Are You Making These 3 Biggest Remote Work Mistakes?

- Hi there. Thank you for clicking on this video. I really hope I made the title clickbait enough because this is a topic I care about deeply. What are some of the common mistakes when it comes to remote work? In this video, we will look at three big mistakes people make when it comes to working from home and what you can do about it.

Working from home or remote work or distributed work, this is a big opportunity, both for employers and employees but it really requires a new way of working and thinking. That's why I made this quiz, The Five Level of Remote Work and with a few simple questions you can explore better ways to remote teamwork.

Are you ready? Let's go. (upbeat music) By the way, I'm Arthur, the founder of Workshop Wednesday, an online community that helps you to run high energy and results driven workshops. And a quick reminder because we passed the 100 YouTube subscribers. We are running a giveaway which you can enter until the 24th of March.

You can win three of my favorite workshop books and the steps are easy. Like this video, join the community@workshopwednesday. co and reply to any of the emails that you get from me and reply with your favorite TV series or movie. If you do that before next Wednesday, then you have the opportunity to win three of my favorite workshops.

And now with that out of the way let's move to today's time, The Five Levels of Remote Work. And this is a model I've talked about already in a previous video. It's a model from Matt Mullenweg the founder and CEO of WordPress. And for this video, I turned that model into a quiz The Five Level of Remote Work.

What's your score? So we're going to answer a few simple questions to explore better ways to remote teamwork. So the first question out of seven how do you prefer to work? Remote is the most common term for being able to work from anywhere at home, a co-location or whatever is most comfortable and productive.

Three options over here. Maybe you prefer to work only at the office or maybe it's hybrid. If that's allowed again or maybe fully remote. In this case, let's go for hybrid. So two or three days per week remote. And the second question is what is your main communication style with your team? Is it mostly real time or is it asynchronous?

Real time mostly that's video calls right now, or asynchronous maybe via Slack or Microsoft teams or maybe you're making use of tools like Loom and Yuck. So let's go for real time in this case. How many meetings do you have per day? So let's say three to five meetings per day. Who prepares your meeting?

No one, only me, our facilitator, everyone. let's say in this case that everyone prepares, okay. Question five. Where can you find your company's goals and failures? In this case let's go for in a presentation somewhere. Okay. We're getting there. How connected do you feel with your team right now? Let's say that a few somewhat connected.

And the final question is how long can you comfortably work at your remote workspace? Let's say in this case I can work three or four hours at my workspace. So now the report is created and after a couple of seconds, we're getting the results. So in this case, our personal score is level two. We are recreating the office online and that can be productive in the short run but can lead to serious issues over longer period of time.

Plus you're missing out on the advantages of remote work. And then below it, you can see some of the signs that you are recreating the office online and what you can do about it. So let's talk about the three biggest mistakes around to recreating the office online. Mistake number one is of course unproductive meetings.

And most of the times this is because you're doing too many things at the same time. If you're doing too many things at the same time that leads to a lot of problems. You get a lot of automatic meetings in your calendar and your days get gathered more and more leaving you with no time to do the actual work.

And the best step you can do to solve this problem is to create a heartbeat. A heartbeat is a rhythm of meetings on a weekly basis on a monthly basis, a quarter basis and a year basis. And this rhythm helps you to do the right things at the right time. Examples of what you could use to create a heartbeat rhythm is to make use of scrum or objectives and key results.

So I have a look at that if you want to create a rhythm around setting goals in your company. And in the scrum framework there is a lightweight way to do the planning, inspecting and adapting of the work that you're doing. And by following these kinds of frameworks it also becomes easier to say no to automatic and unproductive meetings.

Mistake number two is to work at the same place every day, the whole day. This can quickly lead to a Groundhog Day feeling. It's uninspiring and unhealthy. So what you can do over here is to become location independent and also device independent. So what do I mean by that? Of course I have my main desk over here.

It's the place I work at the most but I can also easily work on my iPad. And even on my phone. For example if I'm preparing a YouTube video, most of the times I'm collecting examples on my phone. I may be even write out a script or some bullet points I want to talk about. And once I've set that up I continue on my computer and I prepare everything.

So I can record a video just like this to be able to do this. You of course need tools that make it easy to switch from devices. But luckily a lot of the big players already have this built in. The challenging part with this though is to make it structured and organized. So I would recommend to spend some time for that.

And then mistake number three. What I see is that a lot of the decisions only get made in real time meetings. And this is problematic in many ways. For example, if one person is not there either she will miss out on the decision that's being made or she's the one who actually needs to make the decision.

So the decision will be postponed, but it also often is not necessary to make a decision in a video call. And what you can do over here is to embrace asynchronous ways of working. I've made a more detailed video about that as well. I will link it in the top corner and in the description of this video.

But basically what it comes down to is that you can make use of text, audio or video to come to decisions. For example, one thing that's really appreciated by people I work with is that I record videos before meetings to go through the agenda and to explain what we're going to do. And also sometimes I send out a five minute video at the end of a meeting making a recap of the highlights and actions that we decided on in that meeting, making it easier for people who were not there to reflect and to join in.

And let's add in a bonus mistake, mistake number four. And that's is that you're not sharing your knowledge enough with your colleague. If you document, what's working for you in a knowledge base it becomes easier for other people to see what's working and the best practices and also they can contribute themselves.

And in this way you will help each other grow and improve over time. And of course if you like the Workshop Wednesday videos that help you around remote work, then feel free to share them with your colleagues as well because that will help them to get to the next level. And more specifically, I will leave down a link below to the quiz and this way you can do a self-assessment and can see the next steps that would be helpful for you.

And if you liked what you see then share it with your colleague, because in this way you will help them as well. Most of the bullet points you can click on and this will open a video with instructions on how to implement that and to get better in this area. Or if you want to, you can also have a look at our remote work program about Future Proof where everything is combined in a five week program.

And this program will help you and your team to implement all the steps to go to a successful hybrid way of working. That's it for now, don't forget the giveaway, like, join and reply with your favorite TV series or movie. I hope this video helped you. Thanks for watching and see the next one. Peace (upbeat music)