Remote yet Connected: Promoting Healthy Work Practices

One of the biggest challenges we’ve heard from clients and other companies is how to shift the patterns of office work to a home environment. Healthy work habits at a distributed company can seem anxiety-inducing at first. What is work? How many breaks are reasonable? How can I sustain a good pace without burning out? ARGH! When the work habits of others aren’t visible because you’re not in the same physical space, it can be hard to calibrate a pace that works for your organization. Here’s a few principles to start: 

Sick Leave

COVID-19, as of today, is expected to get worse before it gets better. If it affects a member of your team, it appears that 2-4 weeks is a reasonable assumption for recovery. For this reason, your sick leave policy may be one of the first things your leadership team should check and evaluate.

Our philosophy is simple. We want you to be healthy, stay healthy and keep your family and colleagues healthy. Let your team know, stay home, rest, see your doctors when it’s needed. We have your back.

That said, we’ve been surprised that the default of “working through sickness” is strong and persistent. We’ve often had to encourage people who are clearly unwell to take the day off, until they realize that we value their health, and won’t punish them for taking care of themselves.

Our advice to leaders: do what you need to make it easy for your people to take care of themselves. You’re building a resilient organization, expect to repeat the message, and model the behavior you want.

Taking Breaks

As a distributed-first company, it can be difficult to block off time to eat, take breaks, recharge or even identify these breaks as part of a healthy work habit. However, taking breaks is an important part of sustaining a daily pace of production, and we encourage people to experiment with habits and share with the rest of your company. Two examples:

I now try to take a 5-10 minute break every two hours. My version of a break is to physically move to another spot and engage my brain in something else: reading a book, making tea, doing some stretches, etc. I’ve found it really does help me re-center and it’s way easier to do things in two hour blocks than six hour blocks

I use the Time Out app to remind me to take breaks (although I don’t always listen…). I also put musical instruments near my desk and when I see them it reminds me to play a song and stop working for a bit. I also avoid taking breaks that are staring into the catacombs of social media. I also used to break up my day by going for a run or doing some other exercise for 30 minutes.

Boundaries between Work and Not Work

When working from home, it’s easy to “do just one more thing” and wind up grinding away for longer than you intend. When there isn’t the fast train to catch home or a deadline to beat the traffic, the boundary of work can be fluid. This is an opportunity to set or reset the expectation for work so that you and your company can be effective and resilient. We, along with the findings of researchers, know that work quality degrades above 40-50 hours per week. For Truss, we set a standard of averaging around 40 hours per work week.

I will purposefully schedule a workout class right at 5:30 so that I have a hard stop at the end of my day. It costs me $25 if I book and don’t show up, so I almost always go. Sometimes (especially if I’m home) I let work bleed into dinner or evening relax time, so this helps me put a cap on things and go focus on something else for an hour.

Surge Protection Time

Whatever your company’s average work week, there will certainly be times when deadlines, unexpected incidents, customer demands or other issues require working long hours. At Truss, we call these circumstances a “surge”. As a policy, Truss intends to keep work pace sustainable. To maintain health and sanity after a surge, we ask employees take some time off to recover. If they work more than 40 hours in a week — be it travel, long days, or tight deadlines — we ask employees to let managers know and ask for surge time. However, it is on each employee to determine what they need. The primary intent is to help maintain a healthy attitude and balance. These days are not intended to be extra floating holidays.

Check out the rest of our “Remote yet Connected” series on distributed work