Tips & Tricks for All Remote Workers

Some of the tricks from Chapter 6 are also valid for people working remotely from a hub, a coworking space, or a personal office. In this chapter, we’ll see other tricks that apply to all types of remote workers.

Always assume positive intent

Working remotely forced a lot of people to use email, chat, and other tools that completely hide the emotional part of communication. In most cases, especially if people are tired, working too hard, or having other problems, they tend to overreact to messages because of the lack of emotional context.

When you receive a message (in any form) from your manager, colleagues, and even family members and friends, always assume positive intent. You can then check if your assumptions are real. If the discussion takes a turn for the worse, always follow up directly with the other person, using a video call, so you can also check their body language.

Work on your personal brand!

The first suggestion for every remote worker is to start or to keep working on your personal brand. Being remote decreases your visibility in the company, and sometimes in the market. Work on your personal brand by maintaining your promises, helping colleagues, sharing information, creating content, being active on important projects, actively engaging your connections, mentoring or coaching other people, and finding new mentors or coaches.

Everything you do to be more integrated and known is an active part of your personal brand.

But what exactly is a personal brand? I’ve included two paragraphs from my previous book, Beyond Public Speaking for Geeks Succinctly, about the topic. Look at that source if you want to go deeper on the topic of “personal branding for geeks.” The sixth chapter is entirely dedicated to improving your brand.

What is a personal brand?

I like this definition from David McNally and Karl Speak found in Wikipedia:

“Your brand is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes the total experience of having a relationship with you.”

You can work on your personal brand, but you can’t completely control it because it depends entirely on the impressions you give to others.

Note: Even if you work for a company, you have your own personal brand, sometimes associated with the company’s, sometimes completely disconnected. You must always work on your personal brand, because it’s not good for your image or career just to be identified with your company’s name.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos defined (personal) brand as “what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Don’t limit it to thinking that personal brand is only your reputation. Having a good brand helps you in your job, but sometimes in your personal life as well in ways that you cannot imagine when you start working on it. Everything is easier when your good reputation precedes you.

Note: I can remember dozens of times when I was introduced to a new customer and they said, “I know him, he’s Genio Del Male” (my blog/Twitter alias, which in Italian means evil genius; see the About the Author page at the beginning of the book). Most of the time, it is easier for me to convince my customers because of my brand. Of course, you should keep working on your brand because it can also become a memory of an ancient past. I have a lot of colleagues who worked with me as evangelists for Microsoft and were well known in the market, and now people barely remember them. On the other hand, others are still relevant today because they continued to work on their brands, or their brands were so strong that they lived on years after they changed jobs.

Having a strong personal brand can also be seen as having insurance for your future, especially in these troubled times. Nobody can assure you that your personal brand will make a difference, but not having it will for sure make one, in a negative way, since nobody will know you, and it will be more difficult to emerge from among the crowd.

Everybody has a personal brand

Most people confuse a personal brand and personal branding. We already defined what a personal brand is. Your personal brand exists even if you don’t do anything about it.

Personal branding is the process and the strategy used to increase the value and the perception of a personal brand.

Invest in yourself

We’ve already said multiple times that working remotely most days of the week can be dangerous for your career, at least in some companies. Apart from working on your personal brand, you should work hard on yourself.

Investing in your growth is always good advice, but when working remotely you have to go the extra mile because you’ll lose some of your network, and so you should invest in your learning, in cultivating your relations, in finding different interests, and so on.

Find a mentor, a coach, and eyes and ears in the office

If you go to the office at least two days per week, you’ll probably have your sources; you’ll be updated on what happens between various persons, at least at a high level. You’ll have enough chats at the watercooler or the coffee machine and enough business lunches to understand what’s happening.

But if you are working remotely full time, if you are always on the road, or if you’re alone at the customer site, you need someone that keeps you informed about the trends, the facts, the relationships, everything that happens in the company (or in your department, or on your floor), so you can make your decisions having the side information that you’d normally miss being away.

Having a mentor and a coach is also good advice, even for people working in the office all the time—but for a remote worker, the help a mentor can give is essential. You need a mentor because they can guide you in difficult waters, sometimes better than your manager, and because they’re normally not directly involved in the problems of your team.

They can ask you the right questions, and then ask other questions, and then ask yet other questions, so you can deeply explore your problems and opportunities, and find the answers you need.

Sometimes your mentor or your coach can also help you by sharing what’s happening in the company. It’s important to spend some time of the mentorship or the coaching call chitchatting about different topics not related to the call.

If you want to understand the differences between the two roles better, you can read a short Business Trends article by Shubhomita Bose on the topic.

Have regular meetings with your manager’s peers and their manager

Your manager should schedule regular one-to-one meetings with you (if your manager isn’t doing it, you should demand regular connections), but you shouldn’t forget about your manager’s peers and their managers.

They’ll have an important role on your career; being visible and engaged is important for your growth and for your future opportunities. Those meetings can be quarterly, or even yearly meetings (depending on the type of connection that you have).

You can ask and discuss many different things, like their views on the team, feedback from their direct reports about your work, how they perceive your impact, what’s missing and what you’re doing right, and so on.

And you shouldn’t forget the personal side of the meeting! Being in the office gives you the opportunity for small talk on many occasions; when you’re working remotely, try to include some chitchat in your structured meetings.

Care about people more than business

We already talked about this in Chapter 5, from a manager’s point of view, but the same goes for the remote worker. If you only talk with your colleagues about business, you’ll be excluded from side talks; you’ll miss an important part of what’s happening in the team.

Try to participate in informal team meetings from time to time. Schedule chats with colleagues. Ask for feedback, even for normal activities. Ask for their views, and if you have the confidence, try to talk with them about your personal views and issues, and be open to listen to theirs.

Technical issues

We discussed technical things in Chapter 2. In this section, we’ll see some ways to overcome typical technical issues that arise when working remotely.

Bandwidth issues

Apart from finding a better network provider, if you’re at home or in your personal office, sometimes you don’t have many options. You should use what’s available and try to optimize your environment—if it’s possible—and for a lot of people, this is a dream.

Bandwidth issues are problematic for calls, virtual presentations, uploads, and downloads. All recent browsers and tools support interrupted downloads and uploads; you only need a lot of patience. For calls and virtual presentations, you can start turning off your video. People will tolerate that you’re not on the webcam, but they won’t like faulty audio, and neither will you.

You can also turn off other people’s video that eats a lot of bandwidth and CPU power. One option that I use a lot is to call on the phone to join the audio part of the conference, leaving all the bandwidth for the content. If you plan to talk a lot, remember to insert your participant ID when joining. Most conferencing software will focus on your webcam or avatar when you speak, but if you join anonymously, the software cannot put the focus on you, and people won’t immediately understand who’s talking, especially in crowded events.

Note: If you’re already in the call and audio quality is bad, you can dial in on the phone from the tool options or directly from the participants list if you’re the organizer. In any case, you can share your phone number with an organizer and ask to be called back.

Problems sharing the screen

Sometimes your PC displays the screensharing artifacts from the conferencing tool, but the screen is not shared at all. Always ask if people can see your screen. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s better than talking for minutes before someone tells you that they haven’t seen anything. In that case, the typical IT solution of “stop sharing and share again” will probably work.

Another typical problem if you’re sharing with software that you’ve never used is the order of the monitors, in the case of a multi-monitor setup. Different software displays the monitors using different numbers, so if you’re used to sharing “screen 1” in one software, that could become “screen 3” in another. Pay attention to the screen that you’re sharing.

Note: During an important online conference, I shared the PowerPoint designer and not the projected presentation because of different screen numbering, breaking one of the rules of a good presentation.

Most conferencing software allows you to share documents and videos in advance, instead of sharing the screen. That helps a lot with bandwidth problems, because the content will be shared to every participant from a central location, and not from your PC connected from the middle of nowhere.

Echo and other audio problems

If you have audio problems that are not related to bandwidth, you can first check if another participant has audio enabled, and ask them to mute, or (if possible and not seen as rude) mute them directly.

Most audio problems can be temporarily fixed by a good pair of headphones, so you can isolate audio in different directions. Even if you have the great audio setup that we discussed in Chapter 2, you can still have audio problems. Keep a pair of headphones with a microphone with you; they can save your presentation!

Do you look sunburned on camera?

If you look sunburned during a meeting, your webcam is probably having problems with white balance. If there are settings that you can check, look at them. Put a white paper in front of the camera to help it rebalance the colors.