Published
on November 2,
2017
More
people today than ever are working remotely. A new report by Gallup found
that 43 percent of American employees now work remotely at least some of time,
up from 39 percent in 2012.
Additionally,
Gallup found workers are spending more time working remotely, with many
entirely remote.
That
sounds great, as working remotely and the flexibility that comes with it
empowers more people to pursue the work they love. But, as anyone who has
worked remotely knows, there are some major drawbacks to working from home as
well.
In
his LinkedIn Learning course on the
subject, Instructor Todd Dewett identified
the three most common challenges employees face when they work remotely, along
with strategies to overcoming each one.
1. Isolation.
Working
from home sounds great. You can wear pajamas all day, there are no annoying
colleagues to deal with and you can do the laundry while you work.
But,
after a very short while, those benefits begin to lose their luster. And soon
you realize you’ve spent the entire day in your sweatpants and haven’t talked –
or even seen – another person for the past six hours.
Quickly,
working from home can go from amazing to isolating.
Dewett
recommended a few strategies to avoid that feeling. They are:
·
Meet with your team in-person
on some regular basis. Depending
on your situation, that can mean once a week, once a month or twice a year.
That face-to-face interaction is key to feeling like you are truly part of the
team.
·
Remember the purpose behind
your work. Working from home can make you
lose sight of the bigger purpose behind your job, making work feel like little
more than a series of tasks you need to achieve. To avoid this, remind yourself
of the higher purpose behind your work and the benefits it has to the world
around you.
·
Spend 5 percent of your day
using technology to connect socially. Email,
text, chat, video chat – there’s no shortage of ways to communicate with
colleagues today. While those methods should primarily be used to communicate
professionally, Dewett recommends spending 5 percent of your day using them to
connect socially with your colleagues. Again, this will make you feel more a
part of the team.
·
Don’t be afraid to take breaks. There’s nothing more isolating than sitting at your
computer and cranking out work by yourself all day. And the reality is office
workers take breaks throughout the day, so you should too. Dewett recommends
dedicating 10 percent of your day to taking breaks. Ideally, you’d spend some
of this time with other people, either with neighbors or friends and family via
the phone or text.
2. Feeling like you are losing influence.
When
you work from home and others are in the office, you can feel like the
forgotten one. While others are getting face time with key stakeholders and
pushing their agenda, you are in your home, cranking away alone.
To
push against this and ensure your voice is heard, Dewett recommends doing these
three things:
·
Ensure you meet with your boss
and your team often. Dewett
recommends talking with your boss two to three times a week via video chat or
on the phone. For your team, proactively update them on the work you are
focused on and your progress. Also, going back to the last point, being social
with them occasionally can help here too.
·
Stay up-to-date and proactively
share your views on key issues. You
don’t need to know what every person is doing at all times. But, there are
always a few big issues your team is focused on that you do need to stay
up-to-date with and be sharing your opinions on. To do this, identify the two
or three people most influential to the decision, and reach out to them with
any questions and your point of view.
·
Build relationships with the
key people in your organization. You
obviously need to form a strong relationship with your boss, which is covered
in the first bullet. But, identify two or three influential people at your
organization that you want to form relationships with: maybe it's a rising
star, someone who is politically well-connected or a star performer. Create a
dialogue with them by asking their opinion on something and going from there,
perhaps even forming a social relationship with these people. This will ensure
they factor you in when making decisions.
3. The seemingly impossible task of giving and taking
feedback remotely.
Giving
and taking feedback is hard enough. But it’s even harder remotely.
Whenever
giving feedback, Dewett recommends following these five rules, regardless if
you are remote or not: make it specific; make it descriptive so they are aware
of an issue, instead of evaluative so it feels like you are condemning their
performance; own your feedback, instead of trying to pass the blame on others;
make it about issues, not about the person; and give one piece of feedback at a
time, not many.
Okay,
those are the rules for giving feedback generally. But, specifically, how do
you give feedback remotely? There are a few rules to follow, Dewett said:
·
Either give the feedback in-person
or on the phone/video chat, with a well thought-out email serving as a last
resort. Never give critical feedback over chat or text.
·
When giving the feedback, praise
something they did first, give the feedback second and then allow them time to
talk through it third. Ideally, this is done over the phone or on video chat,
because that best fosters dicussion and understanding.
Finally,
receiving feedback remotely can be even more difficult than receiving it when
you work in-person. The reason is you often don’t have the same social
relationship you’d have in-person, and it can make you feel particularly
isolated and unimportant to your team.
Don’t
let those emotions overtake you. Feedback is critical for growth, and when you
do receive feedback, Dewett said there’s a process you should follow.
“You
need to acknowledge that you received it, signal that you understand the
feedback and suggest specifically how you will use the feedback,” Dewett said
in his course. “When you do that the person who gave it to you will feel much
more confident that you're on the right track.”
Tying it all together
There
are a lot of benefits of working remotely. You can set your own hours to some
degree, you can do chores during the day and you avoid all the distractions of
the office.
That
said, there are some negatives as well, with three of them highlighted here.
The more proactive you can be about addressing these issues, the less likely
you’ll face these challenges and the better experience you’ll have.
Do you work from
home? Watch Dewett’s full LinkedIn Learning course, Working Remotely, today.
This article originally appeared on The Learning Blog.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/challenges-working-remotely-how-overcome-them-paul-petrone/?trk=eml-email_feed_ecosystem_digest_01-recommended_articles-12-Unknown&midToken=AQEmsUSMZWLRCw&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=0pgP8HNv_Wko01
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