Working from home — how it changes what I focus on

I never particularly enjoyed working from home, beyond a day here and there. The most regular work-from-home I had before now was when we lived in California. Once a week I avoided the long commute by working from home. Then came COVID-19. Like many other people, I’ve been working from home since the middle of March. And I continue to do so, even as many other offices reopen.

It’s now been almost three months since I’ve gone to the office as I usually do. Three months in which I’ve been working on a new routine — just like everyone else — and finding out how working from home is different than being at the office. This realization just sounds like an obvious observation not worthy of the e-ink to write it down, but it has come with a steep learning curve for me. I realized that being successful with remote work requires me to do more than just replace face-to-face meetings with video-calls.

As a Product Manager I work with a variety of cross-functional people. Most of them are also based in London. I also frequently interact with people in other parts of the world. My interaction with my peers is a mix of synchronous/realtime communication (meetings, chat) and async collaboration (working on documents, or posting content in our internal groups using workplace.com).

I’ve been asking myself a few questions on what I can learn in this situation to be more effective and impactful in my work. I’m not pretending to have all the answers, but I’d like to share how I’m thinking about this and hope other people could share their experiences.

How can I build and maintain empathy for others?

The physical distance comes with risks of losing the personal connection to my peers. Everyone experiences this time in their own way and is affected by it differently. People’s living situation and how it impacts our ability to focus on work can vary a lot.

I try to let people know when I struggle, opening up the opportunity for them to either accept their own struggles or open up and share them with me if they wish to do so.

How can I help to get clarity?

Being physically closer to each other made it easier to maintain this amongst a cross-functional group of people. However well aligned we were before, switching to remote-work feels like an amplifier for every gap in how we as a team understand our objectives and priorities.

These days I find myself attempting to be more precise in my meetings. Trying to make sure we all understand the nuances of what we’re working on. With that I’m consciously covering less content, to make sure we don’t fly over potential misunderstandings. At times I feel that I’m repeating myself and am concerned of being annoying to others. So far the feedback I’ve been getting was positive about the level of clarity I’ve been providing.

How can I better deal with the challenges of context switching?

Switching between topics is hard, and many people have experienced this. Working from home doesn’t make this easier. As there is no commute and no distance to walk from one meeting to the other I’ve been even more confused than usual when switching from one topic to the other.

Whenever I can, I try to block longer periods of time to work on one thing, consciously making decisions not to work on something else at that moment, or even the whole day.

How can I find time for chit-chat?

I’ve seen a couple of articles where people shared their best practices around working from home. One thing that is mentioned in practically all of them is the need to keep / build social relationships with people I work with.

So far there are two things that seem to work for me:

• Join recurring “tea-sessions” where there’s no agenda and we’re encouraged to talk about what comes to mind. While this is often still around work, it’s much easier to drop the occasional question about the past/upcoming weekend and move the conversation away from work.
• During the first few minutes of a meeting talking about something personal, can put the team into a more personal mood. Having a feeling to understand each others situation makes up for the “lost” time in the beginning. This works much better in conversations involving 2 or 3 people than with more participants.

While I don’t have the answers, I’m trying to be aware about these areas that I believe are more important than ever, while we’re still adapting to this new way of working.