Work from home tips from a work at the office advocate

I never liked work from home. This is not a dogmatic position but an opinion formed by the experimental results for a period of 20 years. Jon verbal communication and the inherent need of human beings to belong to a team are just too important to be ignored. At Starttech Ventures we have sufficient evidence that working in the same office is a great accelerator for early stage tech startups.

We experience however the last few weeks with the coronavirus pandemic can only be called extraordinary; we do have to do our part. Not only then shall we stay at home, but we’ll also do it with enthusiasm and excitement since we are supporting a good cause.

Having read numerous pertinent resources and tried to digest them all, I would like to start with a couple of tips after having carefully read many of them:

• Try to follow your schedule like you would do at the office. Work the same amount of time, take your coffee breaks, enjoy your lunch, etc. Your days at home need to have a flow.
• Take care of your nutrition — Junk food seems to be more attractive if you stay at home. At Starttech Ventures we have the pleasure of closely working with Dimitris Petsios, a prominent dietitian specialized in mediterranean diet, who will be guiding our team throughout this challenging period.
• Find some time to exercise — At Starttech Ventures we are blessed to have ScienceTraining.io in our portfolio, so Aris Myrkos, Marilena Kokkinou and our Zumba instructor Iro Tsakiri will be advising All of team members on this front — While staying home makes things kinda more complicated, there are always solutions (Being on a quarantine since Monday March 9th, I’m taking a daily push-up challenge; today I’ve managed to do [easily!] a set of 32, not too bad!)
• Communicate. Communicate. And then communicate some more. Being remote reduces the communication bandwidth (you are losing non-verbal communication, basically more than 90% of the information transmitted from a person to another when they meet in person), so you have to communicate more.
• A start-of-day and an end-of-day call is highly advisable for small groups of 3 to 5 people or so. It will help them stay tuned. I promise my team (and not only) that I shall keep calling them without mercy!
• Texting is good, calling is better. Slack can do as well as numerous other tools — For example, our ClouodAgency.io team uses Discord, an app originally built for games, which is free and works perfectly well for team collaboration.
• Sometimes you may feel overwhelmed. Just take a break. It always helps. Also, please don’t hesitate to ask expert advice if you feel you can’t effectively deal with it by yourself. — At Starttech we are lucky enough to have Psycholate in our portfolio, so a group of prominent psychologists will be advising our teams’ members.
• Never forget that we are in the middle of an unprecedented sanitary crisis. Top priority is that you and your loved ones stay healthy. The community too.
• Strange as it may sound, work from home is still work. So, if you feel sick, just let your team and the corresponding manager know of it and simply request a sick leave. This is not just for sound accounting; it’s first and foremost for your own good.

Sooner or later (hopefully, sooner) this storm will be over. Despite what one can read on social media these day, no, it’s not gonna be the end of the world. It’s one more epidemic, like numerous others that took place throughout the centuries — with the fundamental difference that it is the first one of them where humanity can respond effectively.

Doctors and nurses around the Globe fight courageously to save people; and they most often make it. On the same time, researchers from Shanghai to New York, from London to Sydney and from Tokyo to Buenos Aires work tirelessly in order to come up with a vaccine and an immediately effective medication. They will make it, it’s just a matter of time.

From a historical perspective, it is the first time ever that humanity manages to deal with such a situation in an effective way.

Rest assured then; the best is yet to come. This storm, a kind of a bad dream, will soon be over. And, once this happens, all of us, the work-at-the-office aficionados we’ll manage to go back to our temples of co-creation.

Until then, unhesitatingly embrace the new — temporary — reality and enjoy working from home!