6 Skills You’re Hopefully Developing While Working From Home

A new form of workplace literacy

Everyone’s work from home (WFH) experience has been different over the past few months. Some are predisposed to thrive in isolation, while others can’t wait for the day we can openly gather again.
 

Wherever you fall on the continuum of WFH tolerance, this is a difficult time for millions of folks around the globe. But in an effort to shed light on the positives, this post covers some silver linings that will materialize as we continue to push towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

Coronavirus has driven the global workforce towards a rapid crash course in WFH literacy. Many of these skills will be very transferable when and if we return to offices. While a growing percentage of employees and contractors were already shifting to remote work, many of us have had to adjust priorities, learn new tools, and change our routines.
 
Fortunately, today’s workforce is better equipped than ever to handle the massive paradigm shift. We’re educating ourselves and each other to be savvy, flexible workers. And once this storm passes, we’ll all be better off for levelling-up our product stacks and self-sufficiency.

Again focusing on some of the silver linings, here are 6 skills and tools we’re all hopefully developing as we work from home.

With unprecedented travel limitations and safety precautions, video conferencing is perhaps the most obvious tool we’ve all had to learn. But “literacy” in this context doesn’t just refer to learning the tool itself – it also refers to learning when to use it.
 
Plenty has been written on “Zoom fatigue” in the past couple of months. Hopefully, teams are paying attention to this very real phenomenon and learning where to draw the line. Not every meeting needs to happen on a video conferencing platform. We all still have phones! 
 
For teams leaning heavily on Zoom, I suggest taking some of your meetings to the phone. If you find yourself feeling “refreshed” by this, that’s a good sign that your team or company should consider scaling back on Zoom, if possible.

Traditionally speaking, employers were skeptical of remote work because a large amount of oversight is lost when employees aren’t in the office. The fear (which has largely been unsubstantiated) has been that employees could slack off and cut corners without a boss looking over their shoulder.
 
While this is an old-school perspective, it is worth noting that more distractions exist at home.
 
Hopefully, those of us working from home are learning to be more self-directed and organized. Fortunately, technology can help facilitate your pursuit towards self-improvement.
 
Under normal circumstances, I consider myself a power user of organization technology. During the pandemic, I’ve levelled-up my game by using Google Keep, which allows me to manage and centralize to-do lists across all of my Google accounts.

Learning in itself is a skill, and one that we’re all hopefully improving. Whether it be Zoom, a VPN, or even helping your kids with Google Classroom, we have all had to learn new things with limited help.
 
This can be a humbling experience, as we sometimes forget how much we don’t know. Freshening up on your ability and willingness to learn will have lasting, positive effects for all of us. It’s like the old adage: Give a person a fish and they eat for a day... teach them to fish and they can eat (or keep learning) forever.

Whether it be Trello, Asana, Jira, or something of the like, working remotely has caused teams to adopt (or more heavily rely on) project management tools. 
 
Some of these tools have become very intuitive, and they help create organization and accountability. And remember, the road back to normalcy is still being forged. It’s nice to hope that full-capacity offices will soon return, but it’s unlikely. Even for those who have learned the basics, these tools have very deep features which should be explored. 
 
That is to say that these tools will remain important for the foreseeable future. Learning how to maximize their utility will also have a lasting impact.

The best employees are using this opportunity to take on new tasks, fill voids, and rise to new challenges. We should reward those who take initiative. At the same time, we should practice empathy and recognize that different people are dealing with different circumstances (overseeing kids at home, sick relatives etc). 
 
The hope here is that all employees are learning how to do more with less. Things are changing fast, which means your company must adapt accordingly. It all starts with your employees and contractors making decisions about where to focus attention. This importance of moving quickly and improvising will shape the future we are all heading towards, coronavirus or not.

For those who were resistant to moving to a system like Google Drive, or even Windows 360, this was the moment people had to shift. 
 
This is AWESOME. For some it might seem like an obvious move, but various industries and companies were behind the curve. The pandemic has forced adoption on some, which they hopefully realize is a blessing in disguise. Now we just need to teach folks to be power users of functions like suggestions and comments :)
 
This article is better because of those tools!

I firmly believe that accelerated remote work literacy during this difficult time will prove to be beneficial. These are skills and tools that will remain useful, no matter what the future holds.
 
Of course, I’m also aware that we lose some critical things while in isolation. The importance of human interaction, for one, cannot be understated – and many of us are realizing that. The ability to provide constructive feedback can also be more difficult in isolation, as many managers prefer to offer certain feedback in person when it’s easier to read body language.
 
My hope is that we all continue to push through these challenges and understand they will not last forever. The skills we are all developing, however, will last long beyond this pandemic. 
 
In other words, the skills and tools will stick with us much longer than the challenges. Unequivocally, that’s a net positive.