There are thousands of articles that give great lists of best practices when working from home, but most of them neglect what has been the critical one for me.
In my experience, the most important “best” practice when working from home is to work socially. Especially if you are an introvert, like me.
One of the biggest challenges in the remote work environment is isolation. If you don’t head it off, isolation can kill your motivation, productivity, and happiness.
But you can beat isolation with intention and a little effort.
I’ve been a full-time remote worker for several years now. I struggled at first, but now I wouldn’t trade it for any commute of any length, nor any office environment in any part of the world.
The difference has been leaning in to the concept of working socially.
What does working socially mean and how do you do it?
Community Through Conversation and Collaboration
A healthy office environment has an energy.
That energy results from the community that is built through conversation and collaboration.
For years, executives, human resources, and office designers have been chasing the holy grail of how to build community and culture through management style, company perks, and office layouts. Apple even chose the chairs in their new Apple Park campus for the purpose of promoting collaboration.
But that’s crap, because you can’t build it like that. Culture and community result from the people and the conversation they share, independent of the latest management and office design fads.
Are the people engaging in the activity of conversation and collaboration? More specifically, are YOU engaging in the daily conversation and collaborating with your colleagues?
This is true for the office and it’s true for the remote workforce.
The good news is that since the conversation is the critical piece, you can build community with a remote workforce if you foster that conversation through tools and activity.
For you personally, you can stave off those feelings of isolation if you stay engaged and work socially.
How to Work Socially
On the surface it’s rather simple: Stay connected and engage in the conversation.
Working socially is something YOU do, for your own benefit, but it also has tangible team benefits. If you do your part, the example you set might be enough to get the ball rolling for your whole team, which in turn makes it easier to keep yourself engaged.
It takes intention and effort, but you might find that the remote platform and tools make it easier for you to be social than in the office.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
Engage With Tools That Foster Conversation
Hopefully, you have been provided with some tools such as Slack, Zoom, MS Teams, or something similar. These are real-time conversation tools and are excellent at providing a collaborative running discourse throughout your day, as well as direct and live person-to-person conversation.
If you’ve resisted these tools in the past (whatever your reason), now’s the time for an attitude of openness to change.
What about email?
Unfortunately, although email is ubiquitous, it’s terrible at conversation. It’s great for publishing, formal and external communication, and announcements, but it’s terrible at conversation.
Engage and use the tools that make conversation effortless. If you’re not currently using them, get started.
Keep Colleagues Informed and Celebrate Wins
It starts with oversharing your work.
Post when you finish something or start something new. Hop on a video call when you have a question for a colleague. Be a virtual connector between teammates. Ask others how their stuff is going.
Engage in the conversation of the workday.
Always celebrate wins for yourself and your colleagues. It’s amazing what “likes”, smiley faces, virtual high-fives, dancing bananas, and some “Oh Yeah!!” gifs can do for the team energy in the virtual environment.
“Doing it right” may feel like you’re communicating too much, or that somehow you’re “tooting your own horn.” But what you’re really doing is ramping the information velocity. And information velocity is the key to collaboration.
Keep yourself and others plugged into the heartbeat of the work itself by oversharing what you are doing and celebrating the wins of your team and colleagues.
Show Some Personality
It continues by bringing humanity to the workplace.
Although remote working tools are great, they can easily mask personality and intention. These things come through more reliably when in person.
By definition, your work and home lives have become integrated, so embrace it, rather than fight it.
The dog’s gonna bark. The delivery guy is gonna ring the doorbell. The kids will interrupt because they need help with homework. Horns from the traffic outside? It’s all good.
It’s OK to share a little more about your home and personal life than you might if you were in the office.
Do you need to wrap up the meeting by noon because you have a long training run scheduled for lunch? Is tonight the performance of your improv group? How about some messy desk pictures or video of the distracting squirrel at the feeder outside your window.
The conversation tools make it easy to share photos, videos, emoji’s, giphy, and links to fun and interesting stuff.
All of this allows you to effortlessly put some personality into the workplace.
Try Stuff…Stuff that Might Not Work
The tips above are things I have found help me and my team stay engaged, be productive, and love the remote environment. But of course, every person and every situation is different.
Have the courage to try some stuff. It may be uncomfortable, or it may even fail. You might even have to participate in some … (GROAN)… virtual team-building exercises.
Seth Godin has a test he uses on himself, and he teaches others. If you’re not saying to yourself, “This might not work,” then you’re not pushing hard enough.
The more you put yourself out there and the more you push yourself, the more engaged you will be in the workday and with the team. That engagement, which is the heart of working socially, is the most important “best” practice when working from home.
