Top three qualities of a top-performing remote worker

As office workers are forced to work remotely in the last few weeks due to coronavirus outbreak, hundreds of articles and manuals are being created to work remotely, mainly addressing how to manage yourself and handling tools.

While these are prerequisites to work remotely, what makes you a top-performing remote worker is your ability to build relationships and trust with people in your organization.

You can set up a remote office in a day, but building trust and relationships with your colleagues may take a while if at all it happens.

Building a relationship of trust often takes time and determined effort while working remotely. Few things that you can consciously practice are –

• Accountability – Take accountability of yourself, i.e. delivering your promises. Remember you have to be your own manager, delivering things on time and as agreed is key to be a responsible and trusted remote worker.
• Communication – At the office, on account of being physically accessible to others, we communicate through verbal and not verbal communication means, this is not possible for a remote worker. Hence communicate the progress of activities periodically or once you reach an important milestone through email, WhatsApp, chat, etc
• Respect- Be respectful of others by making them comfortable, e,g, asking if they can hear you out clearly. Don’t make a fuss of someone not able to find something as obvious as a share button. At the office, we are helped by our colleagues so often on simple tasks that we take them for granted until we have to do it ourselves in a remote set up.

In the last decade, the world has evolved from working remotely “once in a week” or occasionally to now working almost full time remotely or exclusively. Acceptability of working remotely changed at a very slow pace over the years, because the focus was very often on the tools and ability to manage people, rather than equipping them to be self-managed. 

The current coronavirus outbreak will have a lasting impact on the way we work remotely, though this could end up causing a lot of friction among workers unless we take conscious effort in building trust and relationships among ourselves while working remotely.

Originally published on my LinkedIn article here