Mastering the Art of Working From Home
In recent years, the trend of working from home has skyrocketed, with more and more companies offering flexible work arrangements to their employees. At first work from home looked all nice and shiny, offering several benefits such as flexible timings, saving of fuel and other costs, reduced commuting time and a lot of comfort and ease. But there have been challenges
From the freedom to set your own schedule to the ability to work from anywhere in the world, the benefits of remote work are hard to ignore. In this article, we’ll explore the ins and outs of working from home and provide tips for making the most of your remote work experience
Breaking the monotony and feelings of isolation
One needs to be more creative and resourceful in getting to know people and in staying in touch with their colleagues. Initiate fun activities such as virtual drinks, meet-ups (monthly) and online games
Even better, get involved in some out-of-the-house activities such volunteer work, take dance lessons or martial arts or whatever you like but keep your social life alive.
Managing workload
The problem is more drawing the border between work and personal life especially workaholic kind of people. For most people, the lack of physical separation between home and work may add to this pressure to work endlessly.
You need to work on a schedule. You can even put sports or hobby activities at the end of the day to make sure you stop working.
Managing distractions
Maintaining concentration is a challenge especially in high populated neighborhoods. Distractions can be looked at from many angles;
- Mental state — make or improvise a formal workstation at home to help you get into the right mental framework for work. Avoid working from the bed or sofa. You need to separate work from personal life, you need to be self-motivated. Make an agenda for each day.
- Background noise : When working from home, there will always be background noises, be it children playing around, neighbours playing music, vehicles or someone watching TV. We really can’t blame them, it’s their space to do all these activities. Therefore, in order to minimize the impact we can find a room/corner within your home to work from.
- Utility interruptions such as electricity and internet connection. If the power outages happen during a call or a meeting — the WIFI takes forever to restart (even if it’s less than a minute, it feels like forever ). In order to get rid of this problem, get a power backup for your WIFIrouter so that even if the power outage happens — the router need not restart every single time, considering the power is back within a couple of hours before your laptop charge is over
IT Support for remote staff
This is a tricky one where there are no proper systems and there are multiple support calls. Ensuring you have a secure remote access to IT support team may save you time
Performance appraisal
You are not visible for the other people in your work. So your accomplishments wont be as visible as the ones for the people in the office. This is hard if you are planning to grow in the company because it will make hard to people to recognize and reward your efforts since they are not physically visible. Communicate and set out key performance goals per month or quarter. Be transparent and accountable with time and tasks assigned
Summary tips
- Create a designated workspace in your home and set boundaries to condition your mind
- Have a to-do list and schedule tasks. Take short breaks between tasks
- Find your ideal work times (during the day or at night)- pick your most productive time with least distractions
- Exercise regularly- improves mood, breaks monotony and improves creativity
- Communicate regularly with your team- do not allow to be isolated
- Be transparent and accountable with time and tasks assigned
- Anticipate challenges and make contingency plans– power outages, internet events in the neighborhood that may affect work