Attaboy

For some strange reason, I hear many people talk about how it is harder to thank someone for their contributions when they work from home. Likewise, the at-home people say the same things about their in-office counterparts. I tend to think it's pretty easy to say "Thank you", but let's address the topic anyway!

Let's start with the easiest method: Call, email, or Instant Message. These are avenues you should be comfortable with and have at your disposal. The key to this forum is that your thanks be timely and personalized. Instead of "Thank You", consider something more like "Thanks, Joe. This {new feature} will save us 2 hours a week. Much appreciated!" This makes the thanks more specific to the action that was performed and not a generic rubber stamp. If the thanks is related to something really over-the-top, considering carbon copying the coworker's leaders or team so that others can recognize the difference this person made for you.

Additionally, many companies now have internal social media sites. Feel free to give a shout out on these electronic means so that other people interested in topic can tag on, and start a snowball of positive feedback! Use @ and # tags appropriately to get the message to the right people and find it again later.

Where this gets more interesting is when it relates to swag and physical forms of thanks. Maybe you might take someone to lunch, grab a coffee together, buy them a soda, or put a gag gift on their desk. Hard to do that when they are hundreds of miles away! Hard maybe, but not impossible. Here are some suggestions in the $3-10 range:

• Tell someone they rock, by buying them a $3 e-gift card to a music venue (such as iTunes or Amazon)
• Share that cup o' joe by sending them an e-gift card for a local latte lounge (such as Starbucks). Don't skip on the coffee talk though! Get on an a video chat and share your coffee together.
• Show someone how sweet you think they are by sending a cookie gram (such as the $5 cookie cards from Cheryl's) 
• Is it your lucky day because they helped you out so much? Make it theirs and mail them some lotto scratchers. 
• Make a donation to a charity in their name. Even $5-10 telling them that you are paying their kindness forward. Charities can use every penny! (Red Cross, American Cancer Society, or a favorite local charity, for example)
• Personalize a bottle of Coke during the Share a Coke campaign. Even if they never drink it, it will be a fun keepsake. We all know how hard it can be to find your name!
• Send an old fashioned card. A hand-written note really shows your appreciations. See my previous blog post on cards... e-Cards work too when you are short on time or do not have a mailing address. 

Basically, all you need is their email address or home address, and the possibilities are endless. Most cost the same that you would spend in the office. You may perceive it to cost more because it took more effort, but that effort will be totally worth it.

The key to thanking anyone, in-office or at-home, is your sincerity. If you are truly thankful and express your sentiments from the heart, the recipient will feel that and know they made a difference. 

Thank you for reading my blog today. :-)

Will Work At Home work for you?

Not everyone is cut out to be work at home. Well, maybe not all of their situations enable them to be successful. I'd like to think, based on job duties, that anyone could work at home if they gave it the effort. But let's ground ourselves back in reality and agree that I'm a bit pie-in-the-sky.

So, if it doesn't work for everyone, how do you know if it will work for you? Let's explore some of the factors:

Distractions - To be successful at home, the things that take focus away from work need to be kept to a minimum. That doesn't mean you have to lock yourself in a windowless, soundproof, isolation chamber. But, you do need to make sure that you aren't adding more distraction at home than you would have in the office. The biggest distraction is other people - babies, kids, significant others, neighbors, etc; anyone that is present in the house and requires too much of your attention. While you may switch a load of laundry during lunch, you must remember that you are here to work.

Office Space - Despite what some may think, working from home is not sitting on your couch or lying in bed. You need to have a dedicated work space, just like a space when you would physically go to the office. This cannot be your kitchen table, or an end table, or whatever makeshift thing you think will suffice. In some industries/roles, your office must be private and secured, with the ability to lock files and manage confidential data. Your office must also be safe and ergonomic, for both your long term health, and for legal reasons to protect your employer from workplace safety liability.

Outside Interests - Working at home is physically isolating. While you may compensate socially, there is still a feeling of confinement if you don't leave the house. It is important to have interests that go beyond your four walls to keep your social skills up and your creepiness down. You don't want to be that weirdo that never leaves the house and neighbors whisper about! Your house will turn into a prison if you don't step outside of it. You will feel isolated, alone, and depressed. The best candidates are involved in activities that take place in the outside world: volunteering, church, school, sports activities, social groups, activities with your family, etc.

Social (Media) Skills - You are not the only person working for your company. Even if your work is solitary, there will be others you must connect with, and others you should. If you live on an island, you won't be as engaged with your work, and in turn will not put your whole heart into it. We are social creatures, even the most anti-social of us. We also have a base level of needs, and belonging is a large component. To belong, to engage, you must interact. Being remote, this takes more effort. You have to be willing to reach out and not wait for interactions to come to you. Through electronic means, you must be able to share of yourself and invite others in. This will likely take the form of email, instant message, video chat, phone, and social media venues. If you don't actively employ these techniques in your personal life or current job, you likely will not thrive remotely.

Past Experience - This one is obvious. If someone has worked remotely in the past, they generally know what they are getting into and know if they can handle it. Obviously this cannot be the only factor, but it certainly does help.

Equipment/Tech Savvy - When you work at home, there will be at least some equipment/connections you have to manage. Even if your company supplies everything from the computer to the phone and internet lines, tech support is not onsite to help you if something goes wrong. You should be able to diagnose basic problems like connections. Ideally you are familiar with collaboration tools as well. Being remote, you will need to use webcams, social media, and other tools to stay connected with coworkers. It is important that you feel comfortable with technology enough to utilize these tools with little hand-holding.

Internet Speed - Duh! If you can't maintain a high-speed, dependable connection, it won't work no matter how great everything else is.

This isn't comprehensive. Each role will have unique qualifications, and of course the standard role desirables will also be in play. But these are some of the unique factors that may help you determine if working remote will work for you. Please comment with others!

Times... they are a changin'

In every life, change will come. The same can be said for every job, every company. But when change is large, outside of your control, AND you work at home, you have the perfect storm for heads to explode. If you're company is going through something like a bankruptcy, loss of business, closure of a product line, merger, acquisition, etc., etc., every employee's first reaction is: What does this mean for my job?

When you work at home, this is multiplied exponentially. Whenever someone works at home, they inevitably wonder about whether people will remember them, or if they will be a forgotten lost boy off in Neverland. Most people get over that quickly, especially if they manage their PR as recommended in a previous post. But, when a large portion of the company begins to panic, the at-home fears come back with gusto.

Suddenly every at home person is wondering if they are an even bigger target for losing their job.

So how do you deal with this? How do you cope and not drive yourself insane? How do you protect yourself? Not all that different than you would if you were in the office. It may just take some additional effort. Here are some tips:

• Be a rock star at your job. Don't let worry interfere with your ability to delivery on time, high quality, low cost results that wow your customers. Execution matters most!
• Toot your own horn. Don't be an ego-maniac jerk, but take credit where it is due, and make sure others know about your rock star contributions.
• Toot the horns of others. Likewise, give credit where it is due. Help promote those around you and they will return the favor. You also illustrate your ability to be a team player by being a bit humble.
• Network! Don't stay in your bubble. Talk to your team, your leaders, your peers, your customers. Make as many connections as possible. Join the Dog Lovers chat board even! Get people to recognize your name.
• Stay positive. It's easy to be negative, and studies show you gain "friends" through negativity with pile-ons and sympathy. But that's not the energy you want to put out into the universe. The powers that be will pick up on it, and it ruins your cred. 
• Be prepared. Don't jump ship, but do get things in order in case you need to. Update your resume, get your references, increase your savings. If you have to jump, at least have a cushy place to land.
• Keep managing your PR

Most importantly: Don't fill your head full of worry over something you cannot control.

You can only control what you do. Whatever comes down from on-high will come down, whether you want it to or not. You can't stop the snowball from rolling down the hill. You can, however, prepare for what you might do if it does.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Phone cojones

I was watching a rerun of Two and a Half Men the other night, the one where Alan Harper's ex-wife is getting remarried, and it stuck with me. Alan is on the phone with Judith listening to her usual crazy demands, when he man's up and tells her what he thinks. When he hangs up he says to Berta, the house-keeper, "Oh boy, I'm going to pay for that." Berta responds back with "You know what your problem is? Phone cojones." After a little banter about what that means, Alan says "Good to have a name for it."

I'm glad there's a name for it too, as it makes it easier for me to talk about it!

So what is it exactly? It's basically when you say things on the phone that you would never say to a person's face, either words or sentiment by way of tone and expression. It's easy to stand behind a phone and deliver bad news or tell someone off because you can hang up and walk away from it. You don't have to witness the facial expressions - the red faces, the tears, the crossed arms, the steely eyes. You don't have the awkwardness of being in close proximity after the conversation and trying to act cool. It's almost as if it didn't happen!

Oh... but it did. And because you didn't have the physical guard rails to keep you in your lane, you threw it into the gutter big time. You put up a big zero with those on the receiving end, and now that is how they perceive you, as a big zero.

Sure you can apologize and try to make nice after words if you screwed up, but you can never turn back the clock. You can never suck that moment back in. It's out there forever. The zero stays on the record books, and while you may throw strikes from here on, that zero will always weigh down your average and you will always be fighting against it.

We've all done it. Heck, I think I did it this week. I'm not proud of it. Sometimes those buttons get pushed so hard that it's almost a protective instinct. But you won't feel good afterwards. And the receiving end won't either. It's a no-win situation.

This becomes an even bigger problem when you work remotely. When 100% of your interactions are virtual, the opportunity to throw a gutter ball increases. It is important to remind yourself of something: You, and only you, control your reaction to a situation.

During each virtual interaction (email, phone, video, etc.) ask yourself these important questions:
- Would I respond like this if we were in a room together?
- Is this the lasting impression I want to leave with this person?

If the answer to either of these is "No", then you need to reset your course. Restack the pins, bowl again, and keep it in the lane. It doesn't always have to be a strike, but stay out of the gutter. You are the only one rolling that ball - You control where it goes.

With phone cojones, your balls end up in the gutter.

No, I won't be there in person

Usually I like to write articles that help the remote worker be the best at their job while away from the office. But today, I'm writing for you in-office folks.

When a person is full-time work at home, they will NOT be attending your meeting in person.

Read that one again: They will NOT be attending in person. Period. 

It is up to work at home people to be fully engaged in their job, with their teams, and with their customers. This requires extra effort and attention, making even the easy meetings tougher. But we do it because we love what we do, and where we do it. We're willing to burn extra calories and put in more time to make it work.

But it's a two-way street!

We need the people in the office to put in a little more effort in on the meetings they schedule. If you are only meeting with a handful of people, you should be able to look at their work locations (or even time zones for that matter) and select a meeting medium that works for all parties. If it's a larger meeting or you didn't have time to check that, you need to assume that someone typically cannot be there in person and always offer an alternative.

It's also not enough to give offer a phone number and expect that everyone receives a fair ability to participate. It's up to the host of the meeting to ensure that all participants can properly hear, see, share, and participate. Some tips to help:

• Ask if listeners can hear, and make sure you can hear them.
• Ask if listeners can see your video, and make sure you can see them.
• Ask if listeners can see your shared screen, and vice versa.
• Talk slow enough to allow for people to inject comments. There may be phone delays, or people just waiting for a pause in conversation.
• Purposefully pause to check in with listeners.
• Announce where you are when presenting materials, so that if there is a delay people can speak up.
• Eliminate in-room options from the meeting. Commit to an all-virtual meeting to keep everyone on equal footing.

It's a common misconception that people working from home are really in-office people electing to be at home that day. Employees that are truly work at home are there full time. All the time. They are not "popping in" to the office today because of your meeting. Don't treat these workers like second class citizens because they are at home. And don't insult them with comments like "in case you could make it in." They won't.

Is Work At Home working?

To tell if you Work at Home program is working out, you ideally need measurements on how well the in-office situation was working out for comparison. Without these, most of your analysis of the situation will be based on conjecture and subjectivity. Not that conclusions cannot be made, but they won't have the WOW punch you're looking for.

Some measurements you should know about your team, regardless of your work location include:

• Engagement scores - Using some sort of periodic survey, through a 3rd party or your own, that measures how actively committed your associates are to your team, your product, your company, and your mission. 
• Sick days - Average number of unplanned time off for physical or mental health.
• Turnover - Average number of associates that leave your team in a given time period. Be careful with this measure! If an associate leaves because they received an internal promotion or opportunity based on their desired growth path and your support for them, that's not negative. Make sure you have a means to separate turnover into subcategories to tell those stories.
• Requisition Fulfillment Rate - Average length of time it takes to hire someone in to any open positions in your team.
• Diversity - This can be tricky. There's privacy issues involved. And you don't want to appear to be driven by a quota or some equal opportunity ratio. While you may not "measure" this, a diverse team is a stronger team, and worth bragging about. 
• Budget - Comparison of your actual spend to your budgeted cost, and how well you meet that budget (or hopefully come in under!)
• Delivery - Comparison of your actual delivery dates to your scheduled delivery dates, and how well you provide on-time service (or ahead of schedule).
• Quality - This can be two-fold. There are hard numbers, such as the number of incident tickets you receive, the amount of downtime, etc. But there are soft numbers, such as how well the service actual meets the customer's need, the ease of use, etc. Ideally, you would measure both.
• Net Promoter Scores - Customer loyalty metric, which basically assesses the likelihood that your customer would recommend your service.
• Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Other measures of how well you are meeting customer expectations, providing them with innovative solutions, being a trusted partner for their needs, and so on.

I'm sure you can think of more. For those thinking this doesn't apply because you don't sell a product or "face the public", I challenge you to open your minds a bit. Each of us is providing a service to someone else, a customer, or else you wouldn't have a job!

Now that you have all those numbers, what next? You should compare those numbers while you were in the office to the results after you have been at home for a while. Work at home should have a positive impact on at least one of those categories, while not negatively impacting any. If work at home is really working, you will see improvement in multiple categories and no setbacks. 

If you are seeing a little setback, you may be able to address this through education and support. Sometimes it takes a little while to get the hang of work at home, so don't be too quick to judge or overreact. But, if you are seeing multiple setbacks, or significant ones, it may be time to re-evaluate.

If everything is the same, where you've seen no setbacks but no gains, then it is still not working. Work at home should be driving something, or you wouldn't be doing it. You might as well stay in the office if you can't improve by being at home.

Don't you... forget about me

One of the questions I hear most often from associates considering working from home is "Aren't you afraid you will be forgotten?" My answer is always the same: NO. How could anyone forget about me?

But seriously, I don't worry about it. Why not? Because I manage my own PR (Public Relations) campaign, and I mean I really manage it. Whether you are in the office or hundreds of miles away, people will forget about you if you let them. It's up to you to own your brand and market yourself. This is increasingly important if the old adage of 'out of sight, out of mind' has any truth to it.

So how exactly does one do this? You start by putting yourself out there. Why do you think I have this blog? As you are reading my pearls of wisdom, you can't help but have a little seed planted about my awesomeness. This is one part of my overall strategy for keeping my name in the front of you even when my face is not.

Managing your PR campaign is not the same as doing your daily job. You do your daily job to do this to be paid today. Your PR is about your job tomorrow, next week, next year. For your daily job, it may be enough that only your boss knows you do quality work. But if you boss was gone tomorrow, what would you do? When you have a wider reputation for great things, you can use that street cred to help you through the unknown of tomorrow. That net you are casting will be there to catch you.

Here are some tips on ways to make your name known at your company:

• Teach a class to others on a topic in which you consider yourself an expert
• Write (and publish) a blog on similar topics
• Volunteer for pilot initiatives, special programs, and new ventures
• Be active in social media (internally and externally)
• Get engaged of member of a club or group
• Become a mentor or mentee
• Don't be afraid to put your name on your work and take credit for it

Since I have been work at home, I've received awards from my peers, expanded my team, increased my responsibilities, and been financially rewarded. In fact, I believe a far wider and diverse group of people recognize me now than ever before. Why? Because I own it.

Don't give people the opportunity to forget about you.