For you, remote work may be uncharted territory – for some of your friends, it’s just another day of the week. Many people were working from home before the pandemic hit, but for employees like you who are new to working remotely, this can be a significant transition. When you add this to the rest of the external factors, you’re dealing with during the pandemic, trying to adapt to working remotely can feel more than overwhelming.
We discussed with experts from multiple industries and put together a list of tips to help you improve your productivity, feel more connected with your work, and maintain your mental health while being socially distanced from your co-workers.
Let’s check them out.
Prevent burnout by separating work from life
This is probably one of the most challenging goals to achieve, mainly because new remote-working employees who have family around them cannot separate their personal life from work. So, one of the first things you have to do when you decide to work from home is to have a dedicated conversation with them and help them understand that one of the rooms of the house is your office now, and when you’re there, you’re not available to help them.
You need to create boundaries, and a shortcut to doing it is to tell them that they can bother you only if they’d commute to your usual office to talk with you. If the issue could wait for you to come back from work and solve it in the evening, then there’s no reason for them to visit your home office. You can also use a busy/available sign on the door to let them know when they can reach out.
When you’re at house 24/7, it’s tempting to work longer than your usual schedule, so you may need to set reminders when to begin and end work and plan activities to maintain your productivity.
Give your day structure
It’s crucial to know when to start and end your workday, and if you need breaks for other activities, put them in your schedule to ensure that you respect deadlines. Seasoned remote working employees recommend breaking your time into blocks. It’s essential to have designated times when you want to prioritise your work because you can juggle between office work, cooking lunch for your family, and housework. It can be overwhelming. It’s best to make work the priority focus in the designated working block to prevent your days from feeling chaotic.
Your office provided you with a structure, and you can maintain it even if now you switched to working from home. During this unpredictable period, having a predictable structure can help you get more accomplished. You can set yourself on autopilot and complete your day’s work without having to struggle daily.
Avoid loneliness and engage with people as much as possible
Now that you work from home, there is no office to encourage spontaneous informal conversations, so you must be intentional about socialising with your co-workers and other people. How can you do it?
– Use video calls to enjoy coffee breaks and catch up with your friends from work
– Create an always-on video conferencing room with your co-workers where you can see each other while you work
– Talk about subjects you’d typically approach, like plans, hobbies, hilarious tales of insubordination by pets. It’s important to work with your co-workers to establish a chat group to discuss things unrelated to work. Even if the medium is different, you can still maintain the same connection.
– Drop the embarrassment and shame. Everyone is working from home, and most of your co-workers wear mens lounge pants and comfortable T-shirts during their workdays. This is a forced work-from-home setting, and no one had time to prepare for it. So, one may have their girlfriend’s vanity table behind his office desk. Pets may pop on the camera; children may scream around the house. These instances only humanise the experience and remind everyone that you’re people first and co-workers second.
– Stay in touch with your friends and family. Working from home offers you the opportunity to spend more time with people different from your colleagues. Search for opportunities to build bonds with people from your community, which was impossible when you spent so much time commuting from your house to the office and back.
Embrace the changes
Relax, you’re not the only one working from home. Yes, you have many suits in the wardrobe waiting for you to wear them at the office, but until you bounce back, enjoy wearing comfortable clothes and working in lounge pants and comic books characters printed shirts.
Companies are usually built on the expectation of gathering specialists in the same shared physical place to work together. But now, they deal with acclimation pains because they have to adjust to having their employees working remotely. This friction can trigger serious harm operationally and culturally because many brands were created to function with people seeing themselves daily. Everyone should remember that the transition to remote work is a process, and during the first months, it can be more challenging for everyone to feel comfortable.
You cannot copy the in-office atmosphere and paste it at home where your cat is lying on your keyboard as you try to complete your tasks. No one expects you to be as productive and functional as usually because you’re working in challenging conditions.
But it’s essential to overcommunicate with your team during the process and share your issues. You’ll be amazed how many of your co-workers deal with the same problems. Discussing can help you find solutions. Seek advice on how other workers managed to adapt to working from home.
Another change to your usual work can be the introduction of online time tracking or some kind of employee monitoring software that will track your activities during work hours. It can be a little strange for some people, but in 2021, that’s how the payroll for the majority of full-time remote workers is calculated and you will get used to it too in no time!
And last but not least, take care of yourself because your mind and body need more attention than ever. If you spent 2 hours daily getting to and from your office, use the free time as an opportunity to exercise, walk your dog, play with your cat, or read a book.
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