Tag Archives: remote

The truth about working from home

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A truth bomb from a Facebook group I follow, for people that want to work from home:

I am amazed at the amount of people who believe that work from home means that they can: stay home with their kids, do things around the house, leave the house to run errands, go shopping, etc. My wfh job we got two 15 minutes breaks, no lunch, could only leave our desk around 2 feet - the length of my corded headset and my supervisor literally told us if we were taking more than a FIVE MINUTE bathroom break we were stealing from the company!!! The ones that think they can get away with having their kids screaming in the background are sadly mistaken because customers will call in and complain about you! And the calls are listened to by management at any given time!!

Most work-from-home jobs are customer service jobs, for insurance companies, airlines, subscription TV services, etc., and you don’t work when you want: you have a fixed, strict schedule. And these jobs don’t pay well. The trade-off is, of course, that you get to work from home, but if you think you are going to be doing child care at the same time, think again!

I work from home most of the time, and I don’t have a strict fixed schedule: I work in marketing and press relations for one nonprofit, I manage the online community for another, and I pick up marketing or volunteer management-related gigs here and there. I work from home 90% of the time, and I don’t have a strict schedule: I can walk my dog when I want, for the most part, I can take a break to watch a movie on TCM if I have time in the middle of the day, I can sleep late some days… but I have to work real hours most every day, and I can’t have distractions while I’m working. The deadlines are real. And I have to be available for phone calls and emails from clients. As flexible as my schedule is, there is NO room in it for child care.

The myths around working from home are important to me for three reasons:

There are so many work-from-home scams out there. I have a plate on my web site about What Work-At-Home / Remote Jobs Look Like and how to avoid scams because there are so many scams (and so many people falling for them).

There are so many desperate people in developing countries that believe the myths about working from home, that think it’s work you can do with just a smart phone and you can do whenever you might have some time, that you don’t need a computer or absolutely perfect and fast Internet access. They are among the prime targets for work-from-home scams.

The myths about working from home are similar to myths about virtual volunteering: that volunteering roles online don’t require a schedule (they do – extra time for online volunteering does not magically happen), that the deadlines aren’t strict (they are – if you don’t do an assignment, it often leaves the nonprofit scrambling to get something essential done that they were counting on you for), that you don’t need any skills (you do), etc. Here’s a list of myths about virtual volunteering, from the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

There are a LOT of parallels between working online from home and volunteering online from home. My book The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is focused primarily on people who want to engage online volunteers, and covers how to create online roles, and how to properly onboard and support online volunteers during their engagement. If you are a manager of online employees, you might find it helpful. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

If you have benefited from any of my blogs or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

“mandated telecommuting” has lessons for “mandated virtual volunteering”

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In the early days of the Virtual Volunteering Project back in the 1990s, I used telecommuting manuals, combined with guidelines and best practices for working with traditional, onsite volunteers, to develop the initial materials to advise organizations on how to create roles and tasks for online, remote volunteers.

I’m reminded of that as I read Deriving Long-Term Strategic Advantage from Mandated Telecommuting, a December 17, 2020 article from the American Management Association.

Here’s an excerpt:

Rapid changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic gave leaders little time to make strategic decisions in preparation for the anticipated recession, while forced telecommuting added significant challenges and pressures. Executives were forced to reboot established policies and practices even as they fought to keep businesses afloat…

…there are opportunities for companies to emerge from this crisis stronger and more agile, especially among those that can quickly adapt to the realities of remote work. The most successful leaders in this new era will prove able to fully embrace the new normal, strategically reorient their management practices, and drive efficiency through more purposeful meetings, while ensuring that any fears about the future of work don’t hinder potential and progress…

Even as leaders anticipate the business environment “returning to normal,” they need to accept that the new world will likely look very different from the one before. Significantly, remote work will be much more accepted, even preferred, as organizations and leaders begin to acclimate…

Adjusting to this new reality is less about making telecommuting work during self-quarantine, and more about determining how it will best function even after the pandemic is behind us. This will require that leaders understand the development of telecommuting-focused policies and practices as more than just temporary measures. Such thinking will help them adapt in ways beyond learning how to conduct videoconferences, as just one example. They’ll benefit from considering the much larger picture, including how to engage employees, ensure productivity, build and sustain culture, and maintain focus, all while people continue to work from home.

End excerpt.

This could so easily be rewritten for the nonprofit world:

Rapid changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic gave leaders at nonprofits, public sector agencies and other mission-based programs little time to make strategic decisions in preparation for the anticipated recession, while forced telecommuting for staff, virtual volunteering for volunteers and remote engagement with clients and the community added significant challenges and pressures. Executives were forced to reboot established policies and practices even as they fought to keep their programs afloat…

…there are opportunities for nonprofits, public sector agencies and other mission-based programs to emerge from this crisis stronger and more agile, especially among those that can quickly adapt to the realities of remote work and remote engagement. The most successful leaders in this new era will prove able to fully embrace the new normal, strategically reorient their management and engagement practices, and drive efficiency, while ensuring that any fears about the future of work don’t hinder potential and progress…

Even as leaders anticipate the work and program delivery environment “returning to normal,” they need to accept that the new world will likely look very different from the one before. Significantly, remote work and remote engagement will be much more accepted, even preferred, as organizations and leaders begin to acclimate…

Adjusting to this new reality is less about making telecommuting, online engagement and virtual volunteering work during self-quarantine, and more about determining how these will best function even after the pandemic is behind us. This will require that leaders understand the development of telecommuting-focused, virtual volunteering-focused and remote engagement-focused policies and practices as more than just temporary measures. Such thinking will help them adapt in ways beyond learning how to conduct videoconferences, as just one example. They’ll benefit from considering the much larger picture, including how to engage employees, volunteers and clients/the community, ensure productivity, build and sustain culture, and maintain focus, all while some people continue to work from home and online/remote engagement continues with clients and the community.

It’s a terrific article – just remember how to translate it for the mission-based world. Virtual volunteering will continue at all the thousands of organizations where it did before the pandemic – let’s hope organizations new to the concept, who embraced the concept so late, will realize virtual volunteering has made them stronger, more agile, and better prepared for new generations of volunteers.

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

If you want to deeply integrate virtual volunteering into your program and expand your engagement of online volunteers, such as in an online mentoring program or other scheme where online volunteers will interact with clients, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Purchasing and readin the book is far, far cheaper than hiring me as a consultant or trainer regarding virtual volunteering – though you can still do that!

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Tools for project managers with remote teams

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This article from International Center for Journalists is focused on journalists and editors working with journalists and other contributors remotely, but much of its advice is applicable for nonprofits working with remote staff and remote volunteers (virtual volunteering) – or working with staff you see face-to-face but you need to work with online as well. The article is written by the project manager of Chicas Poderosas, a community of women in media spread across 18 countries in Latin America. 

For instance, when brainstorming a story or a project with your team, she uses remote visual boards like Jamboard. “Jamboard has virtual post it notes, and allows your team to simultaneously create text boxes, write comments and even draw.” Has anyone else used it? What do you think of it?

To keep track of the individual activities in the chart, she uses Trello. Each task is its own card, which can be assigned to a team member, and can include deadlines and alerts. Trello has integrations with other tools such as Google Drive. “In our Chicas Poderosas weekly calls, we update the Trello board, checking up on what each Chica did, and we create and take ownership of new tasks for the next week.” 

She also has good, not-techtool-specific advice like: 

The best tool is not the latest, or the most complex and automated. The best tool is always the one that is more natural for your team, the project and any other involved stakeholders.

If you do find a new tool that you want to implement, always take the time to schedule on-boarding sessions so that your team can practice using it, ask questions and share their challenges. 

Do you use any of the tools she mentions? Do you have other ideas?

And if you want to explore how to involve and support volunteers, whether those volunteers are around the corner or around the world, check out my book with Susan Ellis, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. The book is the result of more than 20 years of research and experience regarding virtual volunteering, including online micro volunteering, crowdsourcing, digital volunteering, online mentoring and all the various manifestations of online service. It’s packed with examples from a variety of organizations and details on how virtual volunteering works, how challenges are overcome, and how success is measured. It includes

  • Detailed advice on virtual volunteering assignment, including one-time “Byte-Sized” tasks (micro-volunteering / microtasks), longer-term, higher-responsibility roles and virtual team assignments.
  • A thorough look at various practices for screening and matching volunteers to assignments, with an eye to getting the most capable volunteers into your volunteering ranks and preventing incomplete assignments or burdensome management tasks
  • How to make online volunteer roles accessible and welcoming for a variety, diversity of people

Susan and I wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook in such a way that it would be timeless – as timeless as a book about using computers, laptops, smart phones and other networked devices could be. It is USA-centric but it offers a lot of international perspectives as well.

There’s also a chapter just for online volunteers themselves, which organizations can also use in creating their own materials for online volunteers.

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Good Reads web sites (you can write the same review on all three sites).

Team building activities for remote workers

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I’ve explored the topic of building a team culture among remote workers in a previous blog, but I’ve been compling even more examples of live events and asynchronous events that can build a sense of team among remote workers.

Some of the additional ideas:

Have team members share baby photos with one team member, who then shares them without identification to the team and asks them to guess who is who.

Have team members share a recipe that is either their very favorite food or is representative of their culture. Randomly assign different team members each others’ recipes. They have two weeks or a month to make the dish, take a photo of the end result, and get ready to share their thoughts on a particular day.

Have a non-work-related question of the week or month, such as favorite vacation spot, what their career goal when they were 8 years old was, their favorite actor, their favorite movie, etc. Questions can be personnel but not anything that any team member wouldn’t want others to know.

Have members take a photo outside somewhere – anywhere – that is not at all work related (photo in a garden, at the beach, next to a sculpture, under a tree, on a swing) and share it with each other on a particular day.

Have conversations with team members about what success will look like for themselves within a project and for an overall project.

Have team members draw the process of them working together from start of the project to finish, showing how each team member plays a role. Share these and look for similarities and differences.

Have a hat day, where everyone is supposed to wear a hat at the start of one of your video web conferences.

Be careful in that you don’t want any team building exercises that make someone feel LESS a part of the team. For instance, asking people to share wedding photos or prom photos – and there are team members that aren’t married, didn’t go to the prom, etc. Or if your team is international, remember that cultural norms can vary hugely among different team members, especially with regard to what is appropriate to talk about or take a photo of.

vvbooklittleFor more advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Successfully working with people remotely is a very human endeavor that people who are amiable, understanding and thoughtful tend to excel in. Even if you are working with remote paid staff and contractors rather than volunteers, you will find this book helpful in supervising and supporting remote workers. And if you work with volunteers who are providing service primarily onsite, this book will help you to think about ways you can support those volunteers online as well, and invite them to provide service online as well.

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Re-creating offline excitement & a human touch online

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Back in 1998, an effort that became the nonprofit Knowbility started a hackathon competition before such events were called hackathons. It was called the Accessibility Internet Rally, or AIR, and in one day, professional web designers and web design students volunteered their time to build web sites for nonprofits in Austin, Texas – web sites that are fully accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technologies. Designers were divided into teams, and each team had a nonprofit to build for. The teams were all on one floor of a training center that donated its space and computers for the event.

It was crazy, fun, exciting and, at times, silly. I was at that first competition, and at the events in 1999 and 2000, representing a partner organization, via the Virtual Volunteering Project. I helped greet and register every participant as they came in. I also ran through the hallways, into the training rooms, shouting deadlines, like “Two more hours! Just two more hours!”  We got donated food from a local Subway shop and various grocery stores, and teams wouldn’t take a lunch break, despite our pleas for them to do so – they’d run into the room, scarf, then run back to their computers, ready for more designing. Austin-area corporations donated their branded swag that they had leftover from conferences in the past, or that had old logos on them, and we were able to put together goodie bags of memo pads, pens, frisbees and more to hand out to all participants. The second year, several corporate teams returned – this time with custom t-shirts they had made for their team especially for the competition! The event was so energizing and fun that teams came back year after year.

I still use the crockpot that we used to provide nacho cheese for teams…

The AIR competition has continued, and is still awesome, but a few years ago, it became an entirely online competition. It’s now called OpenAIR. The event is not limited to Austin, Texas – it’s global! Instead of one day, teams now have five weeks to develop new accessible web sites for participating nonprofits – and the web sites are far more sophisticated than they were back in the 1990s. A team’s members are all onsite together, at the same company or in the same web design class, for the most part, but they aren’t in the same room with the other teams, nor the nonprofits they are supporting – all interaction among teams and clients is via phone, online conferencing, email and shared online spaces. Another big difference from those early years is that, now, most of the participating nonprofits already have web sites, so their material is already digitized – we don’t need to scan logos or photos anymore, because it’s already done.

It’s almost 20 years after that first AIR competition, and I’m back with Knowbility, this time as a consultant, in charge of recruiting nonprofits to participate and supporting them through the entire process. And I have a goal: to find ways to recreate that craziness and fun and excitement and personal touch from the offsite, in-person events of the past online.

I’m supposed to be the virtual volunteering expert. So this should be a piece of cake for me, right? Afterall, I have ideas for creating a personal experience for working with online volunteers in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. I’m using those recommendations, as well as looking through research I’ve curated about organizations working with online volunteers, information about virtual teams, remote teams, ework, telecommuting, etc., to come up with ideas… but I need more!

Here are my ideas so far:

  • Talk one-on-one with the nonprofits as much as possible live via phone or web conference. There could be as many as 45 nonprofits participating, and while there are plenty of tools to communicate en masse with the nonprofits, and I will use many such tools, I’m also committed to talking, in real time, with EACH nonprofit, one-on-one, both right after they sign up and as they need it through the process. If I’ve been clear in those mass communications – on the web site, on the intranet, in email, etc. – then we’re talking about a few minutes at time in real-time communications, not hours and hours. But those one-on-one meetings are, IMO, essential to restore that personal touch and personality to participation.
  • I’ll be asking each nonprofit to take a group photo of their staff holding a small 8 1/2 X 11” sign I will send them electronically, and that they will print out, that says something like “We’re in for #OpenAIR2018,” and then share via their various social media channels tagged with #OpenAir2018. And then Knowbility will share those photos as well via their social media channels, like Twitter and Facebook. That allows us to again see happy faces as a part of this event, and energize participants.
  • I’m going to do some short, private videos for nonprofit participants – maybe 5 minutes – very informal, just giving them updates about what’s going on or something they need to keep in mind, and with each one, having a joke of the week, or some theme (Star Wars, Halloween, nature, pets, basketball, whatever) – hoping that both the key message and the silliness will guarantee viewers and energize participants.
  • I’m going to have at least one live webinar, an “ask me anything” session, allowing nonprofits that have signed up to ask anything, “live”, and everyone in the webinars hearing my answers in real time. This is something PeaceCorps does periodically, and I really love how approachable it feels for participants.
  • I’m hoping the design teams and nonprofits, after they are matched together, will do some screen captures of their meetings together and share them with me, so we can share them with other teams to show each other what they look like when they are working together. Silly hats could be encouraged.
  • I’m going to ask the nonprofits to send something via postal mail to their design team. It can be a postcard of encouragement, a t-shirt from a previous event, a pen with their logo on it – just SOMETHING the web design team members can hold in a hand, something that represents the nonprofit in a personal way, something tangible, and something that didn’t have to be purchased or, if it did, was less than $2 and has something personal written on it by the nonprofit’s executive director or key contact (postcard!). If the NGO is, say, in Afghanistan, and has no way to send postal mail to the design team, I might ask them to send, via email, a recipe for a traditional Afghan dish, and ask the design team to share a photo of them enjoying the dish together.
  • I’m going to ask the design teams to send something via postal mail to their nonprofits. Same rules: it can be a postcard of encouragement, a t-shirt from a previous event, a pen with their logo on it – just SOMETHING the nonprofit staff can hold in their hands, something that represents the design team in a personal way, something tangible.

Those are my ideas for getting more fun and a human touch back into this competition. The challenge is to come up with things that are free, simple, worthwhile to spend the time on, that teams won’t see as a burden, and that nonprofits won’t see as a waste of time. If something can’t be all of those things, it’s not going to work!

So, there’s my challenge. What are YOUR ideas? Remember those restrictions:

  • free
  • simple
  • worthwhile
  • not burdensome
  • not a waste of time

Please put your fabulous ideas in the comments section!

And if you represent a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), charity, public school, or any other not-for-profit, mission-based organization anywhere in the world, I hope you will consider participating in OpenAIR. Your organization gets a new web site that is accessible for people with disabilities, people who want to donate to your organization, volunteer for it, support it or otherwise participate it in some way. Imagine how being a more welcoming organization online will look to your current supporters and to potential donors! The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can start preparing for the competition, and the more support you will get. Although the deadline for signing up isn’t until the end of this year, if you wait that long, you miss out on more than three months of support and preparation for the event!

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Building a team culture among remote workers: yoga, cocktails & games

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Workforce.com has an outstanding article from February of this year, This Party’s Electric: Culture, Cocktails and Remote Co-workers, about some creative, effective ways companies have created a sense of team among remote workers. This article is about paid employees, but these practices would also work for those engaging online volunteers, in many scenarios.

The article notes that:

  • All 70 of the employees at FlexJobs, a telecommuting job service, work virtually, and many employees have never met in the same room, in-person. To build team culture, the FlexJobs leadership team uses collaboration technology to come up with fun ways to help employees develop relationships outside of work, including a twice-monthly virtual yoga class over Skype run by an employee with a yoga certification, and a trivia-themed happy hour using Sococo, an online virtual workplace, where employee teams gather in virtual rooms to brainstorm answers to questions posted by the CEO. “You would be surprised by how well it all works,” said Carol Cochran, FlexJob’s director of people and culture.
  • Katie Evans, senior communications manager at Upwork, an online talent marketplace formerly known as Elance-oDesk, created a “get to know you” exercise, and had remote employees submit three facts about themselves. She shared the facts anonymously with the team, then employees met using Google Hangouts video to guess which facts went with which person. “I thought it would last for 30 minutes, but it lasted two hours,” she said. “Everyone had a lot of fun.” The party made her realize that you don’t need to be live and in person to build company morale, and you don’t need to use complicated technology to make virtual celebrations fun. “The value is in the face time and storytelling, not the platform,” she said. Now she hosts quarterly all-company parties and smaller teams have begun using collaboration tools for team coffees and weekly “rocks and roses” meetings where everyone shares their best and worst moment of the week.

The key in these and other examples from the article is that these remote workers do already know each other, to a degree, through work – they work together already, they’ve interacted enough to know each other’s names and roles.

vvbooklittleFor more advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change, as the aforementioned Workforce.com article confirms. Successfully working with people remotely is a very human endeavor that people who are amiable, understanding and thoughtful tend to excel in.