Working Around Working From Home
/by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Telecommuting has become so commonplace over the last several years for knowledge workers in publishing, high-tech and many other industries that work-from-home situations are even featured in popular advertisements for cars and pretzels. Through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and video web-conferencing systems, technology has provided an easy portal making it almost as if those employees are still in the office.
Of course, in light of recent events, most employees are now working from home. The influx of traffic is flooding internal systems and crashing remote servers. More staff than ever are learning how to focus in a home environment where you can’t have a casual brainstorming chat with the person next to you. And the first 10 minutes of meetings is seeing who is on and if their mic is muted.
As a distributed organization with eight global offices stretching across 11 time zones from the US to Europe to India—along with a large network of remote associates—KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. has faced many of these challenges. While cracks in the systems begin to arise that may not have been previously noted, we wanted to share a few work-arounds that might be helpful:
Adjust work hours to lessen strain on systems
Most networks were not built to be accessible by the full staff remotely. For many companies, particularly larger ones with big teams, there have been reports of systems running more slowly than they would ordinarily or crashing altogether, so files cannot be accessed. The strain comes from usage all at one time. For optimal use, it might benefit employees to stagger heavy network usage to different parts of the day/evening, depending on their particular roles. Though everyone is used to instant access to everything all the time; it is advisable to retrieve needed files from the network and work offline where possible.
Reassess meeting culture
There is no comparison to face-to-face conversation. When everyone is in the office, oftentimes half to two-thirds of staff time is taken up by in-person meetings. And, of the 55 million meetings that take place per day, only about 50% of them are effective, according to Steven Rogelberg, author of The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. Why? “Meeting leaders believe they are better at it than they truly are, and organizations are accepting bad meetings as a way of life,” says Rogelberg. Now that we are all working remotely and communication challenges are greater (people not paying attention, people doing other work during the meeting), perhaps now is the time to readjust to setting goals and benchmarks in one meeting and letting the team operate individually or in smaller teams. Again, that would provide less strain on systems and perhaps cause the teams to be more productive.
Be resourceful
While, in an office, we are able to turn to someone else for troubleshooting a problem, particularly one involving technology, remotely we may not have that luxury. But, you are not alone and you would be surprised how much information a Google search will reveal. Need help with some technology? There’s probably a forum where someone has experienced the same problem and someone else has solved. Need help with productivity at home when your time is less structured? There are apps to help manage and track your time for you. Can’t figure out how to do an excel spreadsheet? There are YouTube videos that will help you. Sometimes, when other people are able to answer our questions quickly, we rely more heavily on them, but we can likely figure out these problems ourselves too.
Chat around the virtual water cooler
So much of what happens in an office is done casually. You run into someone at the coffee pot and have a minute or two of chit-chat that can spark a new idea, a new way of looking at a problem, or just give your brain a break. In a WFH situation, that is lost…or is it? Many teams are beginning group chats on Slack and Skype to help keep that spontaneity and serendipity alive in the workplace.
As we continue to adapt to virtual workplaces, the initial challenges can only make us stronger, giving organizations a new opportunity to assess priorities, maximize efficiencies, build resilience, and support remote team culture.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (formerly Cenveo Publisher Services) is the industry leader in editorial and production services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for intelligent automation, high-speed publishing, accessibility compliance, digital learning solutions and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.