• Use an external monitor. One of the biggest productivity gains comes from useful screen real estate, so finding a way to get more is incredibly helpful to you. Paired with an external keyboard and mouse, you're also on your way to better ergonomics.
• Use a desk and a chair. Sitting on a couch for a long period is probably not healthy in a lot of ways. Can you fit in a sit/stand desk? Maybe you do need a different ergonomic choice, but make it deliberately.
• If you can dedicate a workspace, that's ideal. If you can't, consider a space that you can set up at the start of the workday, then tear it back down in the evening — so you have clearly delineated boundaries of when you're "in the office" instead of just chilling.
• Even if you can't dedicate a workspace, make a conscious effort to not take a meal (be it lunch, dinner, etc.) from where you are working. If you have a dedicated workspace, leave it and go to your kitchen, another room, or, if possible, outside for your meal. This should be time to mentally recharge as much as physically recharge. If you don't have a dedicated space, still take the time to close your laptop and do something that is not work. Your brain (and your similarly stressed co-workers) will thank you.
• Do you have a headset with a microphone to take meetings with? Gaming headsets can be an affordable and high-quality solution, or possibly Bluetooth earbuds. Anything is an improvement over just using your laptop's speakers. But also think about how your ears might feel after multiple hours using a device you're not familiar with. Maybe change between earbuds and a headset … or even just take a long break from videoconferencing.
• Wired Ethernet makes an enormous difference for videoconferencing — and for many of our other tools. Even if the cable has to get unplugged when you roll up your desk at the end of the day, this can be worth the trouble.

• Do you have to homeschool small children? What does your plan look like for that, and how are you trading it off with your partner?
• Do you need to add daily household meetings to identify any issues?

• Can you go for a walk around the block (or further)?
• Can you set aside quiet time at the start and end of your day, before you dive into email?

• Make sure you take time for lunch. This might make a good time to check in with your colleagues in your co-working space or take quiet time for yourself. You might want to think about planning for those lunches to make sure you're making healthy choices rather than just grabbing whatever is available.

• Make a hard break. "Bye, kids, I'm headed to work!" can be a really powerful boundary to set.

• Consider nonverbal cues for meeting participants to use to call for attention. If everyone is visible, that can be a raised hand; if that's not the case, then a chat backchannel can help.
• Work more on pauses between speakers. There is rarely a need to jump in instantly, and that's often seen as a behavior that is exclusionary anyway, so this is a good opportunity to evaluate it. Past three people, a moderator helps enormously — perhaps defaulting to whomever called the meeting or wrote the agenda.
• Consider working off a shared document with an agenda and notes so that some information flows can be faster-than-verbal. This might rely on everyone having more screen real estate.
• Think about the lighting. You should be able to clearly see your face, which generally means lights and windows should be in front of you, not behind you. It's always possible to learn from one call and revise or improve for the next one.
• Thirty-minute blocks are not fundamental to the universe. You can meet for 5 minutes or 15 — and jumping from chat to a video call for 5 minutes can unlock great work for you or your colleagues.
• As a last resort, disabling video can improve audio distortions, jitter, and latency in meetings.

• Maybe take that long walk at the start of your day or after lunch.
• If you're fortunate enough to have a treadmill or stationary cycle in your house, maybe you take a walking meeting with a colleague.
• Look at how you can keep your body from stiffening from a lack of movement or poor ergonomics. Take stretch breaks. Take a 20-second break every 20 minutes and look out at something at least 20 feet away to prevent eyestrain. Consider how to incorporate physical wellness into your everyday routine.

• Schedule open office hours. Open up a video chat and let colleagues join in. Maybe it's just a "hallway chat" that people can drop in for. Perhaps you have a tea-time theme and let people use tea as a conversation starter.
• Connect with people that you usually sit near but don't have meetings with. Check in with them.
• Think about what errands you run and how you can incorporate a little more social interaction into them.
• We're all saving on commute time. A work-social event, such as a knitting group or a distributed board game (for example, Words With Friends), may even be helpful and appropriate during your day.

• Consider checking in and out at the start and end of your day. Especially if you're a manager, you'll be tempted to squeeze in some extra time out of the afternoon commute; but even if you tell your staff that they're done, they won't really believe it if you don't show them that you're done. They can't see you walk out of the office, so you have to tell them you are.
• Recognize that your colleagues may have to make different choices than you do. Maybe they're taking a few hours in the middle of the day to interact with their family. Maybe they're making food for more people. Perhaps they create a hard stop at 5 p.m. Honor their choices — and do so visibly — so they know you're supporting them.
• Remember that you're now a guest in your colleagues' homes — things you say might be overheard by their spouse or children, so be a more-gentle human.

Another area we addressed was looking outside the security industry. A challenge that many security teams have is that, when they’re small, they have to hire people who can do anything and everything. For a three- or five-person team, that makes sense—you absolutely need an architect who can engage deeply about distributed-systems design with principal engineers, then pivot to program manage across multiple engineering leaders a safety initiative, and then walk into a customer executive meeting and manage a team on the side. But as a team grows, that breadth and depth isn’t necessary across the board (although it can be a career aspiration). What was interesting to realize is that, often, the needed depth in a position isn’t in a traditional “security” skill.

Our InfoSec team, like many, has positions that look more like “librarian” or “journalist.” Rather than hiring deep security experts, and trying to teach them those skills, we’ve hired actual librarians and journalists. Those are shrinking career fields, so there are skilled professionals available. Targeting those folks, directly and indirectly, has given us access to new populations; and some of those career fields have very different demographics from the security norms.

We wanted to be more active. One step was to open up our pipeline into new environments. We could take advantage of the Akamai Technical Academy program, which generally produces more candidates who are women, minorities and veterans. The ATA candidates also tend to bring in new and fresh perspectives from other career areas, which only made the team stronger.

These ideas are all about the hiring pipeline, but that isn’t the only area to work on! Building an inclusive culture to improve retention, developing your existing staff and having a flexible and accommodating environment are all important areas to pay attention to.

But our team made it past 40%. And that’s great progress.
This article first appeared in Human Resource Executive.