[sdnog] How to work from home
Mukom Akong T.
mukom.tamon at gmail.com
Wed Mar 25 06:44:28 SAST 2020
Salamualaikum sdNOGers
I've been following this discussion and I thought I'd weigh in a share my
experience.
Before leading the Capacity Building team at AFRINIC, I was a one-person
unit reporting to the CEO
Anyone on my team can wake up any morning and decide they are going to work
from home
- they just need to send a mail to the team and copy HR
- they don't need to state any additional justification for working from
home
- we've been doing this (even before coronavirus) for as long as I've been
at AFRINIC
I'm going to borrow from Simon Sinek and start with WHY
1 | Why Does Anyone Need To Work From Home
- the nature of the job makes it so (I had a member of my team who lived in
another country)
- need to handle some personal errands at home (care for spouse, sibling,
child, parent or even be home for the plumber)
- illness (could be a flu --- no need to call in sick but no need to come
to the office and spread it, or like now ... CORVID virus)
- need a change of environment to focus (there's some kind of work for
which I need to play HD quality music while working, and do things I cannot
do in a shared office
2 | How Will We Know That Working from Home is Working?
For a manager, the concerns include
a) "How do I know that Mukom is actually working and not playing Call of
Duty all day?"
b) "Is Mukom's working from home going to disrupt the work of the team or
company in any way"
For the staff, the concerns include
c) "Will I still be able to maintain my levels of productivity?"
d) "Will my absence from the office negatively affect me in some way?"
Therefore,
- so long as the work can be proven to have been done
- so long as customers are getting served well
- so long as projects are progressing and getting reported
Then it really doesn't matter whether you work from the office or from the
beach at the Red Sea Resort in Port Sudan. Of course, NOT all jobs can be
done from home
3 | How Do You Work Effectively From Home?
One of my personal principles has always been: "Use extreme personal
accountability to buy yourself freedom". In other words, if you hold
yourself to a higher standard of quality and accountability that your
manager sets for the rest of the team, s/he will quickly realise "Oh, I
don't have to worry about Manhal, if she says she'll move a pyramid from
Khartoum to Port Sudan by the end of the month, she'll either do it OR if
she cannot, she'll let me know ahead of time so I don't get surprised"
I'll briefly share the system that we've implemented in the team to make
working from home work.
a) Planning the work
- anything that we do repeatedly or do at the same time every year is a
process.
- **all** processes are documented (in a joint team session) in confluence
where anyone can see them
- every process has a process manager (one person on the team whose
responsibility is to ensure that the customer of the process is happy
- the steps of the process are then implemented in standard templates on a
task management tool (we started with Trello, advanced to Asana and finally
landed on Jira)
- **every piece of work** that will take more than 1 hour to do, is first
recorded in our task management tool (Jira) --- usually, each task has a
Definition of Done (DoD) checklist
- the team's goals for the year/quarter are also in the tool so each task
can be aligned to a goal
- every Monday, the whole team has a weekly planning meeting to plan the
work for the week. After the meeting, every person on the team knows what
everyone else is going to be delivering that week
b) Doing the Work While Being Available
Every day, whether from home or from a coffee shop in Khartoum,
- every one "Checks in" ie. essentially "Hi team, these are the 1 - 3 tasks
I am focusing on for today.
- we implemented a simple check-in system in Slack (a channel called
#checkin where people post their 3 most important tasks for the day. An
example might be
2020.03.24 | Xorlali | 3MITS
├ Complete "Environmental Analysis" part of capacity building strategic
plan
├ Call Nishal and get his feedback on module 2 of routing online course
├ Prepare for meeting with Regulator X about Y
- everyone in the team can see Xorlali's focus for today (just as they all
know her commitments for the week)
- since the work is in Jira , open your Kanban board in Jira and start
working (everyone in the team can see that as well)
It's important that you be available and reachable, especially when working
from home. For us that means someone should be able to reach you and get a
response on Slack or Skype or Telegram. Of course, you can set a Do Not
Disturb for 2 - 3 hours to focus, but do get back to people who left you
messages. It's little things like that that make WFH work.
c) Reporting the Work
Here's where most especially technical people have a big problem.
**Work has no value to the organisation until it has been reported as done**
Even if you choose to argue with that, unless you want your manager to be
pestering you with updates every hour, you want to establish a routine for
reporting on the status of work that's been done. Here're the mechanisms
we've implemented over the year
- The #checkin Slack channel above? --- at the end of the day checkout
(just tick what you did, no explanations). This is a good way for someone
who works from home to signify they've closed for the day
- At the end of the week, write a weekly report of what you did that week
(if you plan your week, check-in and check-out, this should take maximum 30
minutes). We have a standard template in Confluence
- During next week's weekly planning meeting, you'll report your
accomplishments as well as challenges you faced.
d) What Tools
The tools are not as important as the process and daily practices. So I'll
speak about Categories of Tools you need
- Task/Project management tool: Where all the actual work to be done gets
recorded. E.g Jira, Basecamp, Trello, Asana etc
- Document/Knowledge management tool: Where long-form reference
documentation for projects, processes, best practices etc is kept e.g.
Confluence, Wiki
- Realtime document collaboration tool: Where multiple people can work on
the same document simultaneously e.g. Google Docs/Sheet/Slides, Etherpad,
Ethercalc
- Realtime communication: for communicating outside of email (think of it
as a replacement for the Intercom) e.g. Slack, Telegram, Skype etc
Ok, that was long. In conclusion, I'd say
Making WFH work is first and foremost a manager's responsibility - before
it becomes the staff's responsibility (of course there're exceptions ---
pioneers). It's they that often have to fight with archaic HR practices and
silly policies designed for the industrial age and lazily forced on
knowledge workers.
If there is a sufficient number of managers in Sudan interested in
exploring how to set up their teams so they can work effectively from home,
I'll be able to organise a webinar or something to assist.
On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 at 02:15, sara alamin <sara.alamin90 at gmail.com> wrote:
> اdocumentation or wiki tools to write what you have done, or to list
> your processes :
>
> mediawiki, Twiki
>
>
> ticketing system :
>
> Request Tracker (RT): open source, very efficient.
>
>
> team collaboration and discussion board:
>
> - Trello, easy to use. has mobile app.
> - Slack. I have not used too much, but maybe someone here on the list
> may give you more info about it.
>
>
> sharing files, sources, data
>
> - nextcloud, i have worked with it recently; very good tool, and you
> can install plugins to add more features like Nextcloud Talk for
> audio/video conferencing, collaborate on documents, Nextcloud Groupware
> integrates Calendar, Contacts, Mail.
> - owncloud
> - seafile
>
> but i do like nextcloud :-)
>
>
> video conferencing:
>
> - Jitsi :
>
> good with poor connection if you are not sharing video or your screen , no
> need to install client , just browse to it.
>
> *INX-ZA are offering a free meeting tool used jitsi (@edd :), but it will
> not be really efficient routing. it’s free and open source and i am sure
> the inx-za people will offer to help. and if Sudan IXP can have like this
> service will be really good!
>
>
>
> - bigbluebutton
>
> if you are teaching or you need a board to write, marker and so on.
>
>
> اتمني ان تكون اجابتي مفيدة و بالتوفيق
>
> —سارة الامين—
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 8:15 PM Fahd Batayneh <fahd.batayneh at icann.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello Manhal and sdNOG Friends,
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope you are all doing well, and staying healthy in these hard times.
>>
>>
>>
>> For a mailing list such as sdNOG that has many technical folks, I can see
>> that the answer to this question would have two paths; one for “Technical”
>> folks and another for “Non-Technical” folks.
>>
>>
>>
>> Technical folks could either work remotely by accessing servers remotely,
>> or would have to physically be in a data-center running beneath cables and
>> cabinets. I’ll leave the answer to this part to our technical geeks.
>>
>>
>>
>> As for non-technical people (like myself), I have been working remotely
>> from home for the past 6.5 years. While I do have a home office, I do not
>> use it much. If you are able to manage your time wisely, working from home
>> is like working from an office. The only key difference is that you do not
>> have your work colleagues around you to have discussions, and so you would
>> end up using your phone or VoIP platforms to communicate with them more.
>>
>>
>>
>> I do have a good Internet connectivity at home, and so am not in a
>> position to share an experience with poor connectivity.
>>
>>
>>
>> Bottom line, if you have work to do, whether at home or at office, it
>> should not make a difference. Try to adjust.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>>
>>
>> Fahd
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *sdnog <sdnog-bounces at sdnog.sd> on behalf of "
>> manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com" <manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com>
>> *Date: *Monday, March 23, 2020 at 11:57 PM
>> *To: *sdnog <sdnog at sdnog.sd>
>> *Subject: *[Ext] [sdnog] How to work from home
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Hope you are all safe wherever you are,
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards to the current situation around the world , and as we all
>> adviced/forced to start working from home which is not common here in our
>> community , and I know some bosses are not convinced unless they saw you in
>> your desk :D
>>
>>
>>
>> my question is , for simple offices ,with no great infrastructure , just
>> an internet connection to their edge ,how can they work from home ? Is
>> there any free tools /ways they can use, what are the options, with
>> taking along the security concerns
>>
>>
>>
>> what is your advice to achieve that in a proper way , and for those who
>> managed to work from home , how did you do that ?
>>
>> Please share your experience ^_^
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> And how we as "sdnog community" can help in that "for the old fashioned
>> bosses :D"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers & be safe
>>
>> -- Manhal Mohammed
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Sent from my Huawei Mobile
>>
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>>
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--
Mukom Akong T.
LinkedIn:Mukom <https://www.linkedin.com/in/mukom> | twitter:
@perfexcellent
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“When you work, you are the FLUTE through whose lungs the whispering of the
hours turns to MUSIC" - Kahlil Gibran
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