Working Remotely

Happy Friday, everybody. Hope everybody’s doing well out there and staying safe and healthy in this time of just real uncertainty. A little different video today. I’m posting from my house because just like most of you, we have transitioned to a remote work environment. Now, luckily, our office, we are leveraging technology. We’ve been leveraging technology for a really long time, so we were really well-prepared for this sort of thing, so the transition has been very smooth, has not been as rocky as some horror stories that I’m hearing out there.

Just to kind of give you a little idea of what we’re using, we’re utilizing Microsoft Teams, which is a program that you get free, especially if you buy the Office bundle, so if your office uses Microsoft Word or Outlook or Excel, Teams comes with it. It’s a program that a lot of people don’t know about. What Teams does is it allows our team members and our employees to chat electronically, send messages back and forth, kind of like in instant messenger, so you’re not constantly texting, and it allows everybody to stay on the same page throughout the day. It also has a video chat feature, so we just got off about an hour-long weekly … Our weekly meeting, which we would normally hold in our conference room, we did remotely where everybody had a webcam or their iPhone or their iPad in front of them, so we were able to have that weekly meeting remotely. Microsoft Teams has been a really big help for us.

We’re using Zoom, which is a video conferencing app, for when we have a client or a prospective client that wants to have a face-to-face meeting. Obviously, we’re not allowing that right now, but we can do that remotely, as well, through Zoom. It’s a video chat app that allows you and the client to connect remotely. So if you have questions about how we’re using any of those or how Zoom works or how Teams works, anything like that, feel free to reach out to me. You’ve got my email address here at the end of the video. I’d love to walk you through it and let you know how we’re working because we haven’t really slowed down. We’ve got a ton of people out there that still have cases going on, that still have things that they need help with that we need to try to do what we can, and so I’m sure many of you are in the same boat.

You’ve got clients, you’ve got coworkers, you’ve got employees, you’ve got bosses who all have various needs, and you don’t want this time to just grind everything to a halt. So if you need help, your office hasn’t quite figured out how to transition to this work remote environment, let me know. I’m happy to let you know what works for us, what hasn’t worked for us, what we’ve tried in the past, how our cloud servers work, all that stuff. I’m happy to walk you through what works for our office.

The other thing I wanted to reach out and remind everybody of is, this is a very different experience for all of us. Not many of us are used to working from home. But the one key to keep in mind is you have to maintain that separation between work and home life. Take some time every single day for yourself, for your mental health, for your family’s mental health and wellbeing. Separate some time so that you can focus and work on that. It’s really easy for us to let work just envelop us at all hours of the day because our office is here now. But for those of you, just like me, with little kids at home, with a spouse at home, they all have needs, and it’s okay every hour of work, every 30 minutes of work, every couple of hours of work to stop and take 10 minutes, take 15 minutes, to see to their needs, to see to your own needs, to take a break because you can’t help your clients if you’re suffering yourself.

I’ve seen a lot of people get really frustrated because they’re right in the middle of doing something for work, and one of their kids runs in and they need a snack or they need something from the refrigerator. They need to go to the bathroom. Whatever it is, don’t let that frustrate you. That’s part of working from home. It’s part of balancing, of coming to terms with what we all have to do, so take some time. Figure that out. Take some time for yourself. Make sure you’re staying healthy. Make sure you’re doing everything you need to do to stay at the top of your game.

As always, if you have any questions, you just want to reach out, you just need some human interaction to get you through this, I’m here. I’m happy to help in any way that I can. Happy to talk to whoever I need to, so feel free to reach out. Otherwise, hope you have a great Friday, a great weekend, and we’ll see you all next week.