlines, and collaboration times.
Time tracking by app or Excel spreadsheet, submitted on an agreed-upon frequency.
Access to all necessary files, sites, databases, and servers using a collaboration software like Dropbox, OneDrive/Sharepoint, or Google Drive.
Set “working hours” when employees should be available by phone or email.
This is the compilation of necessary considerations I can muster from my experience as a remote worker. I presently lead the operations team for Wakefield Brunswick as their Manager of Strategy and Business, producing resources and communications for the healthcare community responding to COVID-19.
If you have further questions for me about teleworking, advocating to your employer, or personal conduct during COVID-19, please write to me in the comments below. I’ll be responding everyday.
