BY MELISSA BERGER – DIRECTOR OF CLIENT SERVICES
I used to say all of the time: “I could never work from home, I would get so distracted and bored being alone all day.” For a long time I felt this was absolutely the case—being an ENTP (Myers-Briggs personality type) I get my energy from others and I crave extrovert contact. When the opportunity came for me to join Elicit and spend just as much time at my house as at the office, I was excited, intrigued, impressed, and SCARED! What happened next helped me learn so much more about myself and how to stay connected to my colleagues. I was about to find out how I would handle not being able to walk to a teammate’s desk to ask them a question, stay late holed up with the team in a conference room working on a presentation, or grab lunch to catch up on work and life on any given day. I was about to find out if I could actually work from home.
VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION WORKS
When working remotely, you have to be willing to pick up the phone and call people—not just text or email—to stay connected and work together on projects. I spend most of my days on GoToMeetings and phone calls with my colleagues and clients and it somehow feels much more like being in the same room as them than I thought it would. Team members who love to have their dedicated alone time obviously thrive while working alone in the comfort of their own house, but setting up phone calls pushes them to stay connected to the business and their team.
BUT FACE-TO-FACE TIME IS PRICELESS
Now, back to craving extrovert contact. I would not survive without the promise of team collaboration and engagement when we are at a client site together in one of the many cities we travel to on a regular basis. Everyone stays up late catching up with one another, collaborating, getting opinions, and sharing experiences that don’t always get captured virtually. My colleague, Jen, summed it up perfectly in this blog post from last summer. I look forward to seeing my colleagues in the flesh and spending as much time with them as possible until we go back to our respective work spaces at home.
COMMUNICATION IS A SPECTRUM
Since we all regularly work from home, we have to be very conscious about how we communicate with one another. While technology has done an incredible job of keeping us connected, it still can’t fully replicate the ease of message comprehension that a face-to-face conversation can. If you take a look at the spectrum below, you’ll notice that the further away from face-to-face you move (and the more you rely on quick and easy forms of communication), the more likely you are to become distracted. So the next time you have a really important collaborative conversation or brainstorm with your teammates, think about doing it over video conference instead of just a phone call. It might not be as good as being in the same room, but as the spectrum shows, it’s the next best thing.
LIVE WHERE YOU WANT, WORK WHERE WE DO
I’m not going to lie—it was a little tough trying to find my groove the first few months of working from home. Meeting new clients, learning the Elicit way, and getting to know new team members mostly over the phone wasn’t easy. Add in the fact that I also decided to uproot my life and move across the country during my first few weeks and this could have been a total disaster. I was genuinely uncertain if I could thrive with Elicit. Despite all of these potential pitfalls, I’m proud to say I’ve taken to working from home quite well. I started as a work-from-home skeptic and now can’t imagine going back to the traditional work environment I once loved.
Almost a year into the job, I seem to have found a balance between working from home and traveling with equal parts human contact and alone time. It’s the perfect work cocktail—shaken, not stirred.
Working From Home Works
BY MELISSA BERGER – DIRECTOR OF CLIENT SERVICES
I used to say all of the time: “I could never work from home, I would get so distracted and bored being alone all day.” For a long time I felt this was absolutely the case—being an ENTP (Myers-Briggs personality type) I get my energy from others and I crave extrovert contact. When the opportunity came for me to join Elicit and spend just as much time at my house as at the office, I was excited, intrigued, impressed, and SCARED! What happened next helped me learn so much more about myself and how to stay connected to my colleagues. I was about to find out how I would handle not being able to walk to a teammate’s desk to ask them a question, stay late holed up with the team in a conference room working on a presentation, or grab lunch to catch up on work and life on any given day. I was about to find out if I could actually work from home.
VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION WORKS
When working remotely, you have to be willing to pick up the phone and call people—not just text or email—to stay connected and work together on projects. I spend most of my days on GoToMeetings and phone calls with my colleagues and clients and it somehow feels much more like being in the same room as them than I thought it would. Team members who love to have their dedicated alone time obviously thrive while working alone in the comfort of their own house, but setting up phone calls pushes them to stay connected to the business and their team.
BUT FACE-TO-FACE TIME IS PRICELESS
Now, back to craving extrovert contact. I would not survive without the promise of team collaboration and engagement when we are at a client site together in one of the many cities we travel to on a regular basis. Everyone stays up late catching up with one another, collaborating, getting opinions, and sharing experiences that don’t always get captured virtually. My colleague, Jen, summed it up perfectly in this blog post from last summer. I look forward to seeing my colleagues in the flesh and spending as much time with them as possible until we go back to our respective work spaces at home.
COMMUNICATION IS A SPECTRUM
Since we all regularly work from home, we have to be very conscious about how we communicate with one another. While technology has done an incredible job of keeping us connected, it still can’t fully replicate the ease of message comprehension that a face-to-face conversation can. If you take a look at the spectrum below, you’ll notice that the further away from face-to-face you move (and the more you rely on quick and easy forms of communication), the more likely you are to become distracted. So the next time you have a really important collaborative conversation or brainstorm with your teammates, think about doing it over video conference instead of just a phone call. It might not be as good as being in the same room, but as the spectrum shows, it’s the next best thing.
LIVE WHERE YOU WANT, WORK WHERE WE DO
I’m not going to lie—it was a little tough trying to find my groove the first few months of working from home. Meeting new clients, learning the Elicit way, and getting to know new team members mostly over the phone wasn’t easy. Add in the fact that I also decided to uproot my life and move across the country during my first few weeks and this could have been a total disaster. I was genuinely uncertain if I could thrive with Elicit. Despite all of these potential pitfalls, I’m proud to say I’ve taken to working from home quite well. I started as a work-from-home skeptic and now can’t imagine going back to the traditional work environment I once loved.
Almost a year into the job, I seem to have found a balance between working from home and traveling with equal parts human contact and alone time. It’s the perfect work cocktail—shaken, not stirred.
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