Remote Work – Best Practices 2022

Being a remote worker has a very romantic image: you’ll only work when you want to work, you can move about the world and see new cultures, and if you’re lucky, you can make good money. And there’s some truth to that, for sure, but there are many pitfalls on the road to success. With that in mind, here are some of the best practices that will help you as a remote worker in 2022.

Good planning skills are at the top of the list for just about any profession, and working remotely needs it twice as much. As you juggle various projects, try to meet many different deadlines, and coordinate with your team, you will be immediately swamped without proper planning. What’s worse, if you are working remotely, you need to reach greater trust with your employer/clients because if they don’t like your work or the time it has been delivered, they can give the work to someone else.

This also extends to the recent developments in the world. More and more people learned how to work from home and may want to join remote workers' ranks permanently. This means a lot of competition that wasn’t previously there. Good planning, flexibility and time management will be the day to day way in which you can make sure you’re doing your best.

As the world has been through several lockdowns, both clients and employers have realised the true potential of working from home. And part of this is, inevitable, being able to communicate swiftly and entirely online. This may seem like a small thing, but in practice, it means familiarizing yourself with apps like Zoom, Google Meets, and even Skype, knowing how to operate Slack or Trello.

You may even need to be able to handle screen sharing, remote work on other people’s computers and so on. Make sure that you clarify what apps and websites your client uses for communication and stick to them. If you have a larger team, having a clear communication channel can make the difference between completing and failing a project.

Remote work is one of the fastest-growing forms of employment globally, which is impressive because it is also one of the newest. There are still tons of undiscovered little life-hacks and ways of thinking about and structuring your work which can be hard to learn about if you’re figuring it all out on your own. One of the best ways is to be part of your local remote working community.

Whether that community is offline or online, being part of a larger group of people who all strive for a similar lifestyle is a huge help. You can learn from people who have more experience as remote workers, you can help others, or you can find friends there. And when it comes to new shifts in remote working, someone will pick it up and share it with the rest of the community. Remote working does not mean you have to be alone to do it.