![]() When work and recreational zones collide, it can be taxing on the mind and wreck your work-life balance. □□ This helps with shifting in and out of a work mindset: sit at your dedicated work spot during working hours, and, by the same token, make your breaks to relax and have fun elsewhere. However, for the sake of productivity and well-being, our advice is to separate work and home life as much as possible, which includes designating an office area that’s not ordinarily used for leisure (i.e., someplace quiet and comfy, even if just a corner, with a desk, a chair, a stable Wi-Fi connection and good lighting, instead of the bed or the couch), and avoid conducting personal business on company time (such as household chores). Regarding one’s workplace at home, many people are now facing less than ideal conditions, with children being out of school and quarantined alongside their families. ![]() If you're fond of this idea but find the format impracticable, consider changing it to twice a week or so. □ This ensures that everyone is kept in the loop and no one is excluded from ongoing happenings and decisions. in which each teammate has about five minutes to report their accomplishments of the day and their intentions for the next workday. On the topic of teleconferencing and staying aligned with one's colleagues and superiors, at FULL FABRIC we've been doing team-wide daily calls at 5 p.m. Some people are more expressive than others, that’s just a given but you might also find out that some people are less expressive in writing than in talking. □ĭo exercise emotional intelligence: have empathy, be patient and have a willingness to pose and answer questions that clarify meaning and respect different communication styles. This acknowledges the request, makes the sender feel seen and lets them know what to expect from the other person. It shouldn’t take very long to get a reply from a coworker, even if it’s something like: “I’ve read your message but can’t properly reply yet, just give me one hour” or “Today I’m packed, but I’ll take care of that tomorrow”. We also emphasise the importance of sharing the same work hours instead of letting everybody choose their own schedule, because we believe in being available for each other. By the way, emojis are your friend, and so are gifs! □ But if text one must, a good rule of thumb for written communication is to be very thorough and explicit. Sometimes, a two-minute call will do more to explain an idea than a wall of text. That’s why we recommend doing frequent calls with teammates (webcams on, preferably! □), as it’s the closest thing to a face-to-face interaction as you can get online. ![]() It’s notoriously more challenging to communicate from afar, as body language, tone of voice, intonation and facial expressions are lost likewise for preserving a sense of togetherness and cohesion. Update your Slack status whenever you’re unavailable (e.g., “□ Out sick”, “□ In a meeting with a client”, “□ On lunch break”, etc.)Ĭhoose a quiet and distraction-free working space Take breaks from work (no one's a machine, after all!), but remember to inform your team first To get the job done and still feel like a team, we rely on a number of small but crucial rules, the main ones being:ĭedicate your full attention to your job duties during working hours Nevertheless, we too had to make adjustments to switch to long-term remote work. We sincerely hope they’re useful and can bring you some comfort during this challenging period! □īasic directives and best practices to handle remote workĪs previously noted, FULL FABRIC has traditionally been a remote friendly company, in the sense that, once a week or more (depending on circumstance), any of us can elect to work from home. The result is a compilation of ideas, insights and resources to work from home during the quarantine, based on our own trial and error efforts. To quote from author Nora McInerny: “I am writing because bad stuff is like good stuff: it just happens.” The world is chaotic, but if we look out for each other, we can get through this a lot easier. As such, we thought it would be nice to reach out and share a bit of our own experience. However, by talking with different educational institutions across the world, we realise that’s not necessarily the case for everybody. Consequently, tangible steps had to be taken.īecause FULL FABRIC was already a remote-friendly company, we had mechanisms in place that helped us make the transition from occasional to full-time remote work, and more than one month in, we are doing a-okay. It was dreamy at first, distant and perplexing – but also unavoidable. The past few days had seen an almost palpable shift in the air, as what felt like a giant wave loomed over us. On March 11th, FULL FABRIC decided to go into full remote mode for an undetermined period of time, as most of Europe prepared for a lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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