Telework Guidelines and Ethics

I developed guidelines for working remotely for myself and thought of sharing with others for greater benefits. Given many of us is starting to work remotely or telework full-time, it is important to stay productive and keep things the same way they used to be when we used to work on-site. I’m publishing these guidelines to be my new telework code of conduct for as long as we are working at home. Here are the guidelines and list:

Schedule and Work Hours

• Maintain the same schedule you are used to. Changing the schedule or starting your work very late is a big no that result in reduced productivity.
• Utilize the commute time to start your day even earlier. For example, if you take an hour to commute to your office and you usually at the office by 9 AM. Now, you can start your day at 8 AM for enhanced productivity.
• Plan to utilize the extra hours from your commute time to achieve two things (1) Get a head start on a future task or dust off this delayed task and try to make progress on (2) Gain new skill in this extra available time to better serve your employer/client and stay up-to-date with new trends in your area of expertise.
• Maintain your normal office schedule when it comes to lunch and coffee breaks. While most of us will be doing lunch and coffee at home, use the time to take a walk in the morning 5 minutes, 20 minutes during lunch time and 5 minutes late afternoon.
• Do not overwork, and limit your daily working hours to no more than 10 hours a day. It important to keep the work life balance and set the boundaries especially when these boundaries are blurry like nowadays.
• Record your time daily and accurately in the system of record, do not wait until last day of the week to record your time, so you forget what happened, record tasks immediately after completion and make sure you use the right charge code.

Productivity and Accomplishments

• Set daily goals to achieve and work hard towards completion of these goals. At the same time be realistic on what can be achieved in a day.
• Keep your supervisors and managers aware of your activities, ensure they know what you are working on, and set expectations with them. Once expectations are set, try to meet these expectations. At the end of the day, summarize your accomplishments and inform your supervisor of what you achieved.
• Set specific time intervals to check received work messages and emails. Ensure you address requests/emails you receive on a timely manner, so not to impact the schedule of others, especially if they have a dependency on me.
• Check policies and procedures related to overtime and after-hours work. Make sure you understand the policies in place and follow as required.
• Solicit feedback from your peers, coworkers, and supervisors to improve your productivity and enhance your work-from-home capabilities.
• If you are a supervisor, then schedule additional team meetings or increase the frequency of the meetings, just to ensure cohesiveness of the team and not to lose focus on mission.
• Try to pursue a certification or get trained on something new in the environment. If you ever wanted to go for this certification or that and always had the excuse of no time, then it may be good time to start pursuing this goal.

Surrounding Environment

• Isolate yourself from family activities, given kids are at home and schools are closed. You should inform and educate all about the ethics of teleworking and that being at home does not mean you are available and accessible.
• Dedicate time to home and family activities outside the work hours. It is important to maintain separation between work and home to be efficient and effective in all what you do.
• In certain cases, you will need to handle some sort of an emergency, like a home repair issue or a car issue, document the time spent and take time off if necessary. Also, check with your supervisor on such situations if you can make up the hours. It is important to seek approval first when you have a planned activity.

Data Protection and Privacy

• It is crucial that while working from home that you protect your employer’s/client’s data and not share it with others that need not to know about it.
• Do not use your employer’s machines and equipment for personal use, use separate machine for each separate activity. If you use client equipment, keep that separate too. Do co-mingle data between personal, employer, clients machines, and do not exchange data across any of these environments.
• Verify your machine have the latest protection software and necessary tools to access your work environments in a secure fashion.

Few final things I want to do and maintain while teleworking:

• Not to eat too much, with the kitchen just around, we may easily fall into that trap :)
• Plan a daily mandatory exercise, no skip!
• Take breaks for your eyes, every hour or even less!
• Do not sit continuously for many hours, stand up!

These are few notes I developed for myself to maintain a healthy, productive, and balanced telework schedule. Indeed, I may have missed few important points, so please share with me if you see something missing, so that I can be a better tele-worker!