The worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic has certainly disrupted our work lives. At Rocket Nine, we’ve been working remotely and with distributed teams for the past decade, so we’ve got some experience getting people up and running with remote meetings and work-from-home situations.
How to Work from Home
The most common questions we’ve gotten in the past week center How to Begin Working from Home.
We’ll address the following topics and give tips for working from home:
- types of online: meeting, webinar, training, presentation
- making sure your wifi/internet is reliable and robust
- choosing between GoToMeeting, Skype, WebEx, Zoom and other communications tools
- finding space in your house, apartment, or hotel
- camera setup
- what about audio
- lighting and background – what is good enough?
- how to facilitate an online meeting
- what other facilitation tools to use
- online etiquette
- mixing remote with on-site
- how to keep an online audience engaged
- keep yourself healthy
- recording your session for later viewing
Before diving in, we want to share that others have great advice (for example, Joy’s thread below). We’ll be adding links to what other work-from-home professionals are sharing.
1. I try to clean my desk every day after I finish workhttps://t.co/E2Ud4HrwIJ
— Joy Heron (@iamjoyheron) March 12, 2020
online meeting formats
Consider what the purpose of the meeting is. Are you holding a planning meeting or brainstorming session? Is it a simple status meeting? Do you need to teach or convey info (eg. webinar, presentation, etc.)?
reliable and robust wifi
close is best…
choosing a communications tools
If your organization already has a standard, than you may not have a choice in the matter…
finding space in your home
Not all spaces are equal…
camera setup
let’s make sure you look professional
what about audio
Being clearly heard is vital.
lighting and background
Sometimes you can simply open up the laptop and get online; other times you might have a bit more setup before going live. If you have laundry hanging behind you.
how to facilitate an online meeting
what other facilitation tools to use
online etiquette
mixing remote with on-site
how to keep an online audience engaged
keep yourself healthy
recording your session for later viewing
Resources
One of our friends in the Agile Coaching space is Mark Kilby who has been documenting his work with distributed teams. Mark has teamed up with Johanna Rothman to write their book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams.
Another terrific person to follow is Lisette Sutherland who runs Collaboration Superpowers and also has a book.