Working from home sounds like a dream to every person who hates cubicles.
You can imagine yourself working in the peace and comfort of your own house saying to yourself something like: “This is the best place to correctly do my job”. For some people, that might be the reality … But for others, working from home can become a double-edged sword.
There are indeed benefits to working from home, but that doesn’t mean working at an office is a bad thing either. In fact, in some cases, working at an office can be more motivating than working from home. But that’s a topic we’ll get further into in the future.
In this article, we are going to show you how to turn your house into a place in which you can focus on work, and not a place to avoid your work, which surely you don’t want to let happen if you don’t want to face the consequences of not being accountable… So before starting to work from home, make sure you prepare first.
How?
Although we said “turn your house” the reality doesn’t start with moving things around your house but starts with changing yourself, and your costumes at home, and even learning a new set of skills to keep doing your job as efficiently as possible.
Let’s make sure you have these skills covered and turn your home environment into a working advantage!
Communication
Emails, chats, video meetings, and even phone texts. It doesn’t matter which media you use to communicate, keeping in touch with your coworkers and supervisors is crucial when working remotely.
Not keeping fluent communication with your team will bring problems to the workflow in general, and could end up with you being personally warned or reprimanded if you’re not doing your job efficiently.
So we recommend you to be familiar with the most common tools used, whether is CRM like Bitrix24, or simple hangouts chat. The key is being always available and showing that you’re willing to work and able to use any tool at your disposal to keep fluent communication.
Here’s an article that will help you to further develop this skill: Communication Skills and How to Train Them.
You’ll surely face situations like handling many tools at once, keeping in contact with your coworkers as well as contacting clients, and prioritizing your regular work, so be sure to fully check this next skill.
Organization
Working remotely also means that you’re going to keep yourself accountable. Your boss won’t be looking over your shoulder anymore to see if you’re staying on your tasks so the quality and efficiency of your work will highly depend on yourself.
To prove that you are fit to work from home, you must emphasize your organizational skills and have a clear mindset on what needs to come first and what will come after that. In other words, make sure you keep everything coordinated.
Think about your priorities from a big-picture perspective and start to break them down little by little before starting to work so you can work your shift as efficiently as possible, remember to leave a space to rest, and surprise priorities.
Every work has a few things that may come up as a surprise during your shift, and it’s part of your organizational skill to learn how to handle them effectively. Nevertheless, if you feel like you need more advice on how to become a problem solver we recommend you to check out:
> How to Improve Critical Thinking at Work
Also, remember to familiarize yourself with tools like Dropbox or Google Drive, and don’t forget to keep your folders organized!
Motivation
This is the time to show your passion, your motivation, and your willingness to be proactive while working.
Some people might find face-to-face contact to be highly essential in a working environment, and having to work remotely might discourage them from keeping focus. So, in order to work from home you have to keep yourself motivated, and not only that but also to show your motivation to others.
The easiest way to achieve this is to actually care and feel excited about the job position you have and the company itself. Tell your supervisor how much you like your job and the parts you feel interest you the most (only if it’s true), so you can focus mainly on that when you work from home.
If you are midway to being considered for a remote position, we also recommend you show your interest in the industry by bringing up the special ways you’ve been involved, like participating in professional organizations, attending conferences, keeping up with blogs or podcasts on the subject, or following the latest industry news.
Let them know that even if you’re by yourself you’ll be happy with your work!
Time Management
Time, whether at home or at the office, is highly essential. And the truth is that it is harder to keep track of time at a remote job than at an office. Why? 2 reasons:
Time Zones
Working remotely opens the possibility of not only being able to work in a different region but also in a different country. If it’s the latter, you’ll have to be extra aware of time zones and what exactly your coworkers are doing at the moment.
So when coordinating tasks or meetings, to avoid confusion remember to set the schedules and/or deadlines in more than one time zone. E.g: “Tomorrow we’ll have a meeting at 6:00 AM UTC−04:00 (Venezuela’s Time Zone) / 12:00 AM UTC+01:00 (Switzerland’s Time Zone).”
Respect Time Limits
Since you’re working at different time zones maybe your shifts begin and end in different schedules, so making every second count when having a meeting is important in order to not delay your coworkers’ other tasks.
Try to set a specific deadline for each meeting, and if by some chance a meeting doesn’t have a specified deadline you can always start the conversation with something like “It’s great to get to talk to you. I want to make sure we can cover everything we need to—can you let me know how much time you have now?” And then be sure to wrap up the talk before then.
Also, here’s an article that can help you to further develop these skills!
>5 Ways to Improve Time Management Skills at Work
Tech Savvy
When you start working remotely, the company you work for needs to know that you’re well-versed when it comes to IT. Let them know that you can manage without the help of an IT department right by your side.
We recommend you inform your supervisor about what you’re good at. Let them know that you’re careful to keep your computer and software up to date and that you have a fast internet connection (plus a backup). And if you actually have some experience dealing with hardware and software that makes it way better!
As you might have noticed by now, the importance of this skill is to show that you can be an independent worker, someone who’s a problem solver and can manage his tasks and responsibilities efficiently.
That’s the essence of a great remote worker, the essence of a great Freelancer. And that’s why we nurture these skills on our Freelancers because even though we have an office at our disposal as you can see in all of our pictures, we want to assure that they’ll be ready when the time comes that any of them must work remotely.
So make sure you start to apply them and your remote job will surely start to thrive!
Finally, if you want to keep improving your work skills we recommend you to check out next: Skills that Make Us Want to Work with You and learn which skills we mainly take into consideration when looking for new freelancers!
