I wrote this article back in october and some of you might have seen that I recently moved to another company. The onboarding kept me well busy and the preparation of the coming year also did. Eventho, I believe this small post was worth sharing.
My best guess is that at this point of time, most of you already experienced home office working over the last months, even partially. This covid19 situation gave a serious push in the “derriere” toward companies’ transformation plans, especially regarding digitalization of the workplace. Do you remember those high tech communication systems ICQ? AIM? MSN? Most of us will probably agree that timing is one of the keys to the element of success.
Reuters made the graph below and it’s representing the world stocks & Oil vs covid ( https://fr.reuters.com/article/global-markets-idINKBN23O08G) as we are in one of the worst economic crisises our generation might face. I observed that companies were and still are preparing for both best and worst case scenarios. During the first half of this year, I can tell you that the covid crisis impacted directly my projects as a salesman.
One thing I learned during my study regarding human and communication: it’s impossible not to communicate. If you curious about this research, it comes from Paula Watzlawick. Through the last 6 months, we have seen communication solutions rising. Do a quick search on the stock value evolution of Zoom… Google Meet, Teams and some others got in and grabbed some extra market share. Look at Salesforce acquiring slack. It all seems to move in the direction the virtual collaboration space. If you are curious about today’s market share of some vendors, here’s a stats report from Datanyze about web conferencing solutions.
Do you want to be like Zoom’s stock and get your productivity to go up? While at home there are tons of reasons to get distracted or feel almost suicidal after a million back-to-back virtual meetings. I will not pretend that it all worked out fine for me from the beginning. Getting the hang of it requires practice and repetition. Today I feel confident that using the right structure helps to be efficient.
There is also an additionnal point which as important as companies’ evolution, we as person also need to change, adjust, try out new way to drive our vLife.
Here is how I survived at home:
Your spot!
First of all, let’s talk about the workplace. I am lucky enough to have a separated office with my own desk. Having a dedicated space, closed or not, is really important to allow you separating work from home as you might not wish to have home coming into your work. Look into Tai-chi, make it nice working environment and one more thing: make your place greener and put some plants there! Last but not least, clean and maintain the order of your place (you don’t eat where you play 😉 )
The set up
My home office setup is composed of the following:
- a couple of 24″ monitors and a docking station. Laptop monitors are too small for me to be stared at for 10+ hours…
- Writing tablet to be able to live draw and show whiteboards. This is a recent acqusition and I can’t wait to improve my live drawing skills.
- External webcam, and a light ring. I also acquired a green screen to improve the scene when need but so far, I did not use it extensively.
- Streaming open source software. Why streaming software? Because it allows me to create and to switch between different scenes faster. For example, to move from a camera facing you to another one facing a flipchart or even redirect to a PowerPoint presentation. It brings life to your meeting. If you want to know more, I found all of this on Google. The streaming soft is free and is called OBS. ==> In all honesty, I’m still learning here but, hey! you only get better by exercising.
Routine
The key here is my one thing to develop a well-oiled daily routine. A routine yes, but an agile routine. Something where you can step out and easily fallback in when needed.
- Get up early: you’ll get plenty of time to do more. If you have kids, this is a moment that becomes a “my time” situation for any kind of activities such as sports, reading, writing, catch-up on work etc. Like all the rest, you can exercise it
- Mindset: exercise meditation, ask for help when you face challenges and focus your thought on your goals. I started to use mindfulness meditation after being endorsed by one of my SAP Academy friend Ruhvan and since then, I kept exercising. In my case I love short sessions that enable me to get my mind focussed or relaxed
- Be active: Do some sport for at least 30min a day. Go also for a walk and oxygen yourself
- Stay productive: Look throughout your day to that one thing that you must achieve and make use of smart actions management tools such as the Eisenhower matrix 😉
- Set up moments for your family: you might not want to bring your kids to work everyday (check this one on Youtube) and conversely if you are like me, you don’t want to bring work to your moment of quality family time.
- Dress up!: I felt lost in the beginning with this “new normal”. Do I need my suit at home? Can I wear a t-shirt? Should I even get out of my pyjama? The answer is mostly depending of your activity. In my case, I have a customer facing job. I might not have to put on my suit but I’m dressing business casual. If you’re looking for help, I recommend you reading this book: Virtual Selling from Jeb Blount
- Be agile: change might happen, be quick and be ready to respond. A routine can be adjusted. In my case the only constant is waking up early and doing sports in the morning. I might not walk at the same time. I might not close my computer at the same time. I mean, you never know when will be your last call, action or whatever.
- Cook ! Have a nice meal, give yourself a reward for the hard work.
Maintain relationships
The title is self explicit. Maintain your network, maintain your professional relationships and also the one with your friends and family. This is not easy and it’s still a struggle from time to time. Set up moments to get in touch with them. While jumping into long days of meetings, I used to forget to set up these moments. I went into a survival mode, not thinking about all of this. Take a quiet moment and ask yourself:
- How are your customers doing?
- How are your colleagues doing?
- Who’s your board of directors and how are they doing? I mean by that, your inner circle…The persons you turn to in difficult situations.
- When is the last time you called your family and had a good discussion?
- What’s your best friend doing?
There are probably many other good things to do when working extensively from home. Feel free to share your best practices with me ! Always happy to learn something new.
Stay tuned for more!
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