Let’s work together to get through the CV-19 bump

A number of useful resources are starting to appear online to help knowledge workers in both the public and private sectors adjust to working from their home bases or remotely for the next couple of weeks.

Most are being produced by experienced home-based digital workers who have useful insights into how to best structure your day and avoid feelings of social isolation and maximise you (and your temporarily) virtual team’s productivity. To get some idea of the scale of that for our established work practices, one estimates is that translates to an estimated 240 million people starting to work from home globally over the course of less than 100 hours.

Here are a few resources that we at Think Digital Partners are finding particularly insightful, and which we recommend you check out:

• Wired is doing some sterling work at the moment, and its UK arm’s already excellent podcast is definitely worth subscribing to at the moment. Here’s just one of its many well-researched overviews on how to structure your day as efficiently as possible.

• This is a great article from respected IT news analysis site diginomica which lays out some very sensible and indeed heart-felt advice and support, especially on the mental health side of teleworking: “We know that a huge part of what makes a business succeed is its people, which is why this post is going to focus on the potential challenges that employees and workers may face with their mental health as the response to the Coronavirus escalates and more people are asked to self-isolate, distance themselves socially and work from home.”

• Many of us are finding LinkedIn a great source of information around these issues, too, including articles such as this

We also saw a great suggestion on Twitter about how managers might try and adapt Cassie Robinson’s idea of creating a ‘user manual’ about yourself to share with colleagues on how you best like to work, which we are using as an illustration here; this is her original Medium long-form piece, which is really worth looking at, while her templates are available for free on DropBox here):

And absolutely last but not least, two digital professionals who have worked remotely for years have launched a crowd-sourced, free handbook called  The Kit proactively tackles normal people’s remote working needs and fears, and has been designed to help businesses of all sizes deliver their own remote-working strategy. The authors promised that the document collates general interest articles about the topic of remote working, across broad topics such as productivity, tech and mental as well as physical health, is entirely free, open and crowd-sourced and will remain so, alongside two WhatsApp groups that have been set up to engage contributors and discuss additions to the kit. NB that The Remote Work Survival Kit is an open, working document, meaning anyone
can view and share their advice; Version 1 is out now, and the group plans to release a new version every 100 hours.

This is a great idea, and one we wholeheartedly support. As one of the authors, Global Digital Strategy Consultant Dominic Mason notes, “Seeing the relentless analysis of Coronavirus data and reactive behaviour among some of my peers, I decided to do something that was positive, human and simple, to help those who may not know how to begin the transition into remote working.

“The digital community has an incredible wealth of knowledge about what it is like to work remotely and it seemed like an obvious solution to share these top tips as widely as possible, so that the UK can keep its productivity levels as high as possible during the outbreak.

“This way of working is also the future for many and is already commonplace in eco-conscious organisations, with entire teams happy to work from home or locally, in order to actively reduce their emissions.”

We echo these excellent sentiments and applaud these and other community projects and the masses of online help and guidance that’s starting to come through.

Think Digital Partners wishes all of its many readers, partners and supporters the very best of luck, and can only add to Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey’s (@McConaughey) inspiring words on Twitter this week: “Every red light eventually turns green.”