Five tips for legal sector in remote work

As Forbes points out, somebody has predicted 2020 to be the “year of remote work”. Nobody would probably expect that coming so fast and under these circumstances. As the coronavirus crisis speeds up globally, the number of employees working from home has hugely increased. Law firms and in-house teams are included, in Switzerland as well. Changing the daily habits it’s not easy as well as dealing with new technology tools for our daily job. Here we put together some tips for legal sector to work remotely in an efficient and happy way.

Create your own workplace

If you don’t have one, it’s up to you to create your home office. Actually, a key benefit of working remotely is the ability to control your own workspace. Creating the environment you prefer – and which allow you the best performance – helps in removing distractors and optimizing your confort. You can decide where to work, if moving from time to time, if listening to music in background. The rule is one: change your habits accordingly to your new home office. 

Set and review your goals

Giving yourself feedbacks will help in maintaining the office routine full of targets and deadlines. For remote workers, a regular check-in and analysis of current objectives is crucial as it allows both high-levels and employees to ensure working time is being spent efficiently and energies are being focussed in the right direction. Video-call and chat tools can give you the feeling of having your colleague next to you to review together outcomes and results.

Humanize communication

Schedule meeting, trying to see your colleagues and keep frequent contacts with your team. In other words, even if at home, try to humanize emails and chats. Fixing short daily meetings to recreate the office atmosphere could be an example. In order to fill the gap of a sudden decrease of direct contacts, regular communication becomes the lifeblood of an engaged team. It is therefore vitally important that you communicate often both with your manager and colleagues. Try to transfer physical and human activity in the digital space.

Schedule extra activities

The secret is compartmentalization: separating where you do your job from where you do your living is extremely important to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Not only space divisions is a key attitude, but a schedule of extra activities becomes complementary. Stay on a plan for eating, exercising and sleeping will help you to speed up your routine and differentiate your work from your private side. This has to be done throughout the day: alternate your desk activity with other actions. For example, change room for lunch break or take coffee in another place.

Write a policy to work remotely

Having rules is fundamental in order to be a cohesive team also outside the office. A written policy may seem superfluous but it’s actually a fundamental component to ensure all members a good communication. To safely manage the change, especially in this critical situation, nobody should be left behind and everybody should know what to do. Policy can include official statements on which tool to use to communicate, and how office routine will be adapted to remote workplaces.