Katie's breakout forum summary

What are the challenges you face by working from home and how are you overcoming them?

Facilitated and summarised by Katie Toohey.

The top tips for working from home are:

1. Set up a dedicated space, whether it is a room, desk or corner of a bench - try to keep it just for work so you can 'arrive' at, and 'leave' work
2. Close the office door when you finish work, or put the laptop away in a cupboard so you get the sense of leaving work
3. Use a 'work' coffee cup and start drinking from it at 9am and put it away at 5pm to help you get a sense of a work day
4. Finish up your day by 'shaking it off' - go outside, dance around to music, take the dog or kids for a walk...
5. Use Skype for Business, Zoom, slack or other chat spaces to check in and chat with your colleagues - make a conscious effort to do this regularly throughout the day. E.g. one of our participants has a daily Morning Tea Zoom with their colleagues to chat and connect about work and social things
6. Use video calling (I personally really like Zoom) to catch up with colleagues instead of a phone call - it gives you that face to face connection and is important to keep your work communication flowing, so much of our communication is visual
7. Using a separate web-meeting tool to connect more formally with clients and stakeholders, such as Go To Meeting.
8. Video calling is initially uncomfortable but you get used to it quickly :-) Many people are reporting that they are finding their colleagues are becoming more comfortable with the 'new normal' including video calling
9. Ensure that everyone has the opportunity to attend your meetings so that you are not accidentally leaving out staff members - video calling really helps in this space as you can have a bunch of people in there, a phone call only has two, three at most.

Some key challenges are:

1. Managing kids concurrently to work is difficult
2. Interruptions to work meetings as people (and pets) unintentionally interrupt
3. Getting online and connected as a team initially
4. Managing time and space with everyone at home
5. Sorting out technology for those who are not used to new tech

Please feel free to use the commenting function below to add in your thoughts and comments!