An incredible amount has changed in the last few weeks, including many agents now experiencing home working; perhaps for the first time.
A number of clients have expressed concern at the prospect of managing their teams from a distance – there was comfort (in the routine at least) in driving to the office each morning and huddling around for a morning meeting before going in and out of people’s homes all day. Now it’s the dining room table, spare room or for a lucky few a dedicated home office on your own all day!
Founder of Acaboom, Brian Farrell has promoted home working for over 15 years. He has managed teams around the world working from home and believes the results are actually far better than with office-based workers.
Here are some of Brian’s tips if you are new to home working:
- Try and find the best environment where normal day-to-day home life is not distraction.
- Make sure, as you would in any work environment, your workspace is comfortable; a good chair, desk with good (room) light, and a decent PC
- There are many web based solutions to enable you to work with your team live – for example Google Drive and/or Dropbox is great for updating information securely whilst all working together.
- Communication – you can still have morning meetings, just virtual ones! Skype, Google Hangouts are all great tools to group video conference.
- Especially in the early days, and when everyone is getting used to homeworking, make sure the team has a list of things to get through. Once used to the new way of working then the team’s natural pro-active tendencies will no doubt start kicking in again.
- Set real work hours for yourself and everyone, stay in the zone and separate family and relaxation times.
And lastly…look forward to this new way of working – there are lots of upsides and it’s likely you’ll see improved team efficiency and happy staff.
We all wonder whether you’ll actually want to adopt at every opportunity moving forward!
