This is a guest post by Sharon Koifman, an expert in remote work with nearly two decades of experience running three companies 100% from his computer. Sharon has studied and researched not only how to operate remote businesses but how to create an amazing work culture where people love to come to work. These days Sharon runs DistantJob, a very unique recruitment agency geared specifically for finding remote developers who work from all over the world.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) started spreading, many companies began advising their staff to work from home. With the virus now pandemic and many countries under some form of lockdown, there’s a large swathe of people who are working from home that have never done so before.

Are you one of those people?

If so, you may be wondering how you’re going to stay productive while working from home – especially if you have young children at home and are having to balance their care and education at the same time.

The good news is that it is doable. In fact, full-time remote workers have been doing this for years! You can learn from their wisdom (and mistakes) which I’ll share, so you can be as productive as possible.

Just make your way through the following sections in this guest post for Process Street:

• Common WFH struggles
• Working from home tips for staying productive
• Work from home like a pro with Process Street!

Let’s get started!

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Unequipped. Unprepared. Uncertain.

34% of people believe their organization isn’t properly prepared for employees to be working from home.

Speaking of which, has your organization recently – and rather hastily – transitioned from office working to working from home?

If the answer is “Yes“, no sweat. Process Street has you covered.

This post will guide you through the basics of working from home (WFH), the positives of it, the potential problems you could run into, on top of offering you our (free!) checklist templates that’ll ensure a safe and smooth WFH transition.

Read through the following sections to get completely clued up:

• What does WFH mean?
• The advantages of working from home
• WFH transition struggles
• Process Street’s free WFH transition templates
• Use Process Street for all recurring processes and tasks!

Or, if all you want is the checklists, get them here:

• Work From Home Office Space Checklist
• Remote Daily Work Schedule Template
• Virtual Meeting Checklist
• Onboarding Remote Employees Checklist
• Work From Home Policy Checklist
• Achieving Work-Life Balance Checklist
• Work Anxiety Resolution Checklist
• Critical Incident Stress Management Checklist

Let’s dive into all things WFH, ASAP. ‍
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Process Street is a 100% remote company. We have been from day one.

But our CEO Vinay Patankar has been remote longer than that. Process Street is Vinay’s third remote company, meaning 10 years of running companies remotely.

At the time of writing, we have around 50 employees across multiple continents and it’s working so well for us that we’ve just sealed our Series A funding round from Accel, Atlassian, and Salesforce Ventures.

We thought now would be a good time to do a deep dive into Vinay’s thoughts on remote work and why his experience of it has kept him remote.

For this Process Street article, we sat down with Vinay to ask him 4 key questions, which we’ve provided links to below:

• Were you distributed from day one?
• How many employees do you have and in how many countries?
• What are the biggest challenges of having a distributed team?
• What are the biggest advantages?

Vinay has also produced a short video series of key things to learn when working in or running a remote team. You can check these videos out in the section below: Continue Reading

It’s 8 am. Your alarm buzzes.

You roll out of bed, perform your morning ablutions, and then sit down at your desk, ready to take Monday by the horns. Which you do, because you’re working from home, and not some crummy, cramped office which is full of distracting coworkers.

Ahh. Bliss.

It’s 8 am. Your alarm buzzes.

You realize you were dreaming.

This rose-tinted view of remote work – and being part of a virtual team – was exactly that: A dream.

Although working remotely can be wondrous, it isn’t always easy.

As members of virtual teams (like myself) will tell you, there are countless challenges and hurdles teams must tackle – from maintaining a healthy work-life balance to establishing a culture of asynchronous communication – before a virtual team can reap the rewards of increased employee productivity, lowered business costs (Cisco saved over $270 million a year!), and improved employee happiness.

Luckily for you, this blog post contains everything you need to help your virtual team not only excel but become excellent.

Read through the sections below to get a proper handle on all-things virtual teams:

• Virtual teams definition
• What makes strong, successful virtual teams?
• How top remote companies go about managing virtual teams
• Overcome virtual team challenges with Process Street!

Now, it’s time to wake up, smell the coffee, and learn exactly how to instill and sustain a masterful, virtual team!

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This is a guest post by David Miller, a technical writer & edu-tech enthusiast currently pursuing research in project management software. You can find him on Twitter, or writing for the ProProfs Project.

If I ask you to select a few colleagues in your company and take a survey of how well they understand their company’s culture, how do you think they’d score?

Not so sure?

Now, think about remote teams.

Teams you don’t even talk on a regular basis – how sure are you that they know your company’s values or culture?

Let’s take an example.

According to a PMI study, 83% of respondents spend at least an hour or two working remotely every day. Among which the percentage of remote employees stand at:

• 47% – Business Owners
• 47% – Managers
• 50% – Executives
• 36% – Team Members

Now, as you can see that most upper-management employees are usually working remotely with the company, and if they themselves don’t possess a firm grasp on company culture – how will they pass it on to their team members?

Usually, remote team members are simply assigned tasks with a due date and it is all professional.

But, what most companies don’t realize is that it is really crucial for everyone who is part of a company to understand their values and culture.

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This article is a guest post from Isaiah Jackson.

Team collaboration is not a new thing.

However, team collaboration is so poorly practiced within many organizations that we need to find new ways to facilitate it.

In the modern digital world, team collaboration is incredibly easy and can be achieved from in the office or in the home.

In this article, we’ll explain how effective team collaboration can allow you to operate your business either with remote staff or with staff being given the freedom to work from home flexibly.

Having home-working opportunities can unleash employee satisfaction, retention, and attainment. Modern approaches to team collaboration enable this.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why the traditional office dynamics are in decline
• The benefits of working remotely
• How team collaboration tools make remote work possible
• The key team collaboration tools used by the team at Process Street
• Why you should encourage your employees to work from home
• Team collaboration tools help in achieving a work-life balance

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“I’d give anything to work from home. It must be so relaxing!”

I’ve heard this kind of thing from my entire family, and with the increasing trend of remote workers it’s not surprising that people want to get in on the action.

The last 3 years of working remotely have taught me otherwise.

Yes, you get to work from anywhere, have more flexibility with your hours, and even wear whatever you want. However, remote work can be isolating, demotivating, stressful as all hell, and even physically damaging.

So, I’ve brought together all of the lessons I wish I’d been told when getting into the game, including:

• How to maintain a work/life balance without a traditional office
• Creating and sticking to your own schedule
• How to stay motivated without seeing your teammates
• Staying healthy and avoiding injuries common to remote work

Also, if you’re looking for remote work, we here at Process Street are hiring!

Check out our jobs page for more information.

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Saying “employee feedback” conjures images of awkward conversations with managers and meaningless buzzwords during performance reviews, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Feedback cycles shouldn’t try to force comments out of your team, but instead support them and let them know when and where they can raise any issues they encounter.

Doing this lets you see the flaws in your business and figure out how to take action in order to improve it for everyone involved.

It’s also a great way to get a second opinion on issue that you have lost all context on. Veteran and new employee alike offer vital second opinions and can really help to highlight where your processes are weakest, and that’s not even mentioning other benefits such as helping to make your employees feel valued.

“69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being better recognized” – Lindsay Kolowich, 11 Eye-Opening Statistics on the Importance of Employee Feedback

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With today’s fast pace of living, it’s vital to have on-the-go access to everything that’s important to your work.

Rather than staring blankly out of a window on your train or bus to work, you could then instead be planning your day and organizing meetings, or commenting on tasks and sorting through your inbox to avoid getting distracted at the office.

However, with the sheer variety of technology on offer it’s also difficult to know what mobile apps you should be using.

That’s why I asked the Process Street team to share the best mobile apps for business they have installed and how they use them.

From the most valuable apps across our entire company to one-off niche cases that could do with a little more exposure, in this article I’ll highlight the apps that let our team stay productive and make every moment count.

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I’m writing this blog post to solve a very specific problem.

During one of our regular marketing meetings, Vinay assigned me this post and said he wants it to be written so he can link it to everyone who messages him just “hey Vinay” on Slack and waits for a response before saying anything else.

Like many managers in remote teams, Vinay’s sick of our tendencies to under-communicate. Just saying “hey Vinay” and hoping to get a synchronous chat going is a waste of time, especially if there are time zone differences, or if general busy-ness prevents a polite, fully-fledged chat.

And so, in the spirit of that real example, this article will solve the problem of communication in remote teams.

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