Companies that offer remote work usually get to choose the best from a global pool of talent instead of limiting the search to one city, and therefore often find the best candidate for the jobs they have.
If you are a remote worker, you have most probably seen other people who work remotely as well. Many knowledge workers have already started seeing the benefits of a remote working lifestyle where they get to spend more quality time with their families, dedicate time to their interests, and travel whenever they want to without having to be on vacation. The majority of people who work remotely report higher levels of productivity and happiness which is both beneficial to employees and employers.
However, remote work is not for everyone. In fact, in order to be able to work remotely and effectively, not only you need to be disciplined and self-motivated, but also you must learn a few specific skills in order to be able to stay focused on the work results, build relationships with your co-workers remotely, and attend to your health, hygiene and nutrition.
Once you start working remotely, it becomes easy to fall into the trap of forgetting self-care. It can become a habit to work outside of regular office hours once you’re in the flow and more importantly your social life might suffer as you will not get invited to after work drinks with your colleagues any more.
What is remote work?
Many people when they think or talk about remote work imagine working from some beautiful beach in a warm country. For some others remote work is about working in one company on one product or project but from different geographical offices (that includes home or cafés.) I would like to propose a more inclusive definition of remote work in this post.
I believe the moment you sit in a different room from your coworkers, you’re working in a distributed team or organization and therefore you need to learn the skills for remote work. The moment you find yourself sending an email or writing a chat message instead of tapping on someone’s shoulder and speaking to them face to face, you are working remotely and you should invest time to learn and adopt the communication practices of great remote work!
What is self-leadership?
There are many articles written about communication tools and practices that remote workers need in order to work effectively in teams. I think self-leadership is the first and the most important set of skills you need to learn and master in order to succeed as a remote worker.
As I was thinking about writing this blog post, I realized that I could write about visible skills you need to pick up and practice and become a better remote worker, or I could take you on a deeper journey of self-discovery and get you thinking and reflecting at a deeper level about how you can learn and practice self-leadership. I decided to do the latter. (Although I did include a section at the end of this post with a list of those practical skills you can pick up right away.)
In this post, I will introduce four self-leadership skills that you can learn, practice and adopt in order to become an effective and productive remote worker. The first two are about your relationship with yourself and the last two are about the relationship you have with other people when you work remotely. And at the end of this post, you can find a section with a list of the more spoken about skills that you can pick up and practice right away.
Self-Leadership Skill #1: Always. Know. Yourself.
You might be one of those people who find anything with the word “awareness” and “authenticity” vague or un-actionable. If you are, you should know that I totally understand you and that is precisely the reason for why I have done my best to outline actionable skills you can take away from this post, even when the underlying ideas are about awareness and authenticity.
As a remote worker, you need to master self-awareness. In other words, you need to always know yourself so that you can reflect and adapt promptly and appropriately in every situation. The bandwidth for your communication with other people you work with is limited compared to the situation where you have a lot of face time with people in an office environment. That is why understanding yourself and how you relate to your work, your colleagues, your customers, and the product you are creating is essential to your success — remote or otherwise.
I can pitch to you to go find your vision and your mission in life and discover your values and strengths, etcetera. Those are all important but no one ever tells you how to actually do that, do they? I personally believe that it is not possible to find your vision without trying new things all the time and failing and learning. I think you cannot find your calling and your mission in life in a vacuum by just sitting and thinking about it. You need to get out there and do something and build your vision and mission. But that’s a blog post for another time…
What does self-awareness have to do with remote work?
As a remote worker, you are going to experience freedom, joy, power, but also you may feel overwhelmed, bored or lonely at times. When you work remotely, especially when you do not work in an office with other people, you are not able to engage in social interactions with your colleagues over coffee or drinks as easily. You need to take deliberate action to have virtual coffee meetings.
At first, many remote workers do not even acknowledge the need for socializing in person. Maybe you experienced this excess joy and freedom when you first started your first #WorkFromAnywhere project. You may have felt at ease and connected to your colleagues by just chatting with them in your chat messenger. This happiness and joy usually persists until someone shares a picture in the chat messenger that shows a few of those colleagues hanging out in a bar.
That’s when you start to feel left out or maybe even experience a little bit of jealousy. You might even question whether or not you made the right decision going remote. That is why I recommend that you learn and practice self-awareness before you really need to cope with those emotions.
There are many ways to learn this skill, the easiest of which is to begin reading books that help you understand yourself as a human better. The book Managing For Happiness of Jurgen Appelo — although not written for this purpose — is a great start. Some other books to read are Daring Greatly by Brené Brown and Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau.
If you have not acquired the skills to recognize and cope with your own feelings and mental states, you will find it difficult to stay productive and happy as a remote worker. This is especially true if you are a generally social person who gains energy from interacting with colleagues. Knowing yourself is very important so that you can maintain a healthy level of social interaction.
To start, be proactive in creating socializing virtual events with your colleagues such as virtual coffee, virtual champagne to celebrate reaching a new milestone and do not be afraid of starting seemingly silly conversations in your chat room. My favorite ones are: “Share your mugshot” and “Describe your mood with a .gif.”
Self-Leadership Skill #4: Express your “I” perspective
As you learn the skills for self-awareness, responsibility and conflict resolution, it becomes apparent that you also need to put some time and focus on practicing how to express and communicate the knowledge you gather from observing your emotional and mental states.
When you are in the middle of a creative collaboration with other people, practice expressing your “I” perspective in a way that creates information for the human system, rather than a blame. For example when you feel bored in a meeting, instead of saying “This meeting is boring.” you should say: “I feel bored.”
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