Home (not) alone: How AMS team members stay connected while working remotely
Working remote isn’t for everyone, but for the right people working alongside the right team it can be a rewarding and innovative experience. To quote the great mind of Nikola Tesla: “Be alone, that is the secret of invention; Be alone — that is when ideas are born.” To be honest, being alone with your thoughts can be scary, but as I mentioned, working remote isn’t for everyone. However, I am on my third year of remote work now, and I haven’t gone insane yet with credit going to having a close-knit team behind me.
As in any good relationship, one of the keys to a successful remote-work environment is good communication. It’s important to not feel like you’re on an island even though your closest co-worker is five hours away. When you’re working in an office and have a question or comment for a team member, it’s easy to pop your head out of the cubicle or catch them while they’re walking by. But in remote work, you can develop a tendency to not want to bother them with a phone call or a chat in case they are busy with something else because you don’t have the advantage of knowing exactly what they’re up to. One of the things I’ve learned is that your team members enjoy hearing from you as much as you enjoy hearing from them, so never be afraid to pick up the phone, send a text or pop something in the chat, even if it’s just a funny meme. It’s important to feel included and sometimes that means including yourself.
One of the things about remote work is that you actually look forward to Zoom or other video calls. You take for granted the ability to actually interact with each other, see their smiling faces and make some small talk before the meeting begins.
One of my favorite parts of working remote is the flexibility it offers. If my daughter is home sick from school or daycare, I can still be there to take care of her all while getting my work done. I also get to live in the small, quiet, affordable town that I grew up in. And while your office is your home and your home is your office, you also have the ability to take the show on the road as well, and I encourage you to do that as a change of scenery is nice on occasion. Set up at a local coffee shop or café for a morning or afternoon to bring some energy and atmosphere into your workday, and sometimes it’s just good to be around someone other than your cat.
Lastly, I just want to mention how thankful I am to have a great team behind me at AMS. They care about how I’m doing and they make me feel at home – even though I’m already working from there.