The Art of Working Smarter and Faster
Gina Trapini, of Lifehacker.com fame, has written en excellent blog post on The Art of Working Remotely. I think it’s great that more and more people are discovering how to improve their personal productivity and liberate themselves from the office and the 9-to-5 mentality.
But working from home or remotely is the wrong way of describing this 15+ year phenomena. It’s all about working in virtual environments. Work is a state of mind, not a location. I’m never mentally remote when I work, I always got my head in the game.
Here are a few of my key learnings from having worked in virtual environments since the late 90s at Icon Medialab, Yahoo! and Blurb and from my experience in leading CareerTV with collaborators across the world:
- The people you work with have to be self-starter, doer and entrepreneurial types that understand web collaboration. It’s a fairly new skill-set but will soon be mandatory for all companies
- Everyone needs to understand how to write and respond to emails (short, clear with ref links), use GApps or equivalent, Skype et cetera. Knowledge of the new Web 2.0 technologies is a must. That includes blogging and participation in communities which is a great way of unlearning marketing lingo and learning 1-to-1 relationship building
- Your organization / team needs to be decentralized, transparent and authentic. There is no room for middle or seagull managers. It’s important that everyone understands that you are a virtual organization and not a physical destination. Information needs to be accessible and free. The atmosphere honest and curious
- Your business plan and roadmap needs to be crispy clear. Roles, responsibilities and accountability needs to be clear as well
- Just cause you are not sitting next to your co-workers and team members doesn’t mean that there is no team work. It’s all about team work and collaboration. Everyone is only a click away
- Face-to-face meetings are very important on a regular basis. Meet up once a month or quarter, pending budget and distance. Use these meetings to hash out roadmaps, product development requirements et cetera. Keep it real and productive. Avoid dreamy visions and the traditional power pointing and focus on getting real things done
The challenge with getting a virtual organization going is that it takes time to re-program everyone to think about work as a state of mind and not an office. It takes time to get up to speed when people aren’t physically breathing down your neck or using hierarchies to establish fear and greed.
But once you have conquered that first challenge it can be extremely productive and rewarding both from a personal and professional perspective. And that’s what it’s all about, right.
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