Journal of Library Administration

ISSN: 0193-0826 (Print) 1540-3564 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjla20

Working from Home: How We Managed Our Team

Remotely with Technology

Monica D. T. Rysavy & Russell Michalak

To cite this article: Monica D. T. Rysavy & Russell Michalak (2020) Working from Home: How We
Managed Our Team Remotely with Technology, Journal of Library Administration, 60:5, 532-542,
DOI: 10.1080/01930826.2020.1760569

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1760569

Published online: 01 Jun 2020.

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JOURNAL OF LIBRARY ADMINISTRATION
2020, VOL. 60, NO. 5, 532–542
https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1760569

posIT

Russell Michalak, Director of Hirons Library, Archives, & Learning Center, Goldey-Beacom
College, Wilmington, DE, USA

Monica D. T. Rysvay, Director of Institutional Research & Training, Goldey-Beacom

College, Wilmington, DE, USA

COLUMN EDITORS’ NOTE

This JLA column posits that academic libraries and their services are dominated by information
technologies, and that the success of librarians and professional staff is contingent on their ability
to thrive in this technology-rich environment. The column will appear in odd-numbered issues of
the journal, and it will delve into all aspects of library-related information technologies and know-
ledge management used to connect users to information resources, including data preparation,
discovery, delivery and preservation.

Working from Home: How We Managed Our Team

Remotely with Technology
Monica D. T. Rysavya and Russell Michalakb
a
Director of Institutional Research & Training, Goldey-Beacom College, Wilmington, DE, USA; bDirector
of Hirons Library, Archives, & Learning Center, Goldey-Beacom College, Wilmington, DE, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the College’s Academic libraries; remote
library and the office of institutional research & training (OIRT), along working; virtual
with all departments of our college, shifted to working from home collaboration; working
from home
(WFH) overnight. This column shares examples from the literature
regarding experiences and lessons learned from both the corporate
world and academic libraries’ experiences managing teams remotely
with technology. Finally, we share how the College’s academic library
and OIRT transitioned to working from home during the COVID-19
pandemic with the variety of online tools we already used, but fur-
ther enhanced during this experience, to communicate and collabor-
ate effectively with our team members.

Introduction
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the College’s library and the office
of institutional research & training (OIRT), along with all departments of our college,
shifted to working from home (WFH) overnight. Due to the library’s services and col-
lections being nearly all virtual already and the dispersed schedules of library & OIRT
employees, we fortunately had already established tools and services for our staff to
communicate and collaborate effectively.

CONTACT Russell Michalak michalr@gbc.edu Director of Hirons Library, Archives, & Learning Center, Goldey-
Beacom College, 4701 Limestone Road, Wilmington, DE 19808, USA.
ß 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 posIT 533

Almost 4 weeks after our College’s campus is still closed physically in accordance
with state of Delaware Governor Carney’s order for all non-essential businesses to close
and families to shelter-in-place until May 15, 2020, we do not know exactly when we
will return to our physical campus. As a result, we are getting used to working from
home (WFH) as we understand returning to work might not happen anytime soon.
According to an April 10, 2020, NY Times update about COVID-19 that forecasted
the possibility of returning to work, two scenarios were shared:

1. “Without any mitigation, such as school closings, shelter-in-place orders, tele-

work and socially distancing, the death toll from coronavirus could have
reached 300,000.”
2. “But if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is
estimated to reach 200,000, even if schools remain closed until summer, 25 per-
cent of the country continues to work from home and some social distanc-
ing continues.”

Libraries, while increasingly known for the online services they provide to customers
in terms of support (virtual reference via ticketing system, chat services, online training
via web conferencing), electronic resources (content), and access to the myriad of serv-
ices often provided by libraries electronically (programming and training), are not pro-
lifically written about in terms of how teams of library employees collaborate or are
managed virtually in WFH scenarios. This column shares lessons we learned from this
dramatic work shift, including strategies for effectively collaborating and communicating
within two departmental teams while working from home.

Brief literature review

Remote working trends in the corporate world
An increasing number of employees are permitted to telework by their employer
according to ConnectSolutions survey in 2014. According to Aliah D. Wright (2020), 23
percent of employees who responded to the survey chose to work longer hours and 42
percent of remote workers feel just as connected to working with colleagues as they do
when they work on-site. In addition, teleworkers are more likely than their colleagues
who work at the office to use technological tools so they can collaborate remotely. The
results from the survey found that “Eighty-eight percent use e-mail, 47 percent use
instant messaging, 36 percent use video conferencing, 32 percent use Skype/Voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) and 28 percent use ‘an enterprise unified communication solu-
tion such as Microsoft Lync’.” Mobile use has already empowered remote workers since
over half of the respondents conducted more than half of their workload on
a smartphone.
Communicating for remote workers with managers is difficult even with tools and
services like Slack and email. Jack Altman (2020) has five tips to manage remote work-
ers’ performance. For remote working to succeed, managers must set expectations from
the beginning. Remote workers must know what the parameters are because they their
learning curve steeper because remote workers do not have opportunity to observe their
534 M. D. T. RYSAVY AND R. MICHALAK

colleagues or manager’s behavior. To build trust, the manager and the employee should
find a schedule that works for both the manager and the employee. If the employee
who is working remotely needs to take personal time in the middle of the workday,
then the remote workers should communicate the change in a communication channel
that both the manager and employee have already arranged. Regular one-on-one meet-
ings build rapport and trust. The employee should create the agenda and the supervisor
should take notes and share the notes. Give clear concise feedback, then remote workers
will not over analyze communication. The manager should ask for status updates.
Status updates help the employee belong. The manager can refer to the employees’ regu-
lar status updates during the one-on-one meetings. Finally, Altman stressed for remote
working to succeed the manager must trust the employees who are working from
home. He suggests, creating a direct line of communication. Managers should not
assume an employee who works remotely is slacking off. Managers instead should reach
out to employees frequently and ask the employee about the status of a project.
Remote work can be challenging for the employee. There can be drawbacks to tele-
commuting compared to working at the office. Those drawbacks include feelings of not
being included, inaccurate expectations of productivity by coworkers and supervisors,
not being invited in training on-site at the office, and the need for new and/or different
skills and mindset to succeed as a remote worker. Dan Shewan (2017) advises remote
workers to take advantage of technology offered by their work or try to find profes-
sional development opportunities independently to stay in touch with coworkers, a
supervisor, and other professionals in your field. Remote workers should use social
media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to stay connected and not feel isolated from
colleagues. Shewan recommends using tools like Slack to bridge the communication gap
between distributed teams. A remote worker can find networking and collaboration
more challenging than coworkers who work at the office. Self-directed learning is a cru-
cial skill to hone for people who work from home. There are many online professional
development webinars and training sessions like Khan Academy that are free.
Productivity expectations can differ between a remote worker and an on-site worker.
Shewan suggests using tools like Basecamp to outline tasks and deadlines so everyone
on the team can see what is expected from each person on the team.
For a team to effectively collaborate, the supervisor must find ways to build strong
teams with virtual tools and services. Almost all companies in America have the appro-
priate software to permit employees to work remotely. Eileen O’Laughlin (2020) reports
92 percent of survey respondents conducted by Capterra in November 2019, believed
their company had the capability to work remotely due to the technology their company
uses at the office to communicate and collaborate. Many companies shared they use
Basecamp to collaborate and Zoom to communicate. O’Laughlin states, companies who
support remote working should foster a community mindset with automatic check-ins,
bonding activities, and regular check-ins about each employee’s personal life. For
remote working to succeed, companies must invest in technology to communicate
effectively when colleagues do not have places like break rooms to observe in-person
cues. For communication to happen effectively, she recommends using web video con-
ferencing software with regular one-on-one meetings and team meetings with the same
experience—which means the camera on and dial-in from computer for employees
 posIT 535

must be turned on for people who work remotely and on-site. When relying on tech-
nology to communicate in lieu of in-person meetings the supervisor must over clarify
and set specific guidelines to build trust with the employee.

Telecommuting in academic libraries

Academic libraries often rely on graduate assistants to complete project workSome
times, graduate assistants work remotely for the academic library while completing a
degree. Carolyn Minor and Beth Dunning (2006) recommend using email when work-
ing remotely only when the team members already have established an in-person work-
ing relationship because email conversations lack context. They advise using a chat
service because it provides a permanent and shared record of a conversation that team
members can look at again later while working on a project. Minor and Dunning used
wikis as their virtual workplace to share documents with teammates. They found their
graduate assistants can report and find solutions in a shared collaborative document.
Wikis solved working conflicts over version control since the document was not passing
through email. Providing access to a document can be challenging when working
remotely so they recommend making sure to introduce the graduate assistant to all
library staff. Introducing staff working remotely models good behavior like including
team members in a conversation in email or via a chat service.
As services offered by academic libraries become more virtual, positions are created
to support those virtual services and the need to be physically present in the library
diminishes. For example, Jamene Brooks-Kieffer (2012), whose duties as a Resource
Sharing Librarian are not public facing, only needs access to the administrative side of
electronic resource services to complete most of her from her computer from home.
Therefore, she only commutes to campus twice a week to attend university committee
meetings or staff meetings. Telecommuting part-time has worked for her position. She
believes to recruit and retain library employees library supervisors must accept telecom-
muting. Technology should not be considered a hindrance when creating a position
that can telecommute since there are technologies that make telecommuting work.
These technologies include:

VPN client

VOIP phone

Laptop computer

Smartphone and/or tablet

Web conference software

Instant message (IM) software

E-mail.

With these technologies most librarians can successfully complete their jobs as
assigned. Brooks-Kieffer states, “None of these [technologies] is [sic] location-depend-
ent; all will work from any place with a network or data connection.” Kiefer-Brooks
also believes that with the right technology supervision can be done remotely from
home. According to her, “there are more effective supervision techniques than
536 M. D. T. RYSAVY AND R. MICHALAK

physically watching over an employee; many of these are feasible via the communication
and technology tools that telecommuters will already be using to complete their
own tasks.”
It is common for spouses to work at the same higher educational institution. Jennifer
Duncan, an electronic resources librarian, and her spouse, a faculty member, work at Utah
State University are one such example. In 2007, Jennifer’s husband took a sabbatical to con-
duct research, which meant relocating to Washington, D.C. for six months. Jennifer
Duncan’s supervisor granted her approval to telecommute so she could move to D.C. with
her husband and child. According to Jennifer Duncan (2008), the approval to work
remotely was granted because all her work could be done virtually with a powerful com-
puter (Macbook) and high-speed internet to run desktop clients, except most committee
work, which she was excused from doing (p. 218). Jennifer purchased, with gran funding, a
Palm Treo smartphone to call into staff meetings and learned to use “technologies like
Skype (an Internet videoconferencing service) and Adium (a chat client aggregator for
Macs)” (p. 218) to talk with colleagues who worked in the physical library.
In order for academic health sciences libraries to provide better services, reduce costs, and
satisfy ever changing user needs, Mohammad Azami, Maryam Okhovati, Heidar Mokhtari
and Soodeh Khodabakhs (2018) surveyed administrators (n ¼ 70) in Iranian health sciences
libraries about their perceptions of health sciences librarians teleworking in 2013. The
authors found that most librarians believed staff who perform information technology and
collection development duties were best suited for teleworking situations. According to the
survey, administrators perceived public facing departments to be the least suited for tele-
working. The authors shared that health sciences libraries are well suited for librarians to
work remotely. University faculty and students are used to accessing scholarly materials any-
time from anyplace to conduct research or complete work assignments (p. 82). Distance
educations programs in universities are common. Faculty are accustomed to working web
conferencing with international faculty to conduct research. Librarians who work in depart-
ments that support virtual tools and services can easily transition to teleworking.
Just because many academic libraries offer services virtually and some support dis-
tance education, mean academic libraries are ready to support librarians to work
remotely. Primary Research survey deans and directors (n ¼ 70) the last week of March
2020. Paul Fain (2020) shared that the results of a Primary Research Group survey
revealed community colleges and small colleges were more likely to be struggling with
remote work. In fact, Lauren Lumpkin (2020) reported many community colleges
remained open after many of the social distancing guidelines were enacted to stop the
spread of COVID-19. Fein stated, the larger the enrollment of the college or university,
the more likely the library employees would be working from home during the chal-
lenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How we worked from home during COVID-19

Despite transitioning our team to WFH fairly quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic
(we had less than five business days’ notice that college employees would be working
remotely for at least the next two months), we were able to do so seamlessly because we
were already used to communicating and collaborating with a variety of online tools.
 posIT 537

Team communications with Slack

Our disparate schedules amongst our core team members (two directors of different
departments—library and institutional research & training, one full-time employee,
three part-time employees, and 25 of student workers) made using an online communi-
cation tool critical early on and we selected Slack (the free plan) as this tool after having
mixed results with Yammer. In addition to inconsistent Yammer message notifications,
the inability to have sub-groups or channels within groups resulted in a very disorgan-
ized messaging space so we decided to try Slack (http://www.slack.com).
We ended up having great results with Slack. We created channels for topics and repeat-
ing activities such as for discussions related to surveys that we either conducted or were
part of regularly. We created channels for our 1 þ 1 meetings (supervisor and employee) to
discuss questions that come up as a result of those meetings and for times when we need to
request something specific of an employee that is not necessary for the entire group to see.
We do not have set rules for how people communicate in Slack beyond, “Check
Slack!” Most of us keep Slack running constantly during our work hours (and directors
use it after hours as well) and use it as a desktop app and/or on mobile devices. Slack is
meant to replace our email communications with each other, and for the most part, we
have achieved this. Occasionally we still email one another to follow-up on tasks, but
from a managerial perspective, if one or both directors is following up on tasks via
email as opposed to in Slack, it means that someone is delayed on something to the
point that we feel we need to begin documenting this delay in a more formal way
(i.e., it is not a good thing).
From a workflow perspective, we decided early on not to use Slack as a place to store
files. Instead, we share links to files such as to a Word document or Excel workbook
stored in our teams’ Sharepoint spaces or to resources found online. We do not upload
files to Slack. This is mainly because we want our files to live in the centralized team
repositories, but also because we are on the Slack free plan which means that after
10,000 messages (which we reached during week 3 of COVID-19 remote working) that
messages and files will begin to be deleted.
Slack use during our remote working during COVID-19 did not change very much
from how we used it for collaboration before with the exception of a slightly stronger
emphasis on “Check Slack!” to everyone since we cannot drop by someone’s desk to say
“How’s X coming along?” when someone seems to need an additional reminder or
encouragement. If anything, we think it is used slightly more for casual chatting to see
how everyone is doing personally as well as professionally since working from home
during a pandemic has a variety of stresses associated with it.

Daily video updates with FlipGrid

One tool we introduced to our team during the first WFH week during COVID-19 was
FlipGrid (http://www.flipgrid.com). FlipGrid is a tool that enables individuals to post
topics in a grid that is accessible through web browsers and apps for all modern smart
phones and then participants reply with video messages (the topic creator sets the reply
time to anywhere between 15 seconds and 10 minutes in length) (Figure 1).
538 M. D. T. RYSAVY AND R. MICHALAK

Figure 1. Daily video check-ins with staff in FlipGrid.

We created a 1 minute 30 second topic for each day of the week (e.g. April 10 Check
In) with the same topic prompt (“What’s going on today?”). Team members who are
working each day check in twice each day: once in the morning and once in the after-
noon by posting a FlipGrid video message to share their progress and other relevant
information with team members. Each topic is locked for a particular work date, mean-
ing that members can only post and reply on the date the topic is set for. We treat
FlipGrid like quick, drop-in conversations with one another (albeit one way) like we
had with one another at work in-person prior to COVID-19 WFH.Virtual Team
Meetings using Zoom
In addition to our asynchronous daily check-ins with FlipGrid, throughout the day
chat communications within Slack, we meet synchronously with our team 3 per week
for one hour virtually face-to-face using the Zoom (http://www.zoom.com) conference
call software. Regular team meetings while we WFH during COVID-19 were important
for a few reasons:

1. Checking in with one another (virtually) face-to-face provided us with the

opportunity to ensure everyone was doing ok and actually appeared to be doing
ok. Note: we knew, of course, that feelings can be carefully guarded, but at least
by seeing each other with our webcams it gave us a better sense of how people
were doing. Emails and other text-based communication can project a very dif-
ferent picture from reality.
2. Sometimes projects/big ideas/questions just simply need to be talked out. Using
some or all of a virtual team meeting over Zoom to talk out these topics was
often faster than emailing back and forth for sometimes days before it was
resolved and/or moved forward.
3. Virtual team meetings enabled us to foster and grow personal connections.
While our team meetings focused mostly on work-related topics, we also shared
how we were coping with COVID-19; i.e., books we were reading, movies
watched, pet stories (pets often made an appearance on calls!), etc. As managers,
we tried to remember to also connect with our employees personally beyond
 posIT 539

their tasks—asking “how are you really doing?” went a long way during
this time.

Project planning with Notion

We started using the Notion app (http://www.notion.so) for project planning prior to
WFH. Similar to other popular project management tools (e.g., Asana, Basecamp,
Trello), Notion enables users to collaborate on a variety of types of documents, share
tasks, track milestones, but has the added bonuses of supporting databases of content
that can be easily shared amongst users and a free education license.
Prior to WFH, Notion was used almost exclusively to track progress on projects, and
mainly by us as supervisors. After our transition to WFH, we quickly built a more com-
prehensive workspace, which we referred to as the Dashboard (shown below) and it
contained details about tasks for projects and enabled us to visualize (by levering mul-
tiple interlinking databases within Notion) real-time employee progress.
We created a variety of views by employee and across all staff, such as (Figure 2):

Daily tasks

Accomplished tasks

Tasks that need review

Another resource we created for our Notion Dashboard is the Tools We Use page
which clearly describes tools that are regularly used by departmental staff with details
such as the purpose of the tool, how to access the tool (including where to find creden-
tial details) and support information about the tool (Figure 3).
Feedback from staff taught us that despite having used nearly all of these tools prior
to WFH, there were some feelings of overwhelm and uncertainty about what to use
when so we developed another Notion Dashboard page, Suggested Daily Workflow, to
provide guidance about how to use tools throughout the day while WFH (Figure 4).

File sharing with SharePoint

Prior to WFH, we already mainly used departmental SharePoint spaces (via our institu-
tion’s Office 365 license) to share files, and that practice continued during WFH. We
did make an extra effort, however, to ensure we mainly put files in SharePoint, despite
it being simple to upload files to Notion because SharePoint is our official institutional
solution, therefore anything with sensitive data had to be in SharePoint and other docu-
ments, for continuity, ease of access, and other workflow reasons, really ought to also
be in SharePoint as well. It was a simple matter to link to SharePoint files in Notion to
keep documents with projects and tasks together.

Summary
The transition from face-to-face working in the physical library to our WFH experience
was less disruptive than it might have been due to the fact that we already had a
540 M. D. T. RYSAVY AND R. MICHALAK

Figure 2. Project planning in Notion.

Figure 3. List of tools we use in Notion.

 posIT 541

Figure 4. Suggested daily workflow in Notion.

multitude of digital tools and systems in place to aid in our asynchronous collaboration
due to disparate staff schedules. The major change we did experience from WFH,
beyond no longer seeing one another face-to-face, was the need to formalize those sys-
tems and use of tools beyond what we had already established. WFH meant that if we
did not check in using our different tools, we simply had no idea how others were
doing and there was not the option of doing a drop-by someone’s desk to physically
check in. Finally, trust became even more vital to our successful collaborations as a
team due to the physical distance we experienced during WFH.

ORCID
Monica D. T. Rysavy http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9351-338X
Russell Michalak http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0961-8926

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