Home Office without Guesses - Experiences of those who have worked remotely for more than 1 year

Introduction

Hey guys!
For those who follow me on social media, you may have seen a short post talking about MY view of the advantages and disadvantages of working 100% from home (remotely). As this is a very relevant subject and one that I believe is the future of several professions, I decided to delve a little deeper into my analysis and share this material with all of you, publicly, as it can help answer questions from people who are thinking about migrating to this regime.

I don't know if everyone knows, but I'm the leader of the BI team at Fabrício Lima – BD Solutions and I have been working 100% remotely for over a year (visiting clients from time to time) and I would like to share with you some of my experience working this way and my opinions.

After all, why is there so much discussion about the Home Office?

Over the last 20 years, we have seen an increase in agility in the daily work routines of companies. Repetitive tasks are losing their place once and for all and giving way to activities that require logical reasoning, data analysis for decision making and increasingly, IT is becoming more important and becoming more part of people's daily lives (both within companies and outside). IT's greatest challenge over the last 2 decades was to bring technology closer to the lay user and this objective was successfully achieved. Currently, technology is increasingly present in people's lives and popularized. Nowadays, it's difficult to live without a cell phone, where people communicate via text, voice and video, send emails, exchange files, hold conferences and almost everything they would do on a computer.

Due to these changes in the type of activities in companies, which have become more intellectual in nature than repetitive and routine activities, where people are increasingly thinking about automating and improving processes to eliminate this type of activity from their day and thus have more time to think and plan, corporations understood that they needed motivated, trained and engaged professionals so that they could increase their productivity and, respectively, their profits.

And then this “boom” of benefits for employees began, aiming to increase their level of satisfaction and engagement, following successful examples such as Google, Facebook and several other giants born in the last 20 years:

• Free coffee machines in companies
• Working in shorts
• Take your child/pet to the company
• Day off on your birthday
• Video game/game room in the company
• Rest/sleep room
• Birthday party of the month
• Several other benefits…

These benefits are excellent and really motivate employees. They greatly increase engagement and can even be decisive factors in attracting or retaining an employee. And that's where the home office.

Today's work is very dynamic and in many sectors and professions, it does not require as much personal contact with your client or teammate. With conference facilities, video calls, high-speed file exchange, remote control, screen sharing and many other features of our modern world, doing business with customers from anywhere in the world today is a reality. Most retail companies are closing physical stores and investing in virtual stores, where everything is done online. Many companies are reducing the need to wait for minutes on the phone talking to telecom agents through fully automated services via apps or websites.

Today it is common to have teammates located in different regions of the world. In multinationals, we see many teams located in different offices, living in different countries and speaking different languages. And because of this change in the job market, in the way we deal with our clients and how we work as a team, home office is becoming an increasingly present reality in the day-to-day lives of companies, especially in technology and administrative areas.

How important is working remotely?

After working for some large companies and completing 15 years working in the IT area, I can say that, currently, the 5 main things I evaluate in a possible job change are:

• 1 – Salary
• 2 – Home Office
• 3 – Growth opportunities
• 4 – Alignment of the activities I will carry out with what I want for my career
• 5 – Other non-financial benefits

In my opinion, Home Office is the main non-financial benefit that a company can offer you, for several reasons, including:

• Save time: I spent 30 minutes going to work and 1 hour getting back. ALL DAY. And now I can use this time to spend time with my family, study or do anything else.
• Avoid stress: Traffic is stressful. Even if you don't even drive and take the bus, doing this every day is tiring and stressful.
• It's safer: Leaving the house every day to go to work is dangerous: You could get into an accident or be robbed
• It's cheaper: Home Office helps you save on gas/fare and not “use up” your car.
• It's more productive: Working in an office can sometimes be complicated. It is very common for you to be distracted by a side conversation from another person on the team or company or for a user to want to “skip the queue” for customer service and ask you or demand something in person. All of this takes away your focus.
• It is more comfortable and performant: Generally, those who work from home end up investing in their own comfort when working. While companies choose tables, chairs and computers thinking about choosing the cheapest, when it is the professional who decides this and he is motivated, he ends up opting for quality and comfort. Giving my personal example, I think it's difficult for any company in Brazil to buy equipment of the same quality that I bought for work. This gives me more comfort to work all day and I can do many more things at the same time, since my latest generation PC can do anything, create several VMs for testing and everything opens at an almost instantaneous speed, while in companies, managers generally have powerful machines to open E-mail, internet and PowerPoint, while analysts have to make do with i5 16GB of RAM to open various software and heavy files.
• Stay closer to family: Working from a home office gives you the possibility of always being at home, so depending on the case, you can always have lunch with the family, play with your child/pet, etc.
• Schedule flexibility: As you won't need to waste time in traffic or get ready to go to work, you can wake up later. If you work on demand, you can work your hours around the times you are most productive. There are people who produce more during the day, others at night, and there are people who produce more at dawn.
• Less friction in the team: You know those people on the team who are always fighting and arguing in the company? Home office will greatly reduce this and you may even miss each other... lol
• More freedom: One of the biggest advantages of Home Office is the feeling of freedom you have! I can live anywhere in the world and continue working! I can go to the coast, wake up early, work normally and go for a swim at the beach at the end of the day.
• The best talents: Another great advantage of Home Office for companies is being able to count on great talents from anywhere in the world, without having to require them to move and leave their cities/family. It's really cool to see the happiness and testimony of people who live far away or in the countryside and who were already giving up on finding work in their current cities and planning to stay away from their family and even change states in search of a job.

Are the benefits, freebies, and cool things that companies go out of their way to please employees from time to time interesting? Yes! For sure! But generally, almost everything you already have in your home and in many cases, companies like to provide various benefits and do various actions to make employees happier, but the salary itself is not usually very high... (these benefits have to come from somewhere, right?)

Is working remotely just advantages?

Like everything in life, there are disadvantages for the employee when working 100% remotely as well, of which I would like to highlight:

• Home Office requires discipline: One thing is certain – Home Office NO It's for everyone. Many people cannot focus alone at home and cannot produce. Either they don't have a quiet and isolated room to work, or their family doesn't allow them to work properly, or there's a lot of noise in the house, etc.
• Some customers like personal contact: In the consultancy I work for, we serve clients from all over Brazil. Although the vast majority like and adapt to working remotely, there are some who like me to go there in person to present a project, talk, do some live explanation. To resolve these cases, we can always leave the house one day or another to visit these clients. They will like it.
• Home Office requires investment: Depending on your area of ​​activity, you may need to have good internet and/or a good computer. And that costs money. And not everyone can afford it, especially at the beginning of their career.
• Home Office = Office at home: Your home will be your office and this will require silence for meetings and concentration in everyday life. Your family will have to be understanding about this.
• Workaholic: Anyone who works remotely needs to be careful not to become a Workaholic and try to disconnect from the company when their shift is over. It is very common to see people always connected to the company and available for any problem, as their office is their own home.
• Not every profession/company supports Home Office: One thing that is very clear to me, but is worth highlighting here, is that not every area/company can adhere to the Home Office. Imagine doctors working remotely or bricklayers building a house remotely.
• Increase in energy bill: Something important to note is that you will save on gas/fare, but your energy bill will increase due to the increased time on the computer. If you like to stay in the air conditioning all day, your bill will tend to increase a lot more.

Although I think it has more advantages than disadvantages, we cannot leave these points aside. It is very important that the Home Office is well aligned with your client/manager so that it works in the best way possible. The golden tip is focus. If you are delivering your activities well, your home office will be a success!

Some tips for those who are starting the Home Office

After having some problems with the Home Office, here are some tips that can make your life easier when you start working remotely:

• You will probably have a lot of meetings. Invest in a good quality microphone to be heard during meetings and ensure that there is no dog barking, children crying or someone coming into your office talking loudly while you are in a meeting. This takes away the credibility of the company you represent
• You will probably share your computer screen a lot to show something to clients. Organize your work area, be careful not to leave any files or information from another client exposed and choose a serious wallpaper
• Take advantage of having meetings over the Internet, communicate with the client and record the meetings (Most tools already have this feature, such as Skype and Microsoft Teams). This will protect you if the client says one thing in the meeting and wants something else later and will also help you review the meeting if you don't remember any details that the client said or demonstrated. Having to keep asking the client to explain something again that he has already explained in a meeting is very bad.
• Invest in good, stable internet and try to use a wired network instead of WIFI. Nothing worse than a canceled meeting because your internet is failing
• Even if not required, use the ManicTime to facilitate your internal control of notes and hours.
• Don't open YouTube while working. In a little while you watched 50 videos and did nothing
• Try to avoid, if you can, using chats like WhatsApp Web on your computer. Side conversations will drain your productivity
• Use the extra time you will have to study and improve technically
• Two monitors or more is a matter of NECESSITY. Productivity increases A LOT!
• If you are building a new computer for work, a desktop usually has a much lower price than a notebook, performs much better and lasts much longer, in addition to allowing you to upgrade any component in the future.
• Improve your communication and feedback: As your client/leader is not seeing you sitting there working, it is good that you provide faster responses and frequent status updates on their demands. This way, they can rest assured that the work is being done and you are focused on delivery.

Why are some companies against the Home Office?

There is a lot of talk about the benefits of working from home and how it increases employee satisfaction and motivation (although there are people who don't like working from home), but still, some companies seem not to follow market trends and insist on not allowing home office, even just a few days a week.

And what's even worse: There are companies that only allow home office when it suits you: Did the employee request to work from home to try to go to his agency at lunchtime, close to his house? Can't Home Office.. Is there a bus strike and the employee would stay at home without working? There can be the Home Office! Will there be a system migration in the early hours of the morning or throughout the weekend? You can too!

But companies have a certain reason, as there are some disadvantages for them to adhere to the Home Office:

• Need for timekeeping tool: For the Home Office to work well, a time recording tool (cost) is necessary, so that the employee can justify what he worked on that day, especially when the client is charged by the hour, as is the case with consulting companies.
• Employee control: Many companies and managers still live in the previous working regime, where the employee is monitored at all times and enters at 8am, has lunch at 12pm, returns at 1pm and leaves at 5pm. Nowadays, those who spent the most time sitting in front of the computer are not always the ones who produce the most. If you are an “old-school” manager who NEEDS to control every second of your employees, there are tools like ManicTime which allow full control of all the time the employee used the computer, which websites and software they used and how long they spent in each tab/window. It's the home office with MUCH MORE control than you have with employees in person.
• Not everyone can work from home: Not every employee has the equipment to work from home or has the necessary discipline. And this can disrupt the home office of an entire area/company. But for those who do not have this discipline, the ManicTime can help.

I believe that the biggest impediment is the culture of many companies/managers, which still has the mentality of a boss instead of a leader, because if you put the positive and negative points on paper, there is no justification for not allowing remote work, at least, a few days a week.

It's really cool that the company is relaxed, cool, fun, gives freebies every week, but I believe that the vast majority prefer to work from home. Getting up from the PC at 5pm and 5:01pm being ready to go to a cinema, walk along the promenade, etc.

Breaking some Home Office myths

I've already talked about advantages, disadvantages and now we need to break some myths and false paradigms about remote work:

• #1 – You can’t control activities: I've heard this excuse a lot for not allowing Home Office in the company, but it's unfounded. There are great call and time tracking tools that allow you to know exactly what each employee was doing and measure their productivity. Make no mistake, “Old-School” manager. Just because your employee is sitting in front of the PC all day doesn't mean they're producing anything. And it is better to work 6 hours yielding 100% of potential than to work 8 hours yielding 50%, according to a study carried out by Microsoft itself (Link here)
• #2 – There is no synergy between the team: Another baseless excuse. Here at the company, we have employees from several states in Brazil and the friendly atmosphere is incredible! Whenever we travel to events, we meet and it's like we are best friends. I have more intimacy with some of these people, who I see more remotely and sometimes in person than some people I saw every day when I worked in person.
• #3 – Home Office makes communication difficult: Nowadays, with screen sharing tools, where the other person can even use the mouse and keyboard to interact on your screen, and voice/video calls, it's as if you were ON THE other person's SIDE. You can even create meetings with several people like this.
• #4 – At the Home Office, no one works properly: Quite the contrary. In some cases, you work even more than physically leaving the company and just looking at your laptop the next day. And using ManiacTime you can measure the productivity and performance of each employee. The leader who knows how to do it with his own hands, knows how to assess whether he is being fooled or not.

I hope that after clarifying these Home Office myths, you will now think carefully about adopting this way of working in your company 🙂
Do you have an “Old-School” boss who is totally against the Home Office? Show him this article 🙂

And what is your opinion? Are you against it? In favor? Do you know of any other myths/advantages/disadvantages that I forgot to mention?
Leave it here in the comments, a big hug and see you next time!