Internet Strength

In the remote world, everything you do is impacted by the strength of your internet connection. When you invest in your tools, you invest in yourself.

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.” ~ Marshall McLuhan

“A good reputation is more valuable than money.” ~ Publilius Syrus

Introduction

Internet connectivity issues are often considered by efficiency experts to be low-hanging fruit. That is, they are usually simple to solve. Yet, despite connectivity problems being generally avoidable, they are the most common way remote workers negatively impact their careers. In short, the speed and performance of your internet connection is the bedrock upon which your successful remote career will be built.

First impressions

They say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And this is especially true in a remote environment. For example, when you are on a call with your team members, and your audio or video breaks up, it obviously negatively impacts the meeting. Your dropping off the call forces the meeting to pause while everyone waits for you to reconnect.

If the interruption is long enough, they’ll move on to another topic, and you may lose your opportunity altogether. You may hope the others chalk up this experience to “technology issues,” and won’t think badly of your, personally. However, we submit that their impression of you may be worse than you think.

Reputation for reliability

When you consistently have connection issues in a remote world, people eventually assume those issues represent you and your work ethic. Experiencing you in this way, they begin to believe you, yourself, are not reliable. That you - not your internet connection - is undependable. Or, worse, that you are a novice, and not a professional.

This type of judgement may not seem fair, and, yet, it is reality. Of course, circumstances crop up, periodically, that are actually out of your control. These are not the issues we’re talking about. Rather, we are talking about behavioral patterns.

As a remote worker, you don’t have the benefit interacting with your team members in an on-premise work environment. Therefore, your on-call presence is your primary avenue for establishing a great reputation

Foundation for success

You may be wondering, “What's the big deal here? Why do they have an entire chapter dedicated to internet strength?” It is a fair question, and you’ll quickly see that this seemingly small characteristic actually carries a lot of weight in determining your reputation and reliability in a remote world.

Most people we work with who are not used to working remotely tend not to give this enough importance. There are some skills we teach that are nuanced and challenging but this is not one of them. This is one of the rare skills that can be instantly solved with a little more money. This makes it all the more sad when people shoot themselves in the foot for something so simple.

Investment in your future

At the end of the day, you are 100% responsible for your internet connection. If your internet provider is unable to reliably deliver the speeds you need, you should switch providers. The increase in financial cost will be significantly less than the cost of a bad reputation.

Is it impossible to secure these kinds of speeds in your current location? Then you may, realistically, consider a physical move, in order to build a successful career in the remote field.

Whatever your personal situation, the choice to not upgrade your internet is based on flawed logic, and rarely works out. Will you triple the size of your internet bill in order to achieve this kind of stability?

Great! Then, just do it.

Minimum requirements

In order to be successful as a remote worker, you should have access to minimum download speeds of 16 Mbps, and at least 5 Mbps upload speeds.

Best Practices

Its always a great idea to try and optimize the strength of your existing connection. Here are a couple of best practices for analyzing and maximizing your internet speed:

• Test your internet speed using speedtest.net

• Connecting your computer to the modem with an ethernet cable is, generally, more reliable than wifi (though some exceptions exist, so be sure to test).

Conclusion

In the remote world, everything you do is impacted by the strength of your internet connection. For some people, this type of technological upgrade represents a significant investment. Yet, an investment in your tools, is an investment in yourself. By doing so, you lay a solid foundation for a long and successful remote career.