simple changes to help move to working remote

Look, the world is both scary and weird right now. Folks who usually work in offices—especially open-plan offices—may be struggling to focus, be productive, or even stay sane. It’s important to realize that your employees and team members are humans and likely have a lot on their mind right now, and you are just not going to be quite as productive as business as usual.

Here are some really simple tips to try and keep you and your people in good shape for more long-term remote work.

Make sure bio breaks are built in.

It’s really, really easy to join video conference after video conference and forget that people need time to take a breather and use the restroom. Most people will just take the break and be late to their next meeting, or just hold it. Neither of these are ideal outcomes.

Use speedy meetings

(end half hour meetings 5 minutes early, and hour meetings at least 10 minutes early) and stick to it to ensure people have a chance to do whatever they need to do as humans.

Build physical movement into your meetings.

Look, we have all forgotten to stand up once in awhile when we’re in an office setting. With people working from home, it’s even more likely they’ll sit for hours on end, forgetting to move around a bit. Besides, we’re all going to get more and more stir crazy as this goes on.

Use physical ice breakers

at the starts of recurring meetings. Maybe it’s 5 minutes of easy stretching, doing 20 jumping jacks, having a dance party for one song… whatever you can think of to build movement into your meetings will help everyone. It’ll make you feel better, and remove some of the cobwebs from the brain. Do make sure you keep this inclusive—consider having optional variations for folks who might not be able to do a full-on jumping jack.

Limit context switching as much as possible.

When we’re distracted by external events and worried about the world, it’s hard to find ways of concentrating on work that—let’s be honest—is not always the most important or interesting thing on your mind. One way to make it easier to get into a flow state is to construct your time in a way that limits context-switching and groups like-work together.

If your job requires a lot of 1 on 1 meetings (people managers, product managers, and program managers), considering rearranging your calendar do those all during the same block of time.

If you work on multiple projects, consider assigning different projects to different days of the week.

Now is a really great time to Marie Kondo your meetings.

I’m not saying you should get rid of any meeting that doesn’t spark joy—that would uhh, really limit the productivity of your organization. But you absolutely should look at some elements of your meetings and Goldilocks them a bit.

Evaluate and modify your meetings

• Function - what is the goal of this meeting, and is it fulfilling its purpose?

• Form - what about this meeting is working or not working well remotely?

• Frequency - is this meeting happening too often, not often enough, or just right?

Based on your answers to these elements, you may want to brainstorm some ways to switch things up. Maybe some meetings turn into a quick Slack chat, and maybe some move to a less-frequent basis for now. Some meetings may need to occur for a shorter time but more regularly.

Create space for unscheduled discussions.

Let’s be honest—we kind of hate drive-by conversations when we’re working in an office. They distract us, get us out of our flow state, and can’t be prioritized. However, there is very often a need to chat in an unscheduled way, despite our desire to structure the heck out of our calendars.

Create virtual office hours

and encourage people to literally drop in on you. Hold it the same time each week, with the same meeting link if you can, and plan to share your video even when no one has joined. When someone does stop in, you’ll be ready for it. You might find that this reduces the need for some ad-hoc meetings as well.

This can also help teammates who may be feeling especially isolated and just need to see a friendly face.

Pretend you’re a real YouTuber.

I’m joking! Mostly. Sort of. You’re having a lot more video calls, right? Why not curate something interesting to look at behind you? I am not encouraging anyone to buy anything new—first of all, that’s going to be difficult right now, but more importantly this is a fantastic time to really implement the reduce and reuse portion of reduce, reuse, recycle.

Have a colorful sheet or towel? Hang it up. Have some house plants? Relocate them to be in the frame. Glass jar that once contained pasta sauce that you’ve now consumed? Slap some acrylic paint on it or fill it with knickknacks for some instant pizazz. Finally, play around with your lighting to make sure you’re not creeping people out.

Do this for you, but also do it for the people who now have to stare at your plain white wall for hours each week. Heck, maybe change it up a little bit every week! Fighting monotony in our lives will also fight monotony at work.