 Hello, everybody. This is Sartre or Brian Rowe from LS NTAP. We've got a great presentation going on here. This is Can I Work Remotely? We're going to get started here at about two minutes after. We've got about a third of the people who are registered who are here and they're slowly trickling in. I just want to remind people that all of the LS NTAP trainings are recorded. There is a link to our YouTube channel at the top of lsntap.org. Our YouTube channel actually just got over 200 training videos up and we're just over 140,000 hits so far. We even have people who are starting to make comments over there and ask questions, that type of stuff. That is a way that you can definitely interact with us. There's a direct link in the chat to all of our archive trainings for the last three years. We've got a full schedule of trainings this year and I'm dropping a link to all of the webinars for 2017. We've got, I believe, 33 scheduled at this point. The link that I just sent out has links to the four so far that have been archived and then it has registration links and dates for every training that we've got coming up for the rest of the year. Definitely recommend checking that out. Register now for some of those and save the spot for them. If you've got any technical issues, please feel free to use the questions box that's there. There's also a function to raise your hand in GoToWebinar. If you do that, we will unmute you and you can ask questions of the presenters. Anything that is sent through the question box, myself and Ket will be monitoring. We will read those out to the presenters as they go along. If you've got a question, there's probably another third of the audience that has the same question. Please feel free to ask. In Tekken Law, we have terrible acronyms. We often assume that people are more aware of things than they maybe please ask. We want to get that information out to people, correct anything or help people get the most out of these webinars that they can. For about two minutes after, one last reminder, we are recording this and it will be posted to our YouTube channel. I would like to turn it over to Anna Steele at this point. Thank you so much for organizing this webinar. I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks, Brian. Hi, everybody. I'm Anna Steele. I'm a member of the consulting team at Just Tech, and prior to that was working as a technologist in legal services. So today, I am joined by Kathleen Dwyer, one of my colleagues at Just Tech. Xander Karsten, who is a project manager over at Legal Server. And Allison Paul, who is the executive director at Montana Legal Services Association. And so many of us have extensive experience either working remotely or overseeing remote projects and remote staff. Kat, Xander, and I are all currently working remotely. So we have a lot of experience in this area and hope to kind of guide everybody in how they're going to work on making these decisions going forward. If it's something that you're considering doing or your supervisees have been asking you about it, that's what we want to go through today. So we'll be addressing working remotely from multiple perspectives this afternoon. First, we'll be looking at some of the technology decisions that need to be made while preparing to support remote workers. A key component of effective and efficient remote workforce is obviously support from your executive director and management team. And of course, for those of us who work remotely or are considering doing so, there are a number of considerations to take into account when working remotely. It's more than fuzzy pink slippers and being allowed to have bad hair days. So we really want to kind of put all of that in perspective. So those of you who are supervisors or managers on this webinar today have most likely been asked by a staff member if they can work remotely. So while the two easiest answers to this question are sure go ahead or nope, never. It's important that your organization is prepared to support remote workers from a technological supervision and staffing perspective. That being said, it's important to work through these decisions now, even if you are not considering working remotely so that you can be well prepared. You don't want to necessarily have to drag it out and be making policy decisions and feeling rushed doing so when folks are starting to ask or there is a definite need for them to do so. Saying yes without thinking through some of these technology and policy implementations can put client data at risk. But saying no as a matter of policy can potentially hinder your effectiveness and efficiency of your staff. So one thing to keep in mind as we go through this today is that there are a couple of different approaches to working remotely. You can have a completely remote staff member who works from home or another location. You can have access to an office space in another location such as a hospital or a community partner. You can have attorneys who want to be able to work remotely between court appearances or hearings. Or a staff member who just wants to work from home if the weather is bad and you don't want to be able to work from home. You can have an office space or a community partner who works from home or a community partner who works from home or on vacation. So kind of keep all of those different scenarios in mind as we go through things today. And I will hand it over to my colleague Kat to start looking at some technology considerations. Hey, thanks, Anna. This webinar as we said is an overview. But when you are thinking about working remotely, obviously it is the word remote offsite location. Meaning typically that you are not going to be in a full office setting. So one thing that may seem obvious but sometimes is not is that your staff member or you should have an option to connect to high speed internet. This is often more of a consideration than you would think especially if you are living in a not so urban or suburban area. In addition, there are some internet providers that will go through, for example, a dish. And while they call that high speed, it is not always the most dependable in terms of weather, snow, rain. Very often the dish internet can get interrupted. Thinking about how to work from a hot spot. Is your hot spot always connected? Is it giving you actual high speed internet? And obviously high speed internet is not all it's not always the exact same. For example, if you are doing a webinar like this, your needs for high speed internet is completely different from if all that you are doing is accessing email, etc. So your hot spot may be very different from your cable connection. Communications also we are talking usually about going through internet. Very few people have a landline anymore if people say that they have a quote-unquote home phone, it is very often through their cable modem or through their internet provider. You may be able to use a soft phone which goes through VoIP as well. So if you are on your soft phone through your internet and you have a child in the other room that is streaming a movie or playing a video game that may impact your internet speed. So something to consider. Same thing as soft phone. I live in New York City and when I am out on the street I get great soft phone reception generally. Many office buildings, especially older office buildings built before the war with a lot of iron and metal in them, very often I do not get great soft phone reception. So you need to consider that. Privacy. How are you going to be able to talk to clients? How are you going to be able to talk to other staff members without compromising privacy? Also with having the ability to place to yourself so that you are not being interrupted all the time. One thing I neglected to mention with hotspots is also how are you securing those hotspots so that other people are not getting onto your hotspot or if you are working on Wi-Fi are you sure that it is secure and of course you need to have access to the proper hardware. If you are using legal server in your office you are going to need to have access to legal server on your laptop or whatever your remote hardware is. And speaking of hardware we hope that most remote staff would have access to the same hardware or comparable hardware. So if within your office folks are using the best most up to date laptops we would like you to have the best most up to date laptop. If everyone in the office is using a particular version of Word we would like you to have the same version. It makes life a lot easier without having to worry about versioning and it also affects your ability to work remotely. If you have an old beat up laptop that somebody says here this is the loner but it is impeding your progress of work that is really obviously not optimal. We are not going to speak much about the organization owns versus BYOD which stands for bring your own device but it is definitely consideration is the organization going to own the laptop or are you going to use your own laptop or tablet or smart phone etc etc. There can be some very big differences in policies obviously if it is a company owned device versus a personally owned device but regardless of who owns what we are using to work we need to make sure that we maintain all the hardware keep it up to date keep it again to the latest versions or at least the same versions that other staff members are using. Already briefly mentioned the occasional remote worker making sure that there are some devices that can be shared especially in the event of a disaster or bad weather when someone is not planning to work off site or if there is some other reason compelling reason for someone to work off site occasionally and again just making sure that anything that remote workers are doing is supported and that everything we keep a list so that we make sure that everything is getting updated as part of those organizational updates that we don't get forgotten about. So extending a little bit more on the bring your own device piece if you are going to allow your staff to use their own devices while working remotely you should really work on develop a policy that is outlining matters such as what type of device can be used for client related worker communications the security of that device so password policies should be encrypted antivirus software is your IT department responsible for supporting and servicing these personal devices if my laptop stops my 10 year old laptop stops working can I call the IT department for the organization that I work for and say hey help me out I want to kind of outline those expectations and you want an employee exit strategy when an employee leaves how can you ensure that the device is clear of any data that they should no longer have access to now this is something that you may want to even start thinking about even if you do not have remote staff or not supporting remote staff because I mean the reality is people are using their personal devices for work they're answering emails on the couch after dinner right or hooking up their email to their smartphones so it's definitely something that you want to be thinking of so in that respect with mobile device management so there's a lot of those policies that I just talked about can be built into software when it comes to smartphones and tablets you know ultimately giving you the ability to wipe the device as a whole or just the organization related data whether the device is lost or stolen or if the employee leaves I know that Google Apps has it built in 365 does to a degree but not as extensive as Google Apps so you just want to be aware again of that and again like I said managing expectations right so if folks are going to be using their own devices outside of the office does that mean that they can count that as work time right when they are answering emails during their time for the past day or week is that something that they can be formally counting that as time worked so these are things that you want to discuss and make sure that are very clear if you are going to be working on a bring your own device policy and definitely don't reinvent the wheel on this one this is something that's getting talked about on LSNTAP fairly frequently and people out there definitely do have these bring your own device policies so definitely see what's out there and have the conversation because you're not alone on this one so you really want to see what other people are doing and obviously the big one when it comes to working remotely as far as technology considerations go is security network access is the big one staff should have some way to securely access the information that they need in order to do their work efficiently and effectively if you use Office 365 SharePoint, Google Apps make sure that you have password policies to keep that information secure if you do not have a cloud-based solution set up Windows or no desktop services or VPN talk to your tech folks about that or software application like LogMeIn we really want to prevent people from emailing excessive amounts of client data to themselves over and over and over again both for security reasons and for just versioning keeping track of the proper documents and also we really want to prevent people from carrying flash drives with confidential client information both of those can result in the information getting downloaded onto the computer and even if it is a company-owned computer having that laptop out and about it gets accidentally left on the train things like that the fewer files that are actually being stored on the device itself the better so if you do use just pro-tip and those of you who have worked with me before know that I love living in the Google Cloud so if you do use Google Apps they are now called G Suite Chromebooks are a great remote device as there's little to no data that's actually stored on the device again it's only as secure as user passwords so if you're going to utilize Chromebooks or similar devices ensure that you have strong password policies so just really when it comes down to security use common sense really think about it and this is one of the big reasons that you don't want to just say yes when somebody asks to work remotely because you want to make sure that you really kind of take the security surrounding your client data and the data and the personal data about your staff into account Hi everyone so my name is Andrew Karsten I think most of you probably know me I am a project manager at Google Server and prior to that did direct services for about four years and then worked at ProbonoNet on the Law Help platform for about almost three years before coming here so then this at Google Server is my first experience working completely remotely I had had experience working here and there remote doing some remote work while I traveled or just sort of generally but this is my first experience not only being completely remote as a staff member but also being but also working on a completely remote team so most of our team works from home works from some other space and calls in or uses other tools to stay connected the first sort of thing that we wanted to cover under the staff perspective because I think it really is the most important part of working remotely as a staff member for me is that effective communication before we jump into that there's the section of the slide deck there's cute little dudes and these are all available to anybody for any reason no attribution needed and the link is there so if you ever want to check out the images that are used in the section feel free they're really pretty great and I use them a lot your communication and communication with your supervisors is really that primary form of transparency that you have some of the most some of the hardest things to really overcome and one of the biggest barriers that I think a lot of people have to working remotely is that fear from a supervisor's position that they won't know what their staff is doing and from a staff position I know for me it was a really big anxiety how do I prove to my supervisor that I'm actually working that they know what I'm doing and that they don't think that they know that I'm hard at work and that I'm not sleeping in just playing solitaire on my computer all day and the real way that we do that and that I do that is through the communication that I provide to them and doing that reliably and often I had this whole thought in my head when I first started working remotely that it was going to be great because I would have all this time nobody would come into my office, nobody would interrupt me and I'd have big blocks of time just to get work done in fact for me at least it's been kind of the opposite I definitely feel more calls and there are more kind of demands on my time our organization uses Slack as one of our primary communication methods and the number of sort of Slack things I get the number of things that I need to pay attention to in a channel is a lot and it's one of the main ways that people know who's there, what's going on and are able to kind of talk and keep tabs on each other throughout so making sure that I have that kind of communication with my supervisor and just other members of my team I also supervise a couple of folks just doing on some individual projects and knowing that they have that access to me as well is really important we also not being afraid of meetings, we talk a lot and have really divergent thoughts on how impactful or effective meetings are and in some ways I do think that we need to kind of separate that out between what is the actual work that is getting done, meeting to meeting what are the decisions that are being made, how effective are those meetings and when we do that analysis we really also need to think about what the sort of intangible and the person costs are you know meetings even if it is just a quick 15 minute check-in and there's nothing really to talk about can for remote staff and I know for me when I was first starting are a really good way of just sort of setting expectations and setting that that idea that we are going to work not only as a team but that we're going to interact with each other on a fairly regular basis video conferencing especially when we're talking about those those meetings can be really important one of the things that I one of the things that I've really learned through working remotely is that when we're when we don't see each other face to face so much of the real communication gets lost and I know for me because I'm you know I'm here and on my computer all the time written communication tends to start taking on a voice that may not be the one that's intended and so it can lead to little more frustration sometimes a little bit more anger sometimes it's never really been a huge issue but just having that video conference that face to face being able to see somebody's expression as you're checking in as you're talking to them can be really helpful and can really avoid some of those you know kind of pitfalls of I read an email and that email is in all caps and it feels like somebody is yelling so you know when you're thinking about meetings and you're thinking about scheduling meetings especially with staff having the option to video conference I think can be really helpful and can be really important status messages Slack just put in a status message option I had used Google Hangouts before and that had for or in Google chat before then and for a long time that had status messages those are really great it allows me to just sort of put something up say hey you know I went out for a cup of coffee I'll be right back it gives me a chance to say I'll be back by a specific time so you know as a so as that way of kind of being transparent letting people know when I'm going to be where for how long I think that that's really that's really helpful and can you know just cut down on some of that just confusion and then kind of going along with what we were talking about a little earlier with the video conferencing you know sort of assuming the best in all of your communication again because we are working remotely it is I don't always know when you know someone on my team is has come in and is tired from you know whatever happened the day before or you know is just generally in a bad mood those kinds of things that we would know if we worked in an office together you know are a little harder sometimes to suss out and that is one of the barriers you know I think sort of when we talk about working remotely it isn't for everyone it's definitely something that's been really great for me but if you're the kind of person who really thrives off of you know kind of knowing everything that's going on in an office being able to do that sort of interplay in that interrelationship with people there are ways to get that but it's a little harder with remote work and so when at least for me I sit down and really kind of look at my emails from the day my flak messages from the day the various voice mail that I have really you know assuming that everybody is you know kind of speaking the best just assuming the best out of people and bringing that kind of kindness to interrelationships especially online I think can be really really important and then just being clear you know I have a time I compose an email or I'm writing up a document for me it's the passive voice that always sort of gets me and so I have to be very careful about editing that out and just being kind of very clear about you know what's going to happen when it's going to happen how it's going to happen because there's not always the chance to just pop in again flak allows a lot of that but it is a little different and it does take a little bit of a shift in thought process and as part of that sort of thinking about who does what and when and how and just having those clear and concise roles you know again it's really helpful to just know that you know what role you have in a project what role you have in sort of an infrastructure and for folks who are working remotely kind of knowing that at the outset of the beginning of either your time as a remote employee or as projects come up just knowing exactly what your role in that hierarchy can be can be really really helpful and getting to know the team that you're on and not just you know knowing them in the way that I recognize their email but really getting taking the chance and getting to know them especially when we're talking about people who are internal to your organization one of the things that for me personally I just have to take a little bit more time to do is when I have a new member on our team or when I'm working with somebody who I haven't worked with before is just to you know take that extra time take that extra beat and really ask a follow up question ask some more probing questions about my team members just to really kind of get to know them a little bit better there's no way you know again there's not really a way to sit and have lunch sort of unstructured and just spontaneously with co-workers it tends to be a little bit more structured and takes a little bit more of a conscious effort well worth it and makes a lot of those processes much easier and as a you know and one of the things that was really helpful for me when I started working remotely was to have a supervisor who was aware of that and checked in and just sort of checked in about how those relationships were evolving and then just you know again kind of in that world of expectation setting discuss when and how work will be completed discuss that early discuss that often we all have those projects that don't really have a timeline don't really have a deadline are kind of those as we get to them sort of projects for remote workers and for me it was really important for me to kind of label that and to say this is one of my rainy day projects one of the projects that I don't have a deadline for and when I do when I review my projects when I review all the various pieces that I have being clear with others on my team about you know this is a project I don't have a deadline for it I'm just doing it as I'm able to do it is that still okay is that still the expectation can be a really helpful way to think through sort of those projects and those deadlines just because we work remotely doesn't mean that we don't have that need for community and work community we'll talk about this in a little bit but one of the things that really you know really happened for me and that I noticed a lot was that my actual time doing work expanded when I started working remotely and so I'm spending actually more time doing work than I was before I started working remotely and that need for a work community in a space that I spend most of my time that many of us spend most of our waking hours remains the same whether it's within an office or whether it's remote so a couple of the things meeting in person when it's possible you know having those dedicated times and knowing those times early that you know somebody may be asked hey can you just come into the office for an afternoon we have an all staff in service we have an all staff training and we'd like you to come and just making sure that remote workers have as much of a opportunity to meet people in person as you know the in-person staff would have hanging out when you can the Slack is again a really great space but other sort of chat features have similar opportunities opportunities we have a random channel where people just sort of post random things as they come up we have one that is called the other screen where we talk about movies or television shows that we've seen and that we like those kind of really specific abilities to get together over things that are not work related and to have those opportunities you know as staff we're not only that's not only available but that's also really encouraged the idea that you know going over to one of those other channels and spending five or ten minutes talking about you know an episode of insert your favorite television show here mine right now is Grace and Frankie just being able to just being able to talk about that and to know that my supervisors not only sort of know that I'm doing this but really understand and feel like this is an important part of my day and that might be different if you know your staff is not working 100% remote that can definitely be changed and scaled to match those expectations but just taking that into account can be really really helpful that kind of covers that dedicated water cooler space and then the other piece and this goes back to that hardware that that Kat was talking about earlier sometimes both on our end on my end as a staff person but also on you know other folks ends when you're when I'm talking to people who are all in person there are some kind of additional hardware considerations that just need to be thought through the most annoying one and the one that we kind of get the most the most sort of play on this is when you have a group of people who are all meeting in the conference room around one poorly mic laptop giving a presentation which I as a remote staff have I'm going to listen to if I can't hear it, if I can't hear the various people if I'm not included in that it can be very very difficult to get everything that I would need or want so just thinking through what those needs are what changes needs to be made for me I thought that my original headset was going to be enough but I spent so much time on meetings and in calls that getting a really nice headset that had some additional bells and whistles has made my life 100% better that's not something that I necessarily would have seen going into it but definitely became really important and also just sort of allows me to communicate and to participate in various meetings where it's both remote and in person so supervision and Alson's going to get into this in much more depth than I will hear but just clear expectations and goals on both sides again we'll talk about sort of supervising remote workers but for me as somebody who's being supervised sort of coming in and really knowing and crystallizing what my expectations are out of supervision is really helpful and is really important and for supervisors if you're not asking your supervisees I think personally both remote and in person sort of what they want that role to look like it's an interesting question task for me you know that idea of when when should I expect my supervisor to jump in on an email or you know jump in on you know a thread that's happening in one of my other spaces can be really helpful just to know and to be very aware of regular check-ins however it works whether you know I have both sort of regular weekly check-ins as well as an email that I send about projects that I'm participating in and that I'm working on and what those statuses are and that for me works really well it helps me to kind of focus on both what I need to do in my own kind of world let my supervisor know what's happening gives us a record of that and then we can talk during our regular check-in session about what's actually going on and questions that I have without having to go over things that are just status checks but that may not work for you so whatever that kind of looks like just setting that up and knowing what that looks like and again meeting, video chat especially I am not a huge video chat person as you can tell because I'm not on video chat now but being able to especially when we're talking about supervision especially when there may be some hard conversations that may need to happen in supervision being able to see somebody being able to make eye contact is really really important and then my mantra just generally for both supervision but also for just remote work in general is be consistent but flexible I find that as long as for me I'm consistent about what I'm doing and I stay as flexible as I can because things happen you know my I'm on a call and the fire alarm goes off in my building you know that can happen to everybody but things happen and so having both my own expectations be fairly consistent but flexible based on what other people's needs are and having the same expected out of me has been really really helpful and then just project and case management generally you know consistency is really a key here just knowing what all of your pieces are where everything is and that you know both for me both my days as well as my work is you know kind of done with the same templates the same tools just ensuring that consistency across different projects when I did case management having you know a set of consistent sort of metrics for my cases forms for my cases that I used internally was really helpful and allows people to and allows other people who I'm working with some of the comfort of knowing where everything is what's going on and not feeling like they have to you know find all these various pieces and all these various spaces that everything's kind of in one place and pretty streamlined and it's consistent across the various projects that I'm working on ensuring and checking access to cloud based tools not just once but over and over again that that access sometimes changes you know various tools install two factor authentication when they didn't before stuff like that just making sure that those are all together and then balancing kind of shared management tools with personal ones I mean I have a notebook that I just keep all of my different notes to do doodle drawings but knowing and being clear and having those expectations set out about what is in a notebook versus what is in the cloud you know I am a firm believer that we're never going to get away from you know the scratch pad where I just write out what I need there's something very kind of human about that for me but making sure that at the end of the day if something were to happen to me that all that good information all that necessary information is somewhere that's easily accessible and identifying what that information is can be really really helpful and now we're getting into like more of a kind of self care piece so kind of identifying what works for you as a staff person when I started working remotely I had this whole thing I was going to wake up early I was going to have my coffee quietly have some then time and then I was going to pick up my email and start my day what that has turned into is I am in bed checking my email and sort of the tradeoff for that for me is and my day I'm on the west coast I work in east coast schedule so I end my day a little early you know I'm able to take some time I've talked this through again with my supervisor you know I'm able to take some time in the middle of the day and run a few errands straighten up the apartment and that you know self care is not just doing things like going fishing it's you know doing those things that are good and necessary for you to feel kind of sane and stable and so you know it wasn't what I thought it was going to be but having a more fluid intermix of work and sort of self care and a personal life has been really really good for me personally other people hate it and don't want to do kind of what I do which is fine and just communicating that with the team and just doing it and making sure that you have the time to do that isolation and this is real for everyone whether you work remotely or not there I'm sure we can all think of times when working on a case for an important meeting and we look up and you haven't seen anybody for three days that happens for everybody it is much easier for that to happen when you're in your apartment so you know just being aware realizing when that happens and better hardware like we were talking about before can make working in a coffee shop a library a public place a little easier to access and finding lunch buddies or other ways to connect can really help with that as you're thinking through it co-working spaces I live in San Francisco there's a lot of them but honestly I've found the best co-working spaces have just been when I've put it out there on social media and said hey I need a place that's not my apartment to work who wants to open up their home for a couple of hours and we can work together I just need a quiet place so don't think about co-working spaces necessarily as a structure but more as just a place to be that is not your apartment and has other people who are working as well and that can be somebody's living room and it's been actually a really great experience that's really helped me to refocus and be with others at the same time and then over work you know there's for I think for as much as people worry about folks on their team not working enough I think there also needs to be a recognition that many of us and many of your team are going to work too much and so for me sort of identifying setting and communicating my limits about how much work I can do it is much harder because I don't think that people necessarily see how stressed out remote workers are because again we're not in the office and you know making sure that you hold yourself accountable or asking somebody to hold you accountable can be really helpful I have a couple of friends who just every time you know I get to a certain point they're like okay Xander you need to stop and let's go play in the sun and that's been really really helpful and really great so just something to think about again you know it's not just that your staff who work remotely aren't going to work enough that oftentimes they may work too much and being aware and knowing those women and with that I'm going to hand it back to Allison great now hopefully my phone didn't flip out can everybody hear me yep I did wonderful thank you I'm Allison Paul I'm the Executive Director of Montana Legal Services Association and I was amused when I went to prepare for this to realize that I had done this almost this exact same talk ten years ago for LSN TAP and so I looked back at my notes from 2008 and they were as relevant today as they were then so I just thought that was kind of funny I always like to start when I talk about the subject to define what remote supervision is because I think what most legal aid programs don't realize is they are doing it they have people that work remotely in every program they might not be working from home but they're working from a different physical location than the supervisor and the next slide has a few examples so it could be you know supervision of a staff member who works from home which is a lot of what we've been talking about today it could also be just a senior attorney with expertise in a subject matter supervising staff in another office supervision of a circuit writing attorney here in Montana that's a term we use a lot because we have people that ride out meaning get in a car no we don't have horses they get in a car and drive out to rural locations to deliver services but I can't see them working just like I can't see somebody when they're at home and then the other one is you know most executive directors supervise managing attorneys in field offices that's all remote supervision and all of the stuff that Xander was talking about in terms of communication it's all equally applicable I think to all of these situations and so that's a setup for what is the program attitude about remote supervision and some programs are particularly excited but this picture is my daughter who her brother placed her on top of some logs on a sled and pushed her down a hill and as you can see by the look at her face she just kind of knew it was going to happen and that is kind of the way that I think some programs approach remote supervision and remote work thinking well I'm just going to have to let staff do it and I don't want to I don't think they're going to work but it's the way of the future but I don't think it has to be that way at our program we embrace it and embrace it within the idea that there has to be good communication and good expectations so some of the challenges that I think every program has and somebody alluded to this earlier how do you really know the employee is working you know by their work product that's how you know either clients are getting represented or they're not practically getting accomplished or they're not in the same way that somebody on the other side of my office I don't know if they're playing solitaire and I honestly don't want to know if they're getting their work done I don't really care you know how do you track productivity without micromanaging and I've got a few tools that are coming up in some slides but it's always a challenge you want to be able to set clear goals for people and have them meet them and a lot of times in the legal aid culture we aren't set up around work plans and goals and it's hard to come up with a to think about moving your program to that so that you can track productivity without having to know every single thing the person is doing you know another way we track productivity without micromanaging is through all our supervisors review time and you're looking at that you can tell what somebody's working on if you have a case handler who is supposed to be spending 60 or 70% of their time handling cases and you look at their time sheets repeatedly and they've only got 20% in handling cases that's the conversation about why that's happening we also use our calendars a lot to track and it's a huge tool we use Google Calendar it's required to put at the top as an all-day entry what your work hours are because everyone has different work hours so whether you're working on-site or off-site like minor 830 to 5 and that's just up there so people have a good expectation and then if I'm going to be gone that's clearly marked and everybody can see everybody else's calendar and it's a huge communication tool for setting expectations around you know remote work and productivity and then I think the other and Xander talked about this a lot challenges encouraging collaboration and communication between on-site and off-site employees and I think all programs have this if you have multiple offices how do you get those offices to work together and have you know assume the best about each other and I think there's a bunch of different tools that you can use to do that both in how you communicate what you use to communicate and what expectations you have next slide so we have a bunch of different policies and there are about seven tools that I sent to Brian I know he could only put four of them in the handout section but these are things that we use and that we found useful over time in helping promote the idea of remote work and remote supervision and the first one is our remote work policy and request form and we developed we have been allowing people to work from home for years but it became clear to me that we actually needed to write it down so people knew they could do it so some people wanted to do it and weren't asking and there were two different we wanted to force them to think through the things involved in remote work like what's your work environment like do you have a private place to work if you're doing client work do you have if you're going to do it on an occasional basis do you have the right equipment and what's your internet like we ask all those questions and then we ask them to think through what they want the policy contemplates that there could be two types there could be occasional work when I just need to work from home from time to time and we actually want to know that because of the computer security issues I want to know if one of my staff attorneys is working at home and I want to educate them on what that means and then we do have some people that work remotely and that's a different request it's funny I have not had an explosion since we actually adopted a policy but it has forced people to communicate around wanting to work from home and why which has been great and helped with our computer security stuff the other thing I'll say is I have had I did have somebody recently asked if they could work from home every day so they could be home after school with their kids and their kids were fairly young and it was a person who does client work and we said no occasionally if you want to be at home because your kids are off school in afternoon and you need to be there and you can structure your work but if your job is having to do confidential work and you have small children at home and you would be their primary caregiver that's not what this is for so you can put limits around it for programs that are worried about that as long as you're consistent the next thing I'll just for a clarification we will take all seven of those policies and we will make them available on the website and also along with the video we'll also try to email them out to participants we have four of them up currently downloadable the MLSA computer use policy the MLSA implementation guide for email computer use policy the progress report examples for remote supervision and the sample hire letter for remote employees are all in that handout section and the others will be available after the webinar thanks Brian so the computer use policy is our version of a bring your own device policy we just wrapped it all into one we don't have a separate one that talks about bring your own device and it talks about a lot of the things that Kat and Anna touched on earlier the next two policies listed here are actually from the old NTAP NTAP some of you may know used to be a standalone organization with a virtual staff before Northwest Justice Project and Brian these are still I think really valid they had developed electronic communication protocols for how they should communicate as a staff and what you should use and a protocol for getting started as a virtual employee that I thought was pretty great so I've included those in your materials they're a little bit dated so some of the technology it talks about might not be current but the principle and what you should cover is all still really valid next slide and then these are some other tools that I've provided to you guys and I do have it under the column of setting expectations because I think it's really important to set expectations for staff who are going to be working remotely or supervised remotely and in there is a sample hiring letter for an off-site worker and that's also from NTAP and what they would use to go through a whole bunch of different things that you would think about that maybe you wouldn't think about in a standard hiring letter there's a sample progress report for an off-site worker this was actually developed by Kate Bledo and maybe a couple people on this phone call know of Kate she worked for Pro BonoNet for a while but I supervised her and she worked out of her home in Maryland and she came up with a this was her own invention she's incredibly detailed so you'll see it's incredibly detailed but as a communication tool it was fantastic because I knew what she did that week I knew what she planned to do I knew kind of the status of her projects all on one quick sheet of paper that I could quickly look at it saved us both time I'm also a huge promoter of regular check-ins I think making sure with any staff you supervise but in particular remote staff having regular check-ins using video conferencing all of our staff that have almost all of our staff have video cameras and headsets and we have a go-to meeting account that everyone can use that works really well for just meeting with people about your work we encourage all our supervisors to use it I think it's been adopted in varying levels of success I use it with people so they get used to it with me so I think that's important for the management to set an example that this is once you get used to seeing yourself on camera it becomes less daunting and it's really important to be able to see people that you aren't physically in the same place as a tool that I think is really helpful for setting expectations but which is not included because I couldn't find one quickly was just a work plan and I think there's all kinds of work plan formats posted on the management information exchange library which lots of legal aid programs have membership to but just having a good clear work plan with your staff so you set expectations around what you expect them to accomplish so you know to judge that productivity by in a fair way I think that's important and then I think making sure that your staff has access to some sort of collaboration software there's a million different kinds from the Google suite we at Montana legal services use something called I mean central which used to be called central desktop or anything that allows you to communicate and collaborate in a web based environment so that it's more like you're sitting across the desk from somebody I think that's really important for managing remote workers and then I think when you're thinking about hiring remote workers it's important to look for particular qualities and these are some things and these all touch on Xander and I actually didn't coordinate completely around what we were going to talk about but this all echoes I think what he was talking about but you want to look for people who take initiative when something needs doing I mean these are things you probably want in staff too but different people work at different speeds and need more direction or less direction I think you want somebody who has work that is portable and most of our work these days is portable but we have like our intake workers we don't have them working remotely for a variety of reasons and we have a few the front desk receptionist probably doesn't have work that is portable to work from home people are highly organized and able to set own boundaries and priorities that's huge and as Xander talked about it's important to set boundaries with your personal life so you don't burn out people who don't mind working in isolation sometimes people who don't need much immediate supervision and feedback so thinking about does this somebody who constantly wants to touch base with you and needs to do that in person or even remotely or can they work independently for long stretches of time and then are effective communicators in writing and by phone and that is really huge because while it's really important to stick face to face meetings in it's not going to happen all the time just because of time and so you want people who can be an effective communicator in writing when you're doing things by email or by chat and I echo Xander's that it's really important to have some mechanism for chat we use Novel Messenger which allows us to have statuses as well in fact as Xander was talking I realized I hadn't put my status on webinar so nobody would interrupt me and it's a good way like I work from home you know at least one day every couple of weeks and you know I put on my status working from home so people know they can't walk down the hall and find me they have to call me and if I'm at lunch I put I'm at lunch so that they know I'm not just you know watching TV with my feet on the coffee table although I might be doing that while having lunch. Thanks Alison I think that actually is really interesting what you said about how you gave this almost 10 years ago I think that's something for the progress in the area I think it's funny that I'm still talking about it and I am happy to talk about it with anybody so if anybody wants to reach out directly although I have to say I am going on sabbatical for three months so you have to wait till August but that said I'm really happy to talk about this with any program so we're going to wrap up real quick with some lessons learned in each of these perspectives and if there's any questions we can address those so as far as technology goes I've only been working remotely since January and just really kind of I think this touches on almost all three pieces not just technology but making a good comfortable workspace that feels like you're in your office at work or feels like you are in a space where you can be productive is really important you know if you are somebody who wants from home really I know resources are often limited in legal aid programs but really kind of engaging your supervisor or your technology staff who are making the decisions on having quality hardware so you are able to have to do quality work and making sure that your hardware and software and access to them are not hindering your ability to do your work Kat any other technology lessons to add? Well in terms of certainly the computer hardware technology if you look at my beautifully clean office on the right you will see that it's also the technology of your workspace and some of us are this is not my actual desk some of us are messier than others but if I can live with my mess and find the things that I need to that's fine but if things are overflowing and I can't even reach my mouse that's an important consideration also one thing that we all of us who have worked from home and remotely as Zander touched on earlier plan B plan C plan Q plan Z always have if possible always have more than one laptop or device that can connect and you know be prepared to have to reschedule something on the fly because the fire alarm is going off or because you can't connect to go to a meeting or because the con Edison electric guy out front just caught the electricity to your building for a whole day which has happened to me all of them this is Allison again I'll talk really quickly about some lessons from a management perspective I think do not underplay the importance of paying attention to onsite versus offsite dynamics and avoid burnout and isolation of offsite workers we were doing a project group working together was doing a video conferencing meeting and I made everybody sit at their computer and connect by video for the reasons Zander mentioned which is when you have four or five people in the same office and two people connecting just by video or remotely it's the dynamics get all skewed because the people that are sitting in the room together obviously are going to have side conversations or all kinds of things when you force to participate either by phone or by video ideally you can still all see each other but even though somebody is down the hall from me they said oh well why am I this seems really silly and I said well it's because I want everybody to feel a part of this meeting we are all equally valuable not just the people who are physically together and I think paying attention to that in all of your interactions and how that works and how email trails work and how all that stuff is really important I think it's really important to set expectations of your supervisors that are supervising people that are working remotely we expect you to do regular check-ins we expect you to use video conferencing and pay attention to workload and productivity in the ways that aren't micromanaging and we have we're famous as a program for actually not writing things down but just doing them so we're working on writing down our supervision expectations and we definitely have them and communicate some on a regular basis so when I get those written down I'm happy to share those you know encourage use of video conferencing and face-to-face meetings and then I do think remote work is an inevitable shift for all of our programs I think if you want to attract the best talent in the new generation of workers they want to be able to work from a coffee shop as appropriate or work from home I think it helps you attract and retain the best staff with all kinds of opportunities for new partnerships we have some new remote workers that are placed at domestic violence shelters and tribal court offices around the state that work by themselves I mean they're really remote worker but they're within a social service agency atmosphere that's not a new concept in the legal aid world but I think people don't think about that as being a remote worker that all these same things apply to and you need to pay attention to and finishing us off Sandra? Yeah, so I mean a lot of this piggy backs off of what other folks have said being transparent, sort of knowing your strengths as a as a remote worker knowing what is going to take me a little bit more time maybe to communicate to my supervisor or to do and just take that into account setting my limits but being flexible around those limits not all of our limits are things that we can achieve every time adjusting your expectations I chuckled when I saw both the desks in the slide deck when I first started working remotely I had sort of this expectation that I was going to have a separate place to work and in reality I live in a 400 square foot studio apartment and so everything's all together but being able to kind of adjust that and still get my needs met and kind of be flexible around that is really important and then two that we don't talk about a lot getting healthy snacks I'm home all the time so being able to my current go to our roasted chickpeas and clementine oranges but having something there if you do work remotely you know this problem so having those some kind of echoing a couple of things earlier we don't always have the chance to interact with people on a regular basis we don't always have a chance to see what other people look like and are communicating to us nonverbally when we work remotely and often times we do it in a lot of isolation so just remembering to kind of be kind to cut other people that last the day where you just read it and you're like I can't, I just cannot you know shut it down, leave come back to it later and I think that that's really helpful on both sides so those are my that's mine and then these kind of life lessons just all wrapping it all up right Xander hit on a lot of these so again just important to and it's important to have these conversations with your staff who are going to be working remotely I wish I could take a little snippet of Xander's talk earlier and kind of package it to be given to anybody who ever asks to work remotely because I think it's really really useful so make sure you're having those conversations with your staff if you're moving to a more remote workforce so thanks everybody for joining us today Brian are there any questions in the question we've got one here so one thing is here that it's important for attorneys to look at their local ethical rules regarding internet use and email use technology use seems to be a frequent issue in CLEs I definitely agree with what Trent is saying here and actually look at not only what's being said in CLEs but whatever the actual ethics opinions are I have attended several CLEs that have been very well intended but did not reflect what local rules say here in Washington state there's a lot of fear in this area and it's important to try to get past that and look at what the best practices are for security for safety those type of things so unfortunately there is some misinformation out there also it can definitely be done safely in a way that protects clients interests and their private information yes excellent great point thank you Brian well thank you so much for putting this on we greatly appreciate it it's a very important topic Northwest Justice Project just implemented a remote work policy and has individuals that are navigating this right now this has been very very timely for us this has been the first webinar that we've done with just tech there will be a survey coming out afterwards we would appreciate any feedback as part of that also a reminder to download the handouts that are there and we'll make the other two handouts available both on the blog post and on the video through YouTube there is a link in the chat to our YouTube channel there and also to all of the other trainings for this year we have over 20 more free trainings coming up find the ones that are interesting to you and we hope to see you there if you've got future questions please feel free to email us at lsntap.org and we've got to help us function myself and Kat are happy to do research and help connect you with somebody in the community that can help you with any issues related to this thank you to all the presenters also I greatly appreciate it you brought in some wonderful experts today thanks so much Brian thanks everybody