How to Thrive Working Remotely
Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@ken-tomita-127057
FrogDog moved to an entirely distributed workforce structure nearly eighteen months ago after years of working from a central office.
When I tell people that I work entirely remotely, I’ve had responses ranging from jealousy that I never need to go into an office to strong stances against ever working entirely outside a traditional, corporate-office setting.
Whether gung-ho or never-me, anyone who moves from an office to a distributed workforce structure or to regularly working from home will have an adjustment period. Some of the FrogDog team struggled.
After observing my teammates and talking with friends in business who’ve made the transition, I’ve determined that the rocky adjustment period—or the flat-out refusal—to remote work partly stems from a culture in which people have made the office their primary source of social interaction and interpersonal engagement.
In some cases, people have even turned the office into their “society,” rather than their communities or extended friends and family groups. Because our culture embeds people in offices for large portions of their days and the vast majorities of their weeks, people get their social outlets through small talk before and after meetings, in corporate hallways and breakrooms, and even when talking over projects.
The habit of office-environment-as-society is an easy one to adopt. After all, you go into the office, other people show up, and you spend time together for hours at a stretch. Voila! No proactive effort needed to connect with strangers without context; the workplace provides all the context and new people needed to have a group of humans available to serve your social-engagement needs.
Add in egregious commutes for some people, which limit free time outside the office, and nuclear-family obligations and you have a world of people working in offices who will feel suddenly isolated when they transition to working remotely. A Buffer survey found that loneliness and challenges with collaboration and communication caused the biggest struggles for remote workers.
Quite naturally, in these circumstances, transitioning from fulfilling social needs in a traditional office setting to getting social interaction in a different way takes adjustment. During the adjustment period, people will likely have at least a few moments of feeling lonely, stir-crazy, isolated, and bored—even if your company takes proactive steps to keep the team in communication and working together, as we did at FrogDog.
For people making the transition from working in an office to working remotely, I’ll provide a few ease-the-path ideas I’ve developed through observation and experience:
Create a real office, whether at home or in a coworking space. Don’t do full-time work at your kitchen table or, if you need to work outside the home, spend all your time roving between coffee shops. You need a set place where you feel like you “go to work” each day.
Plan more nonwork activity into your life. Pick a new sport, hobby, or group you’ve always wanted to try. Actively participate. After all, with no commute time and less time spent chatting aimlessly with colleagues in an office setting, you should have more time for nonwork stuff. (Note: Do not use your newfound free time to just do more work.)
Proactively set in-person meetings with colleagues to collaborate at coffee shops, in coworking spaces, or over lunch. Just because you don’t have a centralized office doesn’t mean you can’t get together in person with in-town coworkers. Heck, meet up with a different colleague every day of the week, if that suits you.
Have lunch or coffee with other people in your working world: venders, clients, networking associates. When you don’t work in an office, you can more easily get away from your desk and you have more flexibility as to when you leave your desk. For some reason, working in an office makes people overly conscious about simple presence—what time they sit at their desks and how long they stay away from their desks—and not conscious enough about the things they get done while working. (Working remotely should allow you to focus your work effort on efficiency, not on time spent at your desk or in the office.)
In the same vein, go to relevant business networking events in your town and in areas you visit.
Go work at a coffee shop or coworking space. You don’t have to have your own colleagues working around you to work in the same place as other working people. And working around noncolleagues absolves you from a lot of the in-office niceties that, while pleasant, can suck away a lot of time. I work almost every Monday morning from a local coffee shop. I enjoy the change of scenery for a couple of hours and get to make minor small talk and have brief social interactions that keep me from getting weird from too much alone time.
If you have children, they’ll often be at home when you need to focus on work. Remember that you can structure your work activities away from the home office for times when your kids could distract you. Kids can sidetrack even the most focused working parent—even when babysitters and nannies have them in care. And in the summers, when children stay home most often, remember that you can likely expense a coworking space.
Listen to music and podcasts to enliven your home workspace and add some background burble. Sometimes we need silence and sometimes silence can deafen even the most zen among us. Pick and choose your aural ambience according to what you need that day.
At lunch or when taking a break from the work grind, run errands. Get out into the world.
Likewise, take a gym class at lunch or at an unconventional time; working remotely often gives you more flexibility with the times you can get in a workout than what you can manage when working in an office.
Get outside. Take a walk with or without a dog. While walking, call a friend or a colleague to talk through something. (All of us have friends who work different hours than we do. And all of us have colleagues with whom we can do walking meetings, even just while on the phone.)
Use videoconferencing as much as possible, if not all the time. Seeing people in real time helps, as does collaborating on projects and topics via screenshare. If you videoconference most of the time, you’ll gradually forget that you don’t see your coworkers, clients, and venders every day, because it will feel like you do. (And, really, you effectively will see them every day this way.)
How much of these efforts you undertake depends on you—and you may find that you need more of them at the beginning of your transition to working remotely than you do after you’ve worked remotely for a while. Also, if you have higher needs for social interaction than other people do—or less—you’ll find that you need to calibrate accordingly.
Yet at least, with these ideas in hand, you won’t feel completely lost in the work-remote sea.