Get best of the week

Features of remote work - based on internal meeting

Having analyzed the latest interviews, we realized that more and more people are coming to us, for whom the remote is a new format. We wanted to help them get accustomed by gathering experience on its “taming” in one text, and in February, following the results of the next internal meeting, we planned this post.

With the latest events in the world, our experience may be useful to a wider audience. Therefore, we took into account the tendency to self-isolation and added life tips on this topic.

image

In our experience, remote workers with the most diverse living conditions face exactly the same problems - the body gets tired of sitting in the same position, their relatives do not understand them, children or pets are constantly distracting, and the background for all this is a strange feeling of loneliness (although it would seem where he comes from in isolation with his family).

Let's figure out how to handle this all.

I focus on the fact that in this post we are talking about full-fledged remote work, and not about freelance. However, many tips can also be useful to freelancers.

The principle of building a work schedule


The first thing to do on a remote site is to decide on a schedule.

The schedule usually depends on the work team, so it makes no sense to talk about particulars. It is important that the schedule must be spoken out at the start, choosing an interaction scheme that suits everyone. It’s convenient for someone to start at 10 am Moscow time, someone in Siberia would like to get out 4 hours earlier, and for someone specifics require certain hours of presence online. You can almost always come to a comfortable compromise.

It is more convenient when the schedule is stable. This helps to focus on business on time.
It is customary for our team to indicate hours of work and lunch in Slack status, setting “away” and warning if it is necessary to move away at this time ( we already wrote about other principles of internal communications ).

In distant work, force majeure happens when you turn off the electricity or the Internet. In this case, we also have internal regulations: it is necessary by phone or SMS to notify the one who can report the problem to the whole team - the operational or technical director.

Tools


From the point of view of tools for remote work, a laptop and stable Internet are enough. Is it worth it to confine yourself to a laptop - a question of ergonomics. It is more convenient to have either an external keyboard or an additional monitor (or maybe both).

As for the Internet, it is better to have some kind of fallback. This is a standard risk for remote work. Few of the Maksiltek residents keep a redundant wired Internet channel at home, but many have routers for connecting via a mobile network (with a SIM card and a tariff with a traffic margin - recently, operators have begun to prevent simple sharing of the Internet from a smartphone to a laptop). Some have a kind of "plan B" - at least until recently. Not far from the place of permanent work, an office or coworking was explored, where you can quickly move in an emergency in 20-30 minutes. Unfortunately, now such a safety net is not possible in all cities.

Workplace


Most of the Maksilektovets work from home - an apartment or a separate residential building. Not everyone has the conditions to set aside a separate office, but we focus all beginners on the fact that the workspace is important. If at home people will constantly walk by you, ask about something, sensible work will not work.

Under normal conditions, if the work does not work out at home, we recommend looking in the direction of a rented office or coworking. But given the circumstances, we give a few examples of how our colleagues solve this problem without leaving home:

  • The head of the testing department works on the balcony, since the region of his residence allows him to occupy this space even in winter. So you can concentrate behind a closed door, despite a small child.
  • One of our front-end workers moves around the apartment after the sun - in the morning he works from a room facing the east, and towards the evening he moves to the kitchen, whose windows face west. This way of “changing the scenery” is suitable for those who find it difficult to work and live in one location.
  • Until recently, the host of the blog on HabrĂ© supported two jobs at home in order to move from corner to corner in accordance with the routine of family life. When children sleep during the day, you can work from the kitchen, and when awake, from the workplace in the bedroom.

The workplace should be organized so that you are comfortable and comfortable, otherwise productivity suffers. We already wrote about how to technically organize this convenience .

Social factor


Homeworkers are not always sympathetic to remote work. Many of our colleagues went through a difficult stage of explaining to their relatives that remote work is primarily work when they just moved from the office to a remote site.

To speed up this process, you can use office and family life hacks:

  • Work on headphones with music that allows you to abstract from everything that happens around (and show others that you don’t hear them). Unfortunately, working with music is not suitable for everyone, but it's worth a try.
  • . , , . , . , . , “” “”.
  • – , , . .
  • To fix working hours is what we talked about above. Households will get used to it over time, which, relatively speaking, you are busy from 10 to 18 in Moscow. And if the working hours are blurred, conflicts can arise at home due to the fact that it will seem to your relatives that you are not giving them enough time.
  • Talk with loved ones about your income. In the circle of friends, remembering money is not always accepted, but in a family that lives off of these incomes, it’s quite. The significance of the remote work of one of the family members is felt instantly, if something material can be acquired for these incomes.

The hardest thing to explain is that one or both parents work for children. Here, unfortunately, only long-term education helps. We will have to accustom them to the fact that it is not worth coming to the office (to the workplace) when the parent is busy.

Productivity


We wrote quite a lot about productivity. Today we recall a few basic principles:

  • If you find it difficult to concentrate, do not wear pajamas or home clothes. Psychologically, in home clothes you feel more relaxed. Changing clothes will help you switch from home to work and back, and at the same time remind your family that you still work. One of the Maksilektovets, switching from work to leisure and vice versa, changes not only clothes but also peripherals: keyboard, mouse and notebook. It helps him.
  • When you need to focus on the task, turn off messenger notifications. There are many special programs to help you do this automatically.
  • . . - GTD (Getting Things Done), - – , .
  • - . - , - . “” , .
  • . – .
  • Try whiteboards and writing boards. Despite all the electronic tools, they help to “unload” background tasks from the head so that they do not distract from the main question. And as one of our testing automation engineers says, this is a “free third monitor”, which always displays the necessary information. Visualization plays a big role.

To maintain productivity on a long time scale, you need to monitor your psychological state. Necessarily needed:

  • Exercise stress. Let it be a treadmill, yoga video tutorials or weight-lifting - any option that you can place at home. Temporarily walking in the parks and jogging out of town are not available to us, let's look for an alternative.
  • . – . ! – . . – , , . , , -.

And how do you deal with udalenka during self-isolation?

PS We publish our articles on several sites of the Runet. Subscribe to our pages on VK , FB , Instagram or the Telegram channel to learn about all of our publications and other Maxilect news.

Help us make blog articles more interesting .

More articles:


All Articles