While remote work has been more widely implemented than ever as of late, many people still find themselves struggling to remain productive throughout their workday. We wanted to share a few tips to help them really make the most of working from home.
Dictate Your Environment
One of the psychological keys to effectively working from home is to identify a certain area as the at-home workplace and stick to it. Preferably, this workplace is away from the distractions of the kitchen and its snacks or the bedroom and its temptation of a nap. Once you have found your area, make sure that you have it equipped with the tools you will need to be productive, like a laptop, external monitor, and any other accessories you use.
Once you’ve established all this, you then need to consider how your days are to be scheduled. Many people enjoy working from home for its relative freedom from the typical 9-to-5 schedule, which allows them to fulfill other responsibilities with their time. So long as office processes allow for it and things are accomplished on time, there is nothing wrong with splitting up the workday as is needed.
Work a Consistent Amount of Time
With so many stresses felt by so many right now, the normalcy of work may seem like a good way to keep from dwelling on them. This is not necessarily the case. Even when working from home, the risk of burnout and fatigue are still there, so it is still important to put some distance between your work life and home life. It can be considered crucial, as setting this distance can help your thought processes and even your physical health.
To make the most use of the hours available to you, it will be important to be disciplined, resisting distractions, and minimizing disturbances. Furthermore, it is also important to end the day when the day should be ended. Not only will this help keep you focused throughout the day to accomplish what needs to be done, it will help to prevent feelings of overworking from settling in.
Have the Right Tools
As we alluded to above, it is important that you have everything you will need to be productive at the ready. This includes the hardware we referenced, as well as the software that your operations are based on.
You have a few options available to you to help make sure that your team has this software. Using remote access solutions, your team could tap into your business infrastructure and utilize it from a distance. Alternatively, you could elect to use cloud-hosted solutions, ultimately having the same result.
Naturally, some of these tools will need to be those that enable your team members to communicate with one another as they are kept apart. Email is perhaps the first business collaboration tool to come to mind, but in certain cases, other options like instant messaging and project management may be better suited to your team’s needs.
If your business needs help getting set up remotely, or needs to do a health check on your existing workforce that are already working remotely, give us a call at 408-927-8700.
