Working at Home
Edited transcript:
Hello. I wanted to do a quick video about small companies working at home with the times we're facing right now. It's more work than I've ever done at home and I've always been very portable so I thought I'd share some tips and I'm learning them on the fly, so probably a lot more to share later, but I found some pretty good ones. Now it's been about a week since I've been working in shelter mode, as many of us in California are.
I broke it down into four basic areas that I think are critical to being successful working at home. I think the number one and probably most important is communication. I believe communication is probably the most important thing in working at home. It's hard to not see people every day and still communicate what your needs are and they to you as well.
One of the things I use a lot now is, actually more than ever, is web conferencing as well as phone calls as well as text messages and in many other ways. But web conferencing seems to be the most effective. I use Zoom. You're probably familiar with it. And I also use Teams. Teams is my favorite personally because it stores a database of all your files, it has chat, it hooks your company together. But there are many other versions of that. It's a collaborative tool. You can look it up.
We use Zoom a lot for external customer meetings and we have up to three a day, three or four a day now and it's worked out well. The other thing we've started doing, which we just started, is having one person in the office. We make a lot of prototypes. We have one person in the office roaming the office for the prototype build process.
It may be a team of six or eight. Both customers and employees need to join in a meeting and one person is wandering the office where the product, parts, fixtures are made and he or she faces the camera at the device of interest. We debate and ask for other views and actually it's a great way to review without ever driving. It leaves the exposure between people at a minimum and allows maximum understanding.
I think the last thing about communication I consider very important is something I call double communication. Normally you send an email to someone and they may or may not respond as quickly as you hope. And what I found is when you change the rules, people start working at home or vice versa, some in the office, some at home, they tend to not see their email in the same way.
If you have an urgent communication requirement, send the email and follow up with a phone call or a text message. I call it double down or double communication. That seems to work pretty well. The next area that I found super important at home. We don't think about it until it's painful is ergonomics. I hope you have a standing desk at home, but if you can do it, it's great.
I try to stand about half the day and sit the other half. You can find yourself in a seated mode for too long and then your back hurts and it's an ergonomic challenge that I think is affecting health. I recommend focus on ergonomics. The next area I call roles and responsibilities. We have many projects running right now and the roles and responsibilities of the individuals changed as they moved from in the office to in the home for lots of reasons.
And redefining what everyone's roles and responsibilities are in between projects is critical. We found that we had some gaps we had to fill rather rapidly because the assumed roles and responsibilities weren't the same as they were previously. Reaffirm your roles and responsibilities. And the last one, I call it the rhythm of home and work life. Typically I try to get up at the same time as I used to, I dress like I'm going to my work, but I'm not really going to the work I usually do.
And I find that that helps create a work life balance. I finish work at the same time, hopefully, and continue my daily schedule as I would as a worker in the normal sense. The other thing I try to do is go for long walks during the day. I can't go to the club anymore. I recommend going on walks if you can, obviously in a safe way.
The last one is something I call curve balls, and one of the things that's happened in this last week especially, is new requirements come out of new places in such strange situations. Usually they're urgent, they're unusual, that requirements that are safety driven, and they tend to throw your schedule off balance. Organizing your calendar to get tasks done in a way that's systematic is even more important than it was in the workplace, as it normally is. Those are my favorite tips for today anyway, and I'm sure I'll have some more in the next week or two. I hope it helps.
