5 Tips When Working from Home: How to Be Productive When Working Remotely

The shift to remote work has left many struggling to adapt. Yet some remote workers thrive from day one, seamlessly integrating into their teams while maintaining high productivity. What makes the difference?

The answer lies in specific skills and habits that successful remote workers consistently demonstrate. After thousands of remote placements across multiple industries, a clear pattern emerges – whether they’re developers, salespeople, or managers, the most effective remote workers share key approaches to their work.

With remote work becoming a permanent fixture in our professional landscape, mastering these skills has never been more important. If you’re working remotely (especially as a developer, one of today’s most in-demand remote roles), these five tips will help you excel in your position. And if you’re hiring remote talent, these are the qualities to look for in your candidates.
Here are five proven strategies to become a successful remote employee:

1. Learn How to Effectively Communicate in a Remote Setting

As far as we’ve come with modern teleworking tools, many workers and managers still feel most comfortable speaking face to face. So if a remote employee wants to be successful, they would be well served learning how to use the video chat, task board, and instant messaging apps that hiring companies also use.

For instance, if a company expects an employee to be available and reachable at a moment’s notice throughout the day, they should set their status on an app like Slack to be available, and make sure to notify the manager if and when they won’t be reachable. Likewise, they should learn the art of engaging and participating in group video chats; shyness isn’t a good enough excuse to never contribute during team planning meetings and other group discussions on an app like Zoom.

These and other communication skills are essential for a healthy and productive remote work environment.

2. Make Technology Work for You

If you’re not a developer or someone else directly involved with highly technical work within your company, you might have been able to skate by for years without needing to learn about any technological tools more advanced than FaceTime.

Project management platforms make it easy to manage complex projects by breaking them down into bite-sized tasks. For example, writing a business plan or an executive summary requires collaboration from several different team members to get the data and content investor-ready. The right tools make it easy to format these larger goals with sub-tasks, timelines, and collaboration features. Most tools offer free trials, so it’s important to test-drive different platforms to see how each caters to your specific needs.

But mentioned with respect to communication, technology becomes an indispensable resource when in-office work shifts to remote work. To succeed in remote environments, familiarize yourself with:

• Communication apps like Slack and Zoom
• Task management tools such as Asana and Trello
• Remote desktop solutions like TeamViewer
• All-in-one platforms like Bitrix24

Every company and every job title will require a different set of skills and responsibilities, of course. But the more work productivity apps you get to know, the faster and easier your transition to remote work will become.

3. Supercharge Your Time Management Skills

Working from home or in another remote environment may be new if you’re a developer or salesperson used to working out of a central office. The routines that you spent years establishing at company headquarters may not be all that useful when your office consists of your dining room table, with your cat meowing in the background.

That’s why it’s essential that you set a daily schedule that works for you. For instance, it’s ok to take advantage of being at home by making yourself a delicious, home-cooked lunch. It’s not ok to spot the TV out of the corner of your eye and decide to settle in for 3 hours of Maury Povich reruns.

To frame your time management and build out your calendar, consider these strategies:

posting achievable tasks within specific timeframes. If you have three assignments due at the start of a new work week, sort them based on how time sensitive each one is, and how labor-intensive each one is. If you work better when you plow through only one assignment at a time, manage your time that way. If you get bogged down by staring at the same project for hours at a time, splice in the other assignments for an hour within your work day, to break things up and keep you motivated. 

In short, whichever work strategies make the most sense for you, use those to map out your day so that you feel both mentally healthy and productive.

• Post achievable tasks within specific timeframes
• Sort assignments based on time sensitivity and labor requirements
• Identify your personal workflow preferences (single-task focus vs. task-switching)
• Break up monotonous work periods by alternating between projects when motivation wanes

Whichever work strategies make the most sense for you, use those to map out your day so that you feel both mentally healthy and productive.

4. Be Flexible

If you’re thinking of applying for a remote job, a few skills will prove more important for your chances of success than flexibility so make sure to update your resume.

You may have spent your entire career working 9 to 5 out of an office. But if you start working remotely, you might find yourself working for a company that’s based on the other side of the ocean. If that company demands that all staff members put in the same hours, the 9-to-5 schedule that in-office workers need to follow might look something like 3-11 to you.

Being open-minded and flexible to, say, work at night can give you a leg up over other qualified applicants. Just make sure that if that’s the job and the workday structure you want, you take the necessary steps to make that new schedule possible. Some of the adjustments you may have to make could include adjusting your sleep schedule, leaning on your partner or another caregiver to help with child care if you have younger kids, and finding leisure activities during typical work hours that keep you balanced and stimulated.

5. Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

So you’re now working in your own space, free from the dozens of fellow worker bees who once buzzed around your cubicle eight hours a day, every day. Time to embrace solitude, right?