It’s a great shakeup to suddenly be away from the office and isolated from your coworkers. But if you’ve been living under the cloud of reputation-harming mistakes, this distance is also an opportunity to step back, reinvent yourself, and work to repair your professional image. If you’ve been passed up for projects or promotions, maybe even gotten the cold shoulder from your colleagues, you may need to do damage control to get your career back on track. Fortunately, there are a few paths you can take to get there.

1. Own your mistakes. One of the best things you can do for your professional reputation is to build your integrity, especially if it has come into question. If you screwed up a critical project or badmouthed a peer, your reputation won’t recover until you take accountability for your actions. Acknowledge the error, fix it if you can (apologies, anyone?), and take steps to prevent something similar from happening in the future.
2. Keep smiling. Picture someone you think is charming. Does that person smile a lot? Smiling is a simple but often overlooked trick to improve your reputation. People are naturally drawn to open and friendly smiles, so when you smile for your webcam, people will notice your cheerful disposition and wonder what you are doing to be so happy. You will become associated with happiness, itself! And what about those times when you’re not feeling so cheerful? If you’re feeling tired or burned out, or if you’ve suffered a personal loss, maybe you don’t need to stream your video feed that day, or maybe you’re better off resting, regrouping, and returning to work refreshed and ready to smile.
3. Check your personality. Are you getting a bad rap because you don’t fit in with this industry or company culture? Find the disconnect. Are you chatty when everyone else is stoically silent? Are you coasting when everyone else is clawing up the ladder? If you want to stay working there, locate the mismatch quickly and do what you can to adjust your behavior. If you’re just not able to change, or if people aren’t changing their attitudes toward you, gather your takeaways and move on.
4. Ask for feedback. To find out where you’re going wrong, you may want to find out how others perceive you. Plenty of HR exercises solicit anonymous feedback about your personality traits and work habits. And if you don’t have an exercise waiting in the wings, you can always find out what others think of you by asking someone you trust. Try writing down a few qualities you want to be known for, then ask some trusted colleagues or even your boss to sit down with you to discuss how you can reach your goals.

Improving your professional reputation may not be an easy or quick battle, but with the right approach, it can be a winnable one from the comfort of your own home!