Staying connected

Working remotely can be quite a lonely experience so it is very easy if you are just working your own just to concentrate in your own bubble, and you forget that you are actually connected with the rest of your team. So there are two areas of staying connected.

One is the physical action of making sure you have got access to telephones, access to the WIFI. Look at what happens when the WIFI goes down. It may well be it just goes down for a minute or two or a very short time. It will not really affect your work but if you need a backup then you can always use your mobile phone as a backup short term to keep connected to the internet.

But under this staying connected side is not just the physical element of WIFI and internet connection and telephone connection, but also staying connected with your team. So there are lots of ways around you can do this. If you know who the team members are, you can talk to them, you can still have meetings while working remotely, you can still get involved with them in the same way. It may be you only work from home for a number of days, maybe two or three days a week, in which case you are still seeing people that can work really really well. But if you are completely working at home then it is so important that you do keep in touch with people. Managers will also contact you and make sure that you are all okay and everything is working well, but if you are just doing a normal job then you know it is very hard sometimes to feel part of a team. If you have got an in-house type chat system that you can use, use it, learn about more people, use video calls instead of a telephone calls that can often work with meetings, try and get involved in all those meetings. Certainly people just saying a meeting just sit on it and not really say much but try and get involved try and learn more about the whole team because if you are working at home sometimes you are just on your own doing your project but most of the time you're part of a team. People need to know what is going on so they also need to be updated. So if for some reason you are going to lose your internet connection, or you are off or when you are going on holiday, make sure people know that you are on holiday. That way they know not to put calls through to you or they know not to expect replies back from emails.

So there are lots of ways of staying connected with others. Just find the ways that are available in your company and also think of other new ways of doing it because that way you can ensure that you're still part of a team although you are working at home.