10 soft skills for remote work

Many people associate remote work with flexible schedules and freedom. Many people are eager to learn a profession that allows them to work without being tied to a workplace. Let’s look at the skills that will help you make the transition to remote work without compromising your personal effectiveness or disrupting your inner harmony.

1. Self-organization. This quality means being highly disciplined, being able to manage your time, not giving in to emotions, and dealing effectively with procrastination. A self-organized person is not someone who has time for everything. It is someone who knows how to plan and prioritize.
2. Communication skills. Communicating offline is different from communicating online (via audio or video calls, voice messages, or text messages). Learn the rules of digital etiquette if you’re not used to communicating on messengers and chat rooms and don’t know how to do it properly.
3. Flexibility. A remote worker should be flexible and able to adapt quickly to external and internal situations. Remote workers may unexpectedly change the priority of tasks or postpone deadlines, and you need to be prepared for technical problems. All of this is relevant for offline employees, but it is a little more difficult to adapt in a remote format.
4. Self-learning. Employers value employees who can learn a new task on their own, quickly grasp new information, learn and grow on their own, and apply acquired skills.
5. Ability to work in a team environment. Working remotely makes it difficult to remain a team player-working together to solve problems, coordinate tasks, and work toward goals. To stay on a team while working remotely, it’s important to maintain regular contact and communication with coworkers on a variety of issues, even down to an online coffee break.
6. Attentiveness. In a remote location, the employee must spend most of his or her time independently checking for errors and verifying the accuracy of tasks.
7. Ability to focus. There are many time traps and distractions at home.
8. Ability to use digital tools. It is impossible to work remotely without mastering digital tools. A remote worker should be familiar with all the major programs and services that allow employees to communicate, distribute tasks, and monitor performance. From conferencing programs (Zoom or Skype) and cloud-based collaboration services (Google Sheet, Google Docs) to popular CRMs like Trello, Asana, Notion, and so on.
9. Stress tolerance. Now we need to dispel the illusions that many offline workers have about the freedom of working remotely. In reality, working remotely takes longer and is often more stressful. Technical problems, isolation, urgent tasks and phone calls, management scrutiny – all add to the stress of working from home. Not everyone can handle stress, but if you want to escape the stuffy office, you need to learn how to bounce back in any situation.
10. The ability to maintain order. This refers to order in everything-in business, in the workplace, and in life. If you cannot arrange your workspace ergonomically and comfortably, you will find it difficult to get into the swing of things day after day. And if you don’t know how to separate work from play, you won’t be able to balance your personal and professional lives.

We have shown you what skills and personal qualities a remote worker needs to meet the employer’s expectations and your own expectations of the new conditions. Please note that all of the above qualities can and should be developed – not everyone is born with them 🙂