Creating the right work environment is your key to success. Working on a sofa will sap your concentration. A comfortable chair, a clean table free of distracting items, and proper lighting is your minimum for a productive day. Use your home office to your advantage and create an ideal work environment around yourself.

Studies and personal experience of music professionals prove that music may contribute to work efficiency and save you from being bored. Find a list of good music resources below.

Good old YouTube You can chose your favorite music or specific playlists. E.g. Lofi hip hop mix. It is all very simple with YouTube: just type in "study music" or "music for concentration" in the search bar and chose to your taste.

Noisli A great resource for background noise. Web-version and Chrome extension are available. You can use the available background noise sets, or create your own combination and save it. There’s a wide range of tracks for you to choose from: sounds of nature, colored noises, train, café or electric fan sounds.

Brain.fm For iOS, AI-generated music that enhances concentration, helps you rest and sleep.

Ambient-mixer The service creates an atmospheric sound mix of any real or fictional place: you could visit Sherlock Holmes, the Death Star or Winterfell. Try preset mixes that could be customized and edited.
Listen To The Clouds This service overlays real air-traffic control conversations on ambient music. Sounds fascinating.

It’s not easy to stay focused when working remotely. There’s always some kind of distraction. We’ve made a list of tools that will help you stay focused.

TrackingTime (tracks your computer time)
This application doesn’t just look great, it tracks all your computer activity and generates an audit for you. How much time was spent using a browser. How many hours were spent emailing. What music you listen to. Working in the background, TrackTime presents you with a diagram of your entire online life. It’s a useful tool to remind you of what’s important: if you keep switching among programs and apps with an interval of less than two minutes, you found an issue.



Notational Velocity (synсs all dispersed notes and stores them in one place).
One of the most difficult focus-related tasks for many remote workers is to collate notes, plans and research in one place. This application stores all your notes in a separate place on your desktop, adding search and synchronisation options across Simplenote or WriteRoom on your iPhone. It significantly facilitates your work.



FocusBooster (25 minutes per task)
This application combines your to-do list and time-manager. Make a to-do list and let the application track the time spent on a task. Each 25 minutes it will remind you to have some rest. It is a very simple tool to train your focus without pushing yourself too hard.

F.LUX (adapts your computer’s display to the time of day)
Looking at your computer or mobile screen for a long period of time could drive you mad. Blue screen glow may cause insomnia. Install f. lux and stay focused on your work regardless the computer’s distracting backlight. F. lux adapts the brightness and saturation of your screen to the time of day and keeps your eyes healthier.

Working from a remote office doesn’t mean you lose connection with your colleagues and miss an important meeting. There are plenty of applications to help you stay involved at any given time, monitor tasks and delegate processes.

Trello An online visual project management tool based on cards and project boards.

Dropbox Access, share and store large data files.

Evernote Reliable and very popular app that imitates a virtual office.

Hackpad Collaborative online document editor.

Draft Write, edit and study documents in collaboration with other users.

This is in addition to Skype, Zoom, Google Meet.

Many people don’t have a decent meal even during their lunch break or go outside for some fresh air during the day.

Working from home can have its drawbacks. Your fridge being too close is one of them. It’s so important to take care of yourself and not overeat. Take short breaks, drink lots of water, try to eat healthy snacks and air your room frequently. Your body will thank you.

Plant Nanny An app game, where you plant a virtual flower and take care of it by watering it with the water you consume during the day.

Lifesum A simple calorie counter that could be useful in the kitchen.

Pravilnoe Pitanie (Healthy Diet) A cookbook app for the day including both comfort and healthy meals. You’ll find it useful if you choose not to buy expensive exotic superfoods and are more attracted to simple cheese, cereals and nuts.

If you’re taking a short break from your work tasks, don’t just flop onto a sofa or stretch out in a chair. Try to make the most of working from home and choose activities that you are unlikely to perform in the office. A change in activities is as good as a rest. Instead of idle internet surfing, make yourself a cup of tea, take a shower or work out.

The main downside of working from home lies in the blurring of boundaries between your work and private life. It’s important to plan how you’ll spend your time away from work, even if you’re still going to be inside your house. What is there to do at home when Instagram and Facebook are boring you rigid?

Watch an old or new movie or a boxset that you’ve been wanting to watch for a while.

Read your favourite books or dive into new ones.

Start cooking. When did you last have so much quality time at home? It’s a great time to boost your culinary skills?

Sport. YouTube gives access to a wide range of home fitness routines for various levels. If you’re tired of videos try Nike Training Club.

Figure out your spring wardrobe. When the quarantine is finally over, have your shopping list ready.

Get through that list of longstanding tasks. Clear out your phone storage, sort and get rid of the things you don’t need, or enjoy an early spring clean. Learn something new. For example, you can take an online course at Beeline University or listen to podcasts.

It’s sometimes hard to stay focused and get going with work when you’re working from home. You need to be organised and focused on results for remote working to succeed.

Don’t forget to engage with your team. Leaders need to regularly interact with employees and to exercise more control than when everyone is working from the office.

Leaders may start to micromanage employees, trying to control every minute of their day. Micromanagement never brings positive results. It’s a simple matter of trusting your team. Remote work needs trust to be effective.

Employees might struggle when planning their day (this is when relevant training courses or webinars come in handy) or overwork and burn out. They get so immersed in the process that they find it difficult to step away from their laptops. People can work selflessly for 12 hours at a time: "I'll just reply to this email/make one more phone call."

It’s vital to monitor how your employees are feeling and help them design a sensible plan with different techniques to escape burn out.

Live formats are ideal: they enable better interaction, give the opportunity to explain things in person, answer specific questions and can convey specific information, and encourage and engage with employees.

At VEON, we use different online formats to cover different learning needs.

Different department functions can be performed out of the office. Some Beeline functions work remotely (fully or partially) including recruitment experts, researchers, analysts, developers and marketing specialists. This includes those working abroad.

In view of the coronavirus outbreak, we are re-evaluating what functions should be office-based. The majority of our employees can work from home, providing our IT systems have capacity. It’s not always obvious who is better suited to working from home. For example, the HR department in charge of recruitment is bound to the office, while accountants calculating salaries can easily work from home.

Some people are provided with work computers, others use their own and are compensated by the company. Many of our employees use their own computers. Beeline offers compensation to employees who bring their own equipment.

Live communication training is ideal here. This provides a great opportunity to engage with people and gives them an opportunity to test various remote working options.

We’ve worked with executives that are highly sceptical about remote working. We conduct workshops with other executives and bring colleagues together— including those who are for and against remote work. They can share their experiences and discuss practical advantages of remote work. Generally, the most doubtful executives become BeeFREE advocates and appreciate the advantages remote working can offer.

There are two approaches: bottom-up and top-down.

Always allow your employee to make the first step. It evokes initiative and responsibility for their work. The supervisor is responsible for authorising employee plans and to-do lists, and can edit task lists and adjust deadlines.

Our company culture encourages employee initiative with a supervisor’s authorisation. Other corporate cultures follow top-down command structure, not Beeline.

Certain employee and leadership skills will come to light in a remote work setting. It also provides the opportunity to strengthen existing skills and learn new ones. Education and training on remote working is vital. Constant feedback and efficient working patterns between supervisors and employees are important, such as one-on-one meetings and strategic sessions. Offline is an important, allowing people to share their mood and emotions, problems and pains with their team—it's human nature, after all.

If personal meetings become infrequent, overall team performance is impacted negatively. We organise annual strategic sessions.

We assess results, not the process. Employees will participate in meetings or conference calls but leaders shouldn’t have to make direct calls to check their actions. It’s easy to sit in front of a computer and not work. When employees work from home, leaders should be checking and controlling their to-do list, job completion and performance efficiency.

Having introduced remote working in local offices we also introduced measurements and KPI to evaluate its success. Client support was the first function to join BeeFREE and working "Home Agents" were measured and assessed. The key question is what do you want to monitor? Time spent in front of the computer or results achieved? Assess every function and establish the right KPI for each area to achieve success.

We have not noticed that.

We offer compensation if you use personal equipment. We provide additional internet traffic to employees working BeeFREE because we understand that sustainable and good-quality internet enables our employees to stay connected and deliver sustainable results.

At the beginning of the project, we focused on educating our employees about BeeFREE. When the number of employees working remotely reached 50%, everyone else wanted to join and discover the advantages of BeeFREE. When a new employee joins, they can now work remotely, get immersed into our work procedures right away, and understand how we cooperate and how we support efficient performance.

We use only licensed software: all software is installed in virtual workspace. We equip personal devices with VDI-software. You log in and work in our corporate cloud solution with our licensed software. In response to increasing demand, Beeline Business offers remote work tools including audio and video conferencing and virtual workspaces.

Mindful awareness is one of our favourite topics. Beeline University is a new resource that drives and introduces great mental health projects. Last year, we staged an event on mindful awareness that brought together speakers from other companies, coaches and experts who shared their experience in time management, procrastination, planning and efficiency. Our top managers support this practice and conduct similar meetings for their teams, sharing their experience, and establishing great practices for efficient performance and planning.

We support activity and exercise, and there are various forms of activities available at work. Anyone can apply for coaching sessions to grow personally and professionally.

Yes, we have a dev team that works remotely. There are technology centre functions in Novosibirsk and Moscow. Our colleagues conduct video conferences and find solutions for their tasks in real time.

As long as you obey one rule: remote work is great but regular personal meetings and work in the office are vital. That’s why we advise teams that are located in the same city to work 1−2 days from the office to communicate and share personal and business news.

We ask team supervisors what they want to see. We also conduct regular internal staff surveys and ask questions such as: "Has your employee delivered more or less efficient performance?" or "How fast does the employee provide feedback when working from the office/from home?"

We annually assess staff efficiency. In 95% of cases, supervisors observed that employees performance hadn’t changed or became more efficient when working from home.