EPISODE 18: Adjusting to Being an At Home Worker – Tips to being Happy, Comfortable & Productive

Hello and welcome to Carey Sperry, All Social Y'all Podcast. I am your host, Carey Sperry. In All Social Y'all Podcast we discuss how to employ social to become truly customer centric. We identify how social is a feel for business growth and we talk with some of the best and brightest business leaders, entrepreneurs and digital marketers. Our guests share inspiring stories and effective tactics to discover, interact and emotionally connect with customers where they are: on social platforms.

Hi everybody. Welcome to episode 18 adjusting to becoming an at home worker, the considerations of being happy, comfortable and productive. We have a free asset for you this week of Tips to Working or Being an At Home Worker - to help you get closer to being happy, comfortable and productive. The tip sheet also provides you with new ideas of how to keep young children occupied and entertained and we have put together for you a list of wonderful healthy get ready ahead of time snacks to help keep you from pondering over what to eat or "stress eating" on bad choice but easy to reach for choice foods. To get your Free guide tip sheet - and you can share it with anyone you think can benefit from it! To get it on your PC or mobile device go to www.allsocialyall.com and at the top you will see Episode 18 and this free asset.

So a lot of people are talking about working at home right now of course, because as you guys know, or some of you that listened to last week's episode on Coronavirus, COVID-19 I didn't want to skip over that because everything else right now about social media seems kind of secondary, although it's a great way for us to stay in touch and be communicating with each other. Despite that, number one is we're just trying to get through every day right now and trying to keep on top of what's going on. So I've been so fortunate to have my husband Stephen Brown of Inseego, Vice President of Sales at Inseego offer to talk with us about working at home. Most of you have already created a space for yourself. Maybe you're experimenting, maybe you're good to go, but some of you we figure are still struggling with kids at home, distractions, schedule, being comfortable, your body, concentration, there's all kinds of things. So we really wanted to focus on that today. And so I would like to again introduce you to Stephen Brown of Inseego and Stephen, thank you so much for being here today.

Oh, thank you Carey. Glad to be here. Glad to join your show.

All right, so if you can't tell, we're at home ourselves, this is our living room where Stephen works. Because Stephen, maybe it would help if you kind of give our listeners some background on yourself and your role at Inseego.

Sure. Thank you Carey. So I've been at Inseego for a little over three years and this is the perfect work from home challenge you might face when you have uninterrupted or unexpected interruptions from pets, children or others. The best thing to do is just be a pro and just flow with it. But I've been in high technology most of my career, again, probably close to 30 years now and I've worked from home at least half of that and I've been at Inseego now and Inseego is a 5G company, so our broad portfolio of smart device to cloud solutions extend the 5G network edge. It's providing ultra reliable internet connectivity, expanded 5G coverage, faster data speeds and increased security. Because Inseego solutions provide robust carrier grade features and processing capabilities at the network edge, new use cases leveraging 5G speed become possible, ultra low latency become possible.

Okay. I don't know if y'all understood what that is, but if you do, awesome. IoT, internet of things, for those of you who do not know is the way that I like to explain it is think of your home and being able to connect everything to the internet, to the remote devices, to opening the locks on your door, controlling your lighting and your TV and now even your refrigerator and things like that. So it's just really connecting everything. And there's all these applications that are happening in the business world with airlines and every industry you can imagine. So that's what they're working on. So let's dive right in. So like I said, many of you have already set up your home office. But Stephen, you work from home, you have for a long time blended working in the office as well as at home. What are some considerations that you would say to highlight besides the basics?

Yeah. Once you get beyond the basics of finding a nice quiet space, maybe you have an office, you've got your technology all set up, which we'll talk a little bit about. But for me, the first thing is you have to understand how to work at home. And the first thing that I had to learn to do was to learn how to fix a schedule. If you don't, what you'll end up with, and I'm guilty of this, is you wake up at 6:30-7 in the morning, you go strolling by your office and you sit down and you open up your email. That is mistake number one because it will be 11:30-1 o'clock before you realize it. You're still in your pajamas, you haven't eaten and you're already into your workday without really starting. So rule number one is really ground yourself in a good schedule.

For me, it's number one is just don't open your email. Start your day off by a natural habit, whether it's getting up, getting your coffee, walking the dog, maybe catch up on the news, but let yourself get going. Get into your work routine and be purposeful about it and then start your day when you should, of course. And it varies from job to job depending on what your role is, whether it's making calls to customers or taking calls from a support center or there's numbers of different things, but the best takeaway I would give somebody is to really be purposeful about how you start your day.

So I'm guilty of that myself. Sometimes I just go right into my office before I comb my hair or I may have brushed my teeth, but then I dive right into my computer. And then before I know it, it's lunchtime and I look a rack, I feel gross. But when the days that I do get up and I put my nice clothes on, I put a little makeup on, for us girls and clean myself up, I just feel more energetic. I feel prouder of what I'm doing. So it does make a difference and kind of making that discipline and that routine is another word for it. So that's good. And I have heard a lot of people saying lately, get a routine. Don't just fly by the cedar pants with your day. But that's huge.

So with setting up, having a comfortable workplace, like you're in the living room and I'm surprised that your back doesn't hurt sitting on the couch all the time because mine would, I have a home office where I have like a proper desk and monitors and everything. But what are some other things that people can do or kind of allow for lesser distractions would you say in the living room like you do it? And how do you kind of manage us as your family with some of the times that you're on a call? Like I say... You and I kind of talk in the morning, when your call so I kind of know when to sort of be considerate of that.

So first thing is learn to become a quick draw with the mute button because things happen pretty quick. Now, it could be somebody wanting to start a conversation with you or it could be a garbage truck backing up outside, or some loud noise, maybe the landscapers are outside. So you just have to be prepared and just don't overreact. Just hit your mute button is one thing and know your technology. Not to get too far into that, but I get a good set of noise canceling headphones because that blocks out most of your ambient noise around you and just make sure you know how those mute buttons work on them.

And the key is just talking with folks ahead of time and just setting some ground rules. Normally people can tell if you're on the phone and engaged, people will just kind of walk by and let you go about your business. Particularly if you're on video, you don't want a dog, and then kids and everybody else popping in there. But you just kind of learn to adapt just like anything else. The longer you do it, people just learn how to get into routines.

Yeah. So I came up from the steps, I was on the phone with someone and they were on speaker and I came up... Our level where Stephen works is on a level above a set of stairs and I came up the stairs and he was like, put his finger up. "Shh. I'm on a call." And I was like, "Ooh." And I took them off speaker. So sometimes you're going to have, and I said to him, I go, "Everyone knows we're all working at home right now. So don't worry because whoever you're having a conference call with should understand that you're going to have things in the background and everything." But it's still, when you're trying to focus on delivering value on a call, we all can get a little serious with each other about being quiet and considering each other's feelings.

You're right. If you just think about human psychology, if we're in the middle of something and we're in the zone and we're focused and our attention does get broken, it takes the average person sometimes multiple minutes to get back into that groove. Now that's more if you're studying or reading, takes you a minute to get back in that zone. Usually if you're in the middle of a conversation you can get there. But to your point, I would just encourage people to really don't beat yourself up. Don't get too nervous about it. Just learn that... Give each other a break. We're all in this together as we've heard most of the folks on the news, the media, we just got to learn how to you give each other a break in these scenarios.

And just, I guess the best example, we've probably all seen the poor guy, I can't remember what he was, he was some sort of a diplomat being interviewed on one of the news channels and he's sitting there in the middle of this briefing and his kids who are coming in and he's trying to be cool and his wife is low crawling behind in dragging the kids out, slamming the door. It's hilarious. But he handled it like a pro. He just kept going and everybody understands.

And it went viral.

Yup, it did. It was awesome.

Gave everyone a laugh because I know how that feels. Speaking of that, I didn't put this to y'all in the introduction is that we contacted or reached out to my sister Quinn over the weekend and let her know that we were going to do this episode and we said our kids are older now, our youngest is 17 and so we don't have the challenges that many of you have, which is having young children at home and they have energy and they have needs, the things they can't do for themselves that you have to do every little thing for them. And not to mention to be cooped up and entertained and things like that. And maybe, or maybe not you have a hand or maybe you're rotating as spouses or cohabitating, helping each other out. So there are some tips that she gave us to share with you all at the end that I think were amazing. So stay with us because those tips I thought are things I never would have thought of. And she said they're working really, really well, so.

Okay. So back to your kind of set up. Now you've got yourself set up. You have some considerations how to manage your day and your family's expectations and such. What about your team? You're all working virtually now. What are some things that you've shared with your team or your team has shared with you about how you best can maximize your productivity working virtually?

That's a really good question. So my team are sales folks that are field sales folks, so they're in front of customers. Most of them are on the road, either on a plane, traveling, driving to a customer. So today they're at home. Now there are inside sales folks that are normal, are used to that type of stuff. So for those folks, it's relatively easy. But for folks that thrive on being out and being in front of customers, that's a big change for salespeople. And so what I've encouraged my team to do is, and they really have just embraced it, is number one, spend this time to get intimate with your customers.

Everybody wants to talk about the virus, but understanding how that's impacting them, their families, how is it impacting their work schedule, whether it's a work from home shift or whether it's just business in general. Understanding a little bit more about your customer and their challenges and then post coronavirus. Start to help them think through that. I mean, we're in the technology business, the connectivity business so we spend a lot of time working with not only our end customers that use our technology, but our partners that sell the technology. We build products for folks like Verizon and AT&T, so we're looking at the shifts now. If you think about the three biggies, just remote or teleworking, one, telemedicine and extended or distance learning or education, whether that's a higher education or even K to 12 now, these kids are being challenged to work and learn differently.

Now, the trends for remote or teleworking was actually headed up anyway. Fairly, I don't want to say a sharp ramp, but it was ramping up. But what we're hearing is what we're seeing is that's probably going to stick because I think people are going to become more comfortable with teleworking. Whether they resisted it for just cultural reasons or they didn't understand it or they were a little mystified by the technology. But once they've actually done it and I think they're like, "Oh, you know what, this isn't so bad. I can be more productive, I can get a lot of work done and I can find that balance."

So for us it's really about learning and listening to our customers and spend time investing in yourself. So this goes back to preparing your day. Set appointments in your calendar during the day to read. Whether it's topical on technology or an adjacent technology to your business. Anything to add value to you as a person to fulfill you to fill your day, I think is valuable because in the workspace we're fortunate where we work, we have a great culture where our leadership team, senior leadership team encourages us to learn and spend the time thinking strategically. I don't think there is any more important time than now to embrace that value.

That's a great point. I think unfortunately a lot of managers, because they're new to this, they're just overwhelmed with the adjustment and their own balancing everything at home and they're demanding of their team and they're almost more worried about productivity and, I mean, understandably like every company has to survive right now with the economy pretty much coming to a temporary halt. And so thinking about the workers and their wellbeing and how they're going to maximize their time, which actually I've talked about this I think in a previous episode about over digitization and how when we're on our mobile devices and our computers, and looking now at Zoom meetings all day and having back to back to back to back, there are studies that have come out that have shown that there are eight brain centers that are all firing and working and which lends to productivity at the beginning of the day. Well, when those are firing all day long, all the centers are going, they start shutting down. It's a self protective mechanism that is part of the human body and then only one or two are working. And guess what? Productivity plummets.

So I urge you management and leadership to not make your people be on Zoom all of the Workday. And to put in some buffer time for them to like what Stephen just said, reading, maybe talking with a colleague on the phone, just the audio or just having reflection time, time to go outside. Which kind of is a segue to the next question I had was kind of scheduling, like scheduling breaks. How do you and how do you encourage your team to schedule your day as it comes to your activities, like your meals even or snacks? Some people stress eat and then they find themselves running in the pantry or refrigerator while they're on calls. Or they're just sitting on the phone all day on Zoom or whatever WebEx platform that they're on and they're not giving themselves any break and they forget to eat.

Right. Personally, I rigid with my schedule, so I have a lot of meetings, whether it's talking about customer engagements or management meetings, planning meetings. We try to be purposeful with those meetings. And one of the best things you can do, and this really has nothing to do with working remote, this has more to do with managing your meetings, is just be prepared ahead of time. Meetings are to make decisions. So when people show up to the meeting, they need to be prepared. And what are we here to decide? Because if we're just meeting for the sake of meeting, we're wasting time. So the better you can prepare the folks for the meeting, like, "Hey, here's what we're coming to this meeting for, here's what you need to prepare ahead of time when we leave the meeting, this is what we're going to have to sign in."

So those simple terms are just very, very helpful for folks. But definitely put in if it's lunch or if you need to just take a break every hour or a couple of minutes. Now I have a smart watch, I wear a Garmin and it'll tell me about every 20 minutes or so. Hey, move. So if I'm sitting too long I'll get up and walk around a bit. Because sitting is the new smoking I've heard. But that's just good advice whether you're in an office or working at home. But just get up and move around a little bit so you don't get into a rut.

But going back a little bit to the psychology of working from home, particularly for people that are new to working at home, we are so conditioned to showing up at an office at eight o'clock and I walk in and I'm at work. Well today work is more about what you do, not where you are. But that's a lot easier said than done because that's a lot of conditioning where folks are used to walking into an office. When they're at home, all of a sudden it's like, well wait a second, I'm at home. Am I really working? And that is a big psychological barrier that takes some people some time to get through. And the best way to do that is be task-oriented. You start your day off with, Hey look, these are the three to five things I need to get done. At the end of the day, maybe you got three of them done, great. Cross them off, re-prioritize the other ones and just keep going. It's all about goals and objectives and moving forward.

That's really smart. It's one reason I married him. So how to not get too, I feel too isolated. Working at home can be lonely. Some people don't live with anyone else. They may or may not have a pet. They may or may not have children. We're going to get to children in a second. And then kind of contrasting how to not feel too isolated with thinking, knowing, having the hope that this soon will be behind us and that we're not going to be necessarily in this state forever, of course. Now some of you are like, dang, I love this little working at home thing. Thank goodness, this awarded me the opportunity and I'm never going to go back to working in an office, but some of us like a blend. I personally like a blend. I like being with customers. I like being at home. I like being in another setting in my office out by Avalon or maybe some people go to Starbucks. You know what I mean? But how can we kind of help during this time of quarantine not feel so isolated?

It depends on the type of person you are. There's lots of different technology out there. At Inseego we use Skype, so whether you're an audio person, you like to talk. Or video to feel more connected, that's really a personal thing. I don't really subscribe to, Hey, if you use video, you're going to feel more connected or not. I think it really boils down to what you're most comfortable with. And just what this... I have to bounce ideas off people. I find if you're thinking about an idea, it may seem like the most brilliant thing in the world to you, but as soon as you say it out loud to another person, you're like, "Oh boy, that doesn't make any sense at all." Right?

So just reach out. There's lots of tools out there, instant messaging, Chatter on Salesforce, Microsoft teams, Zoom. There's many, many ways to stay connected and these tools have been around for a long time. I spent a lot of time in the unified communications space selling these tools and they really do make you feel more connected and you just have to embrace them. And it is different when you're in the office versus when you're remote. And if you're not careful, you can allow your employees, particularly if you're in a leadership position, it's incumbent upon us to make sure our employees are being taken care of and looked after because that old term out of sight, out of mind, that cuts both ways.

Absolutely. Great points. Well, one thing that I will never forget is one of my managers at Forrester told me, because I worked remotely in Atlanta and they're headquartered out of Cambridge, Massachusetts and a lot of the analysts and people that I needed advisors were up there and he said, "Just once a month or once a week even put an appointment time on the calendar with the people that you work with, just to have a one-on-one or one-on-two." And that went so far for me because I would connect with them one-on-one just on the phone and they would say, "What can I do to help you?" And I would say, "What can I do to help you?" And it'd be very collaborative. We'd talk about common challenges and things that we were trying to do to serve our customers and it went so far and then we could follow up with it too.

So I think that's something you all can put on your calendar is just say who can I connect dot with in my finance department, in my human resource department and my management product, whatever departments you have. Just put time on the calendar, 15-20 minutes and it goes a really long way.

So to kind of wrap up before we completely wrap is, I don't know if y'all noticed our dog's tail was wagging in between us for those of you who are watching on the video. For those of you who are just on audio, our dog was... Her big tail was up in between us, anyway. Is my sister Quinn. So a couple of things that she said were one and Stephen tell me if I'm forgetting anything is with... Oh here she is. Hi Fergie. This is Fergie, our dog. Is to take corrugated boxes from your garage or if you don't have any, ask your neighbors if they have them and allow the kids to tape them together and color on them. Make them into houses. She said they do castles and different setups for them and then they can move them around. They can have multiple of those and that will keep him occupied for hours. They can also take them outside on days when it's nice.

The other thing that she... and she said she can't say enough about that. So it gives them a little for, it can be all day long, anytime of day, indoor, outdoor, movable and multiple of them. And then the second thing she said was they do chalk outside and they make little cities outside. So they do like a gas station. A little, what else did she say? Like a school, park.

Sidewalk chalk. They use sidewalk chalk to do that.

Yeah. And she said that she tells the kids our batteries are our vitamin D and when we get outside that's when the sun can recharge our batteries with the vitamin D and it kind of makes them think, okay. And then another great thing that her community has done, they live in San Diego, so they're blessed with the almost beautiful weather every single day. But popsicles frozen, those frozen stick dollar popsicles that you can buy and they're are even less than that when you buy them in the big packet, Walmart or Target or wherever is, they freeze those and they take them outside and it kind of breaks up. I know there's sugar but it kind of breaks up their afternoon or their early evening when you're trying to wrap up your day and it kind of keeps them occupied and something that look forward to. It makes really cute pictures too.

So that's a wrap. Thank you Stephen so much for doing this. And we wanted to not get too into like meetings and how you have productive meetings because Stephen and I both come from that collaboration remote worker environment, he from Mitel and me from PGI. And what's that?

Oh, I did want to talk a little bit about network and technology a little bit just because you hear a lot about security and it is paramount for businesses.

Oh, good point.

Yeah, I and so today most Wi-Fi networks are probably the most unsecure thing that are out there. Particularly your hotspots, like your Starbucks or even most home Wi-Fi networks, they don't have the robust enterprise security that's out there. So there's VPNs that are on your laptops and all that, that's good. But one of the things that make Inseego different is we're delivering connectivity into the home over a separate connection, over a cellular connection, be it a hotspot or some other device that's 4 or 5G connected. So it's a separate secure network with triple layers of encryption that does two things for you. Inherently makes you a little bit more secure. But the other thing is we're not competing with Whitman's PlayStation down there or somebody streaming video over your home network. I read the other day, I think the average number of devices connected on a home network are like 12. So if you start thinking about all these smart devices like thermometers, TVs, light switches, all of that stuff just makes for a crowded network. So providing a separate connection dedicated to your work environment is something that'll make you more secure and way more productive.

Great point. I'm so glad that you brought that up and like you said, or like I said and we said before we started the recording is that we didn't want to get into the nitty gritty of off technical and how to hold good meetings because that's related to that, but it's also related to you just having less stress during the day, being more productive because the kids and the other things that are going on in your home technically are slowing you down and cutting you off and people can't hear you, whatnot. So I'm so glad you brought that up. Stephen, thank you. I really enjoyed doing our first episode together and I hope you all got a lot out of it. Please follow us at All Social Y'all. Our website, you can drop a question on Instagram. Stephen can be found on LinkedIn at Stephen Brown on LinkedIn. He's with Inseego, the IoT company. And we hope that this gave you guys a few nuggets and we do wish you well. We wish you and all of your family to be well, to be as free of anxiety as possible, hopeful for our future, and we want to support you. If there's anything else you'd like us to about or answer, we're here and thank you so much for joining us. We will talk with you next week.

Thanks for listening to the All Social Y'all Podcast. For free resources and materials, head over to allsocialyall.com. That's allsocialyall.com. Also, we'd love to hear from you. What subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram at All Social Y'all.