How to work from home

I keep seeing articles that claim work-from-home is here to stay. But if that's true, we should figure out how to institutionalize it. We should figure out how to build it into our management systems.

When I google "work from home checklists," I see lots of them out there. So far the ones I've looked at seem to be about how to set up your space at home, how to keep your kids and your dog from interrupting you, how to keep yourself on-task instead of on YouTube, how not to spend all your time eating snack food ... things like that. And of course those are all important topics.

But so far I haven't seen any checklists that ask if you have actually coordinated your work-from-home with your business's systems and processes, or whether those systems and processes can continue to support you. I haven't seen any that ask you to think about the risks of working from home, even though I assume that both employees and supervisors have their heads full of risks that they worry about every day.

So I decided to give it a try.

On my Downloads page, you can find two checklists: 

• WFH_organizational-planning
• WFH_employee-readiness

The first checklist, as you might guess, is for an organization planning a work-from-home program. The intent is to cover all ways that such a program might affect a company's Quality Management System, so there are no unpleasant surprises where your external auditor thinks you sent everyone home without checking for risks, or for an impact on stakeholders.

The second checklist is for the individual employee. It's all very well for your company to be prepared to send you home to work, but are you prepared? Do you have a desk you can use? Do you have the equipment you need? Are you going to have to do something new for time-tracking? And so on.

Both these checklists sit at a very high level: you may need to attach other documents to spell out the details. But the details will differ for every organization. My goal is to cover all topics in breadth, but to leave the depth to you.

Also, both checklists are built around the ISO 9001 standard. That's not just a failure of imagination on my part, but a test. ISO 9001, after all, claims to model how any organization's management system ought to run. But that should mean that any model built on it is complete. In particular, if I write these work-from-home checklists based on the clauses of ISO 9001, I should have covered everything that has to be covered. If you find something important missing, then either I goofed or there is a hole in ISO 9001.

So download these checklists. Please. Look them over and try them out. 

And then send me your feedback. Tell me what's missing, or what's wrong, or what's awkward.

And if you find them useful, please tell me that too. Thanks!