Certainly a great many who work in the automotive aftermarket have been working from home offices for some time, as a matter of course. But the current imperatives to minimize physical contact with others and to set up operations in our dens, basements and spare bedrooms, rather than the offices we have been used to, have really brought this practice to a new level.

For outside salespeople who are used to having an office base, this creates some new challenges. Add to this the new imperatives wrought by restrictions on travel and heightened awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak, and personal face-to-face meetings have become rarer then ever.

Anybody who spends even a little time searching around the Internet will find a plethora of advice on how to make a remote working/home-office setup work for you. Much of this information makes a great starting point. But if you really get to the heart of the matter of what it means to be working in isolation, you need to find ways to make your new arrangements work as well as what you’ve probably been used to. Here are some key points that will help make your home office work for you – professionally and personally.

• If possible, set up a dedicated workspace. This helps you psychologically to focus on work, particularly if there are other people, such as your spouse, working from your home as well.
• It may sound contradictory, but allow yourself to move around and work from other locations occasionally, to help alleviate stress. For example, if you are on a call and it’s a beautiful day, you could take the call while sitting outside. Heck, given the realities of the current working environment, you might not even feel you have to hide that fact from the other person on the call. (They’re likely working from home too.)
• Consider a work station that allows you to stand rather than sit. The health and psychological benefits of standing desks is conclusive, and some businesses have paid thousands of dollars to install them in offices. But you can get the same benefits from setting up at a kitchen counter, for example. Another option is to choose a location that allows you to look out the window. It may sound crazy, but this can actually help your state of mind.
• Try to maintain your normal routine. That means getting up, showered and dressed and sitting down to work at the usual time. (For one thing, it’s difficult to focus your attention on important client proposals and services when you’re still in your pajamas. It’s fine to dress casually once in a while, but do not let your casual get too casual – especially if you have a video conference planned.)
• Maintain a more or less disciplined workday schedule. Without the normal physical separation of office and family life, it’s easy to let your work day bleed into your personal day, and vice versa. Early and late calls are normal in sales, but try and make these the exception rather than the rule, especially these days. Family and personal time are important right now too.
• It’s also very important to get regular physical activity. If you are working remotely for the first time, you may not realize how much activity is involved over the course of a typical office day – walking up stairs, walking to other desks, even walking out to get lunch – which is not necessarily the case during a remote working day. So you might have to carve out some dedicated time for this.
• For many organizations, remote working is a new experience, certainly to the extent that many find themselves in now. With this in mind, it is important that patience and understanding rule the day. Conference calls will occasionally fail due to technical issues, emails will get missed, and sometimes client calls will be interrupted by family life. Everyone should do what they can to be patient, and even meet impatience with understanding in these unprecedented times.

Five Handy Remote Working Tools

Even as the automotive aftermarket has transitioned over time to transactional emails and fewer and fewer phone calls, face-to-face meetings and other norms of office life are more challenging in remote settings. But a number of tools are available that are easy to set up and use, and help make working from home as productive as any traditional office setting.

MS Teams

This easy-to-use tool allows company teams to communicate. You can create a group – sales, management, human resources, human resources team – and set up channels for specific topics of information, such as COVID-19 response, delivery issues, or IT. The tool is great for helping to keep information sharing and meetings focused.

Zoom

This app is great for both local team meetings and larger groups. When you can’t actually get together in person, Zoom allows for live conferencing and webinars, plus instant messaging, file sharing, etc. There’s a free version that allows for up to 100 participants for up to a 40-minute meeting. It’s also compatible with both desktop computers and smart phones.

Webex

Generally considered as an enterprise solution, Webex provides for conferencing, webinars, etc. Definitely an option worth considering for meetings and conferences where screen sharing is important. Compatible with multiple platforms.

Slack

Slack is a remote messaging work tool. Basically a digital space that facilitates communication among teammates, it allows teams to share ideas and to comment in a meeting-like format. It also enables you to maintain all your team communications in one place. 

Video calling (FaceTime/Google Hangouts)

While these are not, strictly speaking, business tools, for simple one-to-one (or small group), non-critical communication, FaceTime and Google Hangouts are a real-time, easy means of face-to-face interaction outside of formal meetings, right from your phone or desktop.