From the first tourist who came back from vacation with a suitcase full of the novel coronavirus, people of all scientific and non-scientific stripes have been speculating as to how bad the eventual spread might be. Current status: bad. As of today (March 16), and per Johns Hopkins, the U.S. is seeing more than 3,700 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with patients in 49 out of 50 states. (You go, West Virginia!) Many municipalities and businesses are finding it prudent to cancel events that would draw large crowds, and to send their employees home to work in a more socially isolated environment. (And I can’t say I blame them.)
This remote-work boom, however, can cause problems for companies that don’t already have a work-from-home program in place. That kind of transition needs time for adjustment, and when you have fifty employees scrambling to escape a virus, time isn’t something you have a lot of. Luckily, there are people — freelancers, for instance — who have experience working with agency clients and who know how surprisingly easy it can be to smoothly integrate remote workers into the regular goings-on of an agency environment.
Me. We — we’re talking about me.
But you’re not stuck with just me — we have with us an actual expert to help with the more technological side of things (read: reliably know what he’s talking about). Chiming in from the tech world is Mykel Alvis, principal at Array Consulting and expert with decades of experience in software engineering and process management, as well as working remotely.
Maybe you’re being proactive and taking some time to put together a remote-worker program, recognizing that it’s basically the future of business and has shown tangible benefits to companies that have taken the plunge. Maybe you’re preparing for a potential disaster, like JPMorgan, which recently announced a pilot program to send 10 percent of their 125,000 employees — that’s 12,500 empty desks — home to see how the company’s remote infrastructure holds up. Or maybe you’re watching the news, biting your nails (stop that) and desperately trying to figure out how to let your workers socially distance without having to close up shop. Regardless, we’re here to help.
(And by “here,” I mean at home, in sweatpants. Jealous?)
(Don’t be. Which is kind of the point.)
Environment
Workers
The usual work-from-home advice includes finding ways to interact with people so you don’t feel isolated! And go work from a coffee shop for a change of environment! And those things might apply to a freelancer who isn’t a nuclear-level introvert (like yours truly), but when you’re a full-time employee working from home possibly for the first time in the midst of a public health incident that might discourage spending too much time at coffee shops and networking face-to-face, it’s not so much. So all I can advise is to arrange as pleasant a home office environment as you can. If you have time to set up a workspace, try to find a nice, sequestered space with natural light (or cavelike darkness, if that’s your thing), a desk large enough to hold your necessary office equipment, and the most ergonomically correct chair you can reasonably afford. If this is a last-minute and/or temporary deal, you might end up having to claim the end of the kitchen table and the most ergonomically correct chair that doesn’t currently have a butt in it, but you can survive anything for a couple of weeks.
Another difference you might experience from the stereotypical freelancer is the ability to set your own schedule (which is, to a certain extent, apocryphal anyway). Ad agencies are, of course, heavy into collaboration, which means working along with your coworkers, which means keeping more-or-less company hours. So don’t make any big daytime plans, and let your family know that just because you’re not at work, that doesn’t mean you’re not at work. It’ll be a compromise — you’ll probably have to spend some time folding laundry in your downtime, and the kids will have to accept that you can’t referee their fights just because you’re in the house, and it’ll take some adjustment, and you’ll be fine.
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Be considerate of the fact that your remote workers may be working in a less-than-ideal environment, surrounded by laundry and dishes and a dog that wants to be let out EVERY FIVE DAMN MINUTES, LIKE, GOOD LORD, DAVE, JUST HOLD IT. Don’t expect immediate replies to your communications, and give plenty of lead time when scheduling conference calls and such. And understand that designing a website at the office and designing a website in a bathroom with a toddler yelling MA MA MA MA MA MA MA on the other side of the door are two very different activities.
Gear
Workers
Whatever your technological setup is at the office, you need to be able to replicate it at home as best you can. Laptop? Yes. Big-ass monitor, huge tower, and Wacom the size of a coffee table? Unfortunately, yes. If this is something that has come up kind of suddenly, that means you don’t have time to gradually adjust to a new work setup without your work suffering. It probably won’t be perfect, but do what you can. And you should be able to expect your employer to do what they can.
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That means hooking your people up with the equipment they need, as best you can. And if that means sending them home with the actual gear they’ve been using at their office, that’s what it means. Don’t expect to be able to maintain full productivity while your workers are working with haphazardly assembled equipment.
You may also need to provide equipment beyond what your workers use at the office, because remote work presents additional demands, as noted below.
Connectivity (and Security)
Workers
When you’re working from home, particularly in an emergency situation, what you’re stuck with, network-wise, is what you’re stuck with. Your Wifi is your Wifi (unless you have the money to call your Internet company and upgrade). But do the best you can. And when you’re working remote, security is key.
The expert says:
Make sure your home Wifi is using WPA2 security (harder to crack), and not WEP (easy to crack within minutes). Use a password safe, like LastPass, and make your passwords big and random. Please don’t use any of the passwords listed here as a password. It’s 2020, so most people know what phishing is, but if you don’t, please educate yourself on phishing. Online courses exist (Udemy has at least one class on this, and it’s about $11), so if you’re unsure about how to deal with phishing, you might consider taking some training. (Don’t forget to expense that.) And remember that generally some of the principles of least privilege operate well here: Only provide what access privileges are needed for a task. Take only what you’re working with. Only keep it as long as you need it. Return what you took to somewhere secure. Logout when you’re done.
Security isn’t a place to skimp. You may well be dealing with proprietary company or client data, and that’s not something you can trust to “trustno1” (you big dork).
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The best advice available in this space is “ask your IT person,” and if you don’t have an IT person, your office probably isn’t equipped to manage a lot of connectivity from your end anyway.
The expert says:
IT staffing can usually provide VPN services, often free or nearly free. (If that’s unreasonable, transfer local storage to cloud storage, some options for which are mentioned below.) All modern computers (and smartphones and tablets) generally have some form of VPN client, or virtual private network. This is jargon for a protected network that produces a “virtual” network on top of some other network (like the Internet) with encryption to keep others from snooping. Once you’ve gotten connected to the internal network, remote desktop capabilities, like RDP for Windows and Remote Desktop for Mac, are possible. To be fair, these tools tend to see a lot of work even without a quarantine, but they’re not recommended for daily work — they have a tendency to be poorly secured, and the connections can lag.
Beyond that, the public cloud-based services mentioned in the next section will probably do the job, and can be implemented without the whole “ask your IT person” part.
The expert also says:
Determine what level of security is actually appropriate for your work. If your job is to put cat pictures on the Internet, that’s quite a bit less taxing on your security process than if you work with some form of privileged data. No matter what, your work is important to someone and thus needs to be protected as well as the situation warrants. Someone, probably not you, needs to determine how well-protected that is. Make sure your employees understand your agency’s security policies regarding using personal machines to perform agency work. On one end of the spectrum, this can mean dealing with CCPA ,GDPR, or some other form of legislative enforcement. For others, it’s just a matter of a non-existent or easily understood policy. Most people live somewhere in between. It’s important to know where your workplace stands.
So whether you’re working with protected consumer data or just new branding that doesn’t need to leak out before the big launch: Know what you’re working with, have a policy, and communicate that to your workers. (I mean, you probably should have done that already anyway.)
Communication
Workers
Working from home isn’t all super-fun playtime. (It is, for the record, at least partly super-fun playtime.) When you’re on the clock, you’re also on the hook for working with colleagues, clients, and so on in as close to the same manner as possible that you had at the office. Reply to emails promptly. Reply to phone calls… with emails, because phone calls suck. This is a great opportunity to set up a Slack workspace, where you can all collaborate in a shared channel. It’s like being able to stick your head into someone’s office and bug them, except minus all the annoyance of being able to do that.
The thing to remember is that you don’t like to wait for the information you need to do your job, and none of your colleagues do, either. And whatever measures your agency is employing to facilitate remote work, don’t fight them. Feel free to make your own suggestions, but don’t boycott the technology just because you don’t like it. Things are a mess. Be a team player.
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The most important thing you need to do from the very beginning is to establish best practices for communicating. I hesitate to say “lay down expectations” or anything like that, because that sounds a lot more rigid than you can afford to be in this kind of up-in-the-air situation. But make sure everyone’s on the same page and that you have a system you can all adhere to to keep you working together.
If you’re trying to put a cloud-friendly system together on the fly… like, seriously, where’ve you been? But if you’re trying to make the office remote-friendly while you’re rushing out the door, you have a few relatively easy-to-institute options.
The expert says:
– Slack for collaboration
– Zoom is the current leader in the very contentious videoconferencing field, usable by people with varying levels of technological prowess and access to bandwidth.
– Collaborative drawing with Drawpile (or one of these online whiteboards)
– Dropbox, Box, or Amazon Drive, Google Drive (and by extension possibly G Suite for all your email, file-sharing, and calendaring — welcome to the Future!), iCloud if you’re into that. The most important thing is that everyone agrees on which one to use.
– Trello, for project management, if you don’t already have a cloud-accessible project management system
(Promotional considerations have been paid for by none of these products, but, I mean, they’re certainly welcome to offer.)
These are all last-minute-friendly tools, but they aren’t last-last minute tools, because you’ll still have to upload your working files from whatever terrestrial hard drive you’re working from. But it’s better than everyone trying to work from their own hard drive and having no way to communicate effectively.
The expert says:
If you have stacks of hard drives, maybe someone starts the transfer to a large cloud-based shared storage, like one of the ones mentioned above. They have reasonable storage plans and frankly, they are substantially better than your
nephew JimmyIT professional at keeping those backups available.
As you’re breaking out the fancy new toys, be sure to communicate with your workers about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to use these potentially unfamiliar new tech solutions. And give them the opportunity to provide feedback — that you will sincerely consider — to get buy-in from them.
Adaptability
Workers
I won’t go into the usual advice about staying productive and focused while working from home — those have been covered at length. Shower daily, go to work wearing clothes you didn’t just sleep in, put the kids in the crate and tell the dog you can’t play until lunchtime, etc. At least try to buckle down.
About all the time you’re about to spend solo: I’m told that some people enjoy… interacting? With, like, people? Dunno, folks are weird. But even if you’re a super-introvert like I am, an abrupt move from a bustling communal environment to a solo home office can be jarring. Make more of an effort than usual to make some kind of personal contact — use Slack or (ugh) phone calls rather than email to have that realtime interaction. When you’re on a video call, actually use video. It seems like a tiny thing, but seeing people’s faces when you’re talking to them can make a real difference when you’re starting to feel isolated. Have a virtual Happy Hour, where you all jump on a Hangout and make cocktails out of whatever is available in the house. “Watch movies together” via Skype. Complete and utter hermitage isn’t for amateurs.
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This might be the trickiest part for you: learning to truly trust your people to get the job done while you aren’t in the office to keep an eye on them. You should take comfort in the fact that, according to one study, worker productivity actually increased 4.4 percent under a work-from-anywhere policy, and another survey showed that remote workers spend 10 fewer minutes of idle time than their officebound colleagues. You should also take comfort in the fact that you did hire these people, and when you hired them, you did so with the assumption that they’d still work hard for you without your constant, nagging supervision. Give them a chance to impress you with how responsible they can be when they’re left to their own devices.
Patience
The best thing that everyone, employees and agencies, can do is try to be patient and kind with each other and with themselves. This is unfamiliar to everyone — even people who are used to working remote aren’t used to working remote with a team of people who’ve never done it before, in a hastily assembled setup, with a li’l smidge of global chaos out there to boot. Some of your colleagues might end up getting sick themselves, or having to care for a sick loved one, or just be surrounded by children who are also out of school. It can be hard, when you’re stressed out yourself, to take a deep breath and give the benefit of the doubt to someone you perceive to be making your life harder. The fact is, though, everyone’s life is harder right now, and if we all commit to making other people’s lives better, the world is a better place, even in the midst of catastrophe.
Also recognize that, while I’m sure you’re doing your best to stay on top of everything and keep things running smoothly, no plan survives enemy contact. Things will go wrong. THINGS WILL GO WRONG. AND THAT’S OKAY.
The expert says:
This is true. Things will not work out precisely correctly unless you were basically already working this way.
That’s what I just said.
When that inevitability of failure arises, all you can do is acknowledge that it happened and try to get back on track. Breathe. You’ll be fine.
And employers, when everything gets back to normal and you’re back in the office, be patient with your employees, who are going to be wearing pants for the first time in possibly weeks. Pants are the worst.