Our Guide to Working From Home

By 16th March 2020 Blog

How do I survive working from home? We’ve produced a quick guide of the tips and tricks we’ve learnt, to help you better manage your adjusted working life and relationships with colleagues and clients.

We’re really confident that this will work for you, as we can confirm we’ve been there, seen it, done it and got the t-shirt to prove it! You see, the team is pretty adept to remote working, as we’ve done it before! Just last year, we all worked at home for six months whilst our new office was being prepped. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again, with no impact to daily business!

How did we do it? Well, we certainly learnt some valuable things, from the fun, to the more serious and business-critical. Here are some tips that may help you…

1. Get connected

Working from home means you’re going to need tools to talk to your colleagues. And we like to think during our office break, we’ve nailed them. We’ve become experts at Slack, Teamviewer and cloud-based phone systems, which means we’re always available.

2. Self-discipline is key

If you’ve never WFH it can be hard to get into the swing of things, especially when that Netflix series is calling! We hear ya’ and know how tempting it can be. However, there are ways to fight the temptation. We set ourselves a task and reward system. For every two hours of work, we took a 20 min break and got to watch our fave show. Don’t be tempted to stick it out for longer – it’s all fun and games until that report doesn’t get finished!

3. Pull off the PJs

Ok, we admit it, we spent many a day festering in our PJs during our WFH stint, however, all it did was make us feel sluggish. So, treat your day like you were going into the office. Have that morning shower, brush your teeth and get dressed – trackies are perfectly acceptable here… it’ll give you more motivation and it means that you won’t get caught short. We learnt the hard way when we were surprised with a video call from the boss and guess what, we were wearing PJs and yesterday’s make-up… Now, where’s that lip gloss?

4. Be prepared that things may take double the time

An office environment means that a simple question can be answered within seconds. When you’re WFH, it means an email has to be typed, received and then responded to. So think smart, instead of leaving stuff last minute, plan ahead. It’s the only way you’ll reach that finish line on time!

So that’s pretty much our top tips… And remember, even if we have to work from home, we’re still here to give you the best service possible, even if it’s from on our sofa wearing our trackies.
You can also head on over here, for a fun take on WFH too! Yes, it’s one we wrote earlier…

Technology or methods we use when being a virtual office:

Phones: Voip via https://www.speakdigital.co.uk
Communication: https://www.slack.com or Microsoft Teams
Task management: https://www.asana.com
Helpdesk / Customer Service: www.freshdesk.com
Status Page: Sorry https://www.sorryapp.com
Monitoring: Pingdom https://www.pingdom.com
Level 10 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmV6_fH5NkU

The following backend functions we also use and would recommend:

Email/Docs etc: Google Apps https://gsuite.google.co.uk
Accounting: Xero https://www.xero.com/uk/
Direct Debits: GoCardless https://gocardless.com
Credit Cards: Stripe https://stripe.com/gb
Expenses: Pleo https://www.pleo.io/
Hosting: AWS https://aws.amazon.com (plus Fortrabbit https://www.fortrabbit.com for php apps)
DNS: Dyn https://dyn.com (plus DNS Made Easy https://dnsmadeeasy.com for secondary)
CDN: Fastly https://www.fastly.com
Pen Testing: https://detectify.com
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