With the coronavirus taking hold worldwide, and offices being closed, increasingly, employees are being asked to work from home. However, remote working can be tough. Here are some tips and tricks to ease the transition from working at an office. to working from home.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) recently classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation, and with over 128,000 people infected worldwide (at the time of publishing), many countries are opting to close schools and businesses, in order to reduce ‘community spread’ of this virus. As a result, schools, government offices, and even businesses, are being closed for several days, or even weeks, in the hope that declining rates of infection would be realised.
However, for many, these closures are not a glorified holiday. The work of an organisation, and even of a country, still needs to get done. So, even if it was not embraced before, many employers are now arranging for their employees to continue working from home. However, although most of us might be thrilled at the prospect of being able to work from home – albeit without the threat of a global pandemic in the mix (!) – like many things, it does take some know-how in order to do it well. Here are six tips when preparing to work from home.
1. Be clear about the personal resources that you will be using at home
In circumstances when remote working is being imposed – such as to lessen the spread of COVID-19, many organisations may not have fully considered plans or the requisite systems already in place to allow ALL of their employees to work from home. As a result, a lot of things are likely to fall through the cracks, and may be the expectation that essentially, the employees will pick up the slack. A big area where such omissions tend to occur is with respect to telecoms and ICT, specifically, phones, computers and the associated software.
For employees who already had been assigned laptop computers, the transition tends to be easier, as they would just use those devices at home. However, for those who work at a desktop computer at the office, there may be an expectation that they will use their home computers when required to telework. Similarly, if employees have not been assigned mobile/cellular phones, are they expected to make – and bear all the costs for – work-related calls on their personal phones?
These are some of the matters that ought to be discussed and clarified before remote work commences, in order to ensure that appropriate arrangements are in place, and to limit the chances of employees feeling as if they have been taken advantage of, and left out of pocket, albeit in challenging circumstances.
2. Maintain regular hours
The discipline of not having to bolt out of the door at a particular time, and beat through the traffic, in order to get to work on time, could give way to a more laissez-faire attitude when working from home. Instead of being at your desk by about 8:15 a.m., as you would do normally, with work officially starting at 8:30, at home, you are now clocking it at 10.
One of the keys to working from home successfully is being disciplined: respecting the fact that there are prescribed periods in which you are supposed to be working – unless, of course, other arrangements have been made. Hence, although some flexibility is permissible, even though you might be at home, it is important to still conduct yourself as a professional – even though you might still be in your pyjamas at 10 o’ clock in the morning!
3. Set a schedule, and stick to it
Recognising that many of us are conditioned to be in the ‘work zone’ at work, and leave work behind at home, some kind of mental adjustment might be needed when those two worlds collide. At the office, our days might be quite organised, where we know what tasks we have to complete, the meeting we are scheduled to attend, etc. However, when (almost) everyone might be working from home, things might not necessarily go to plan.
Also, if you and your colleagues are teleworking, due to COVID-19, it is likely that schools have also been closed, and your children are at home. In tending to their needs and trying to keep them occupied, your work commitments could suffer – although you are supposed to be on the clock. It is crucial to manage distractions, in order to be truly productive and to be able to show tangible or measurable work-related outputs.
4. Set targets and goals
When working from home, the days can easily meld into each other, and especially when distractions abound, you may realise that you have accomplished very little at the end of a work day. In order to set yourself up for success, it is recommended that you set targets and goals, These targets and goals can be as granular as you need to keep you honest, such as, targets or goals you want to accomplish: within the hour; by the end of the morning; by the end of the day; by the end of the week.
It is important to highlight that unlike when everyone is working at the office, where there may be a lot of seamless collaboration and teamwork, in working from home, there can be a sense that each employee is under their own spotlight. Hence, what you have or have not accomplished, and/or what you have contributed to your team, becomes quite clear, and could affect future performance evaluations.
5. Use online tools to meet and collaborate
To stave off the isolation that can happen when working from home, especially when one is accustomed to working and sharing space with colleagues, it may be useful ensure that the team remain connected, although everyone might be working remotely.
Platforms such as Slack, Google Chat, Skype, or even WhatsApp, can be used to for group chats, or even to hold internal team briefing and meetings, or even conference calls with clients. Cognisant that one’s office might closed for several days, the aim is to still foster a sense of normalcy, and to limit the losses to one’s team, and to the organisation, when face-to-face engagement may be limited.
6. Mind the munchies!
Finally, with kitchen and the refrigerator so close by when you are at home, you are liable to go rummaging around a lot more often when you feel bored or could do with a break. At the office, snacks and the like might not be as readily available, and so you may be less tempted to eat between meals, or just consume empty calories.
Once again, discipline is necessary. If you are unable to completely resist temptation, you might want to tie your food rewards to work-related targets and goals previously suggested. So for example, by your morning break, you should have accomplished A, B and C, and only then can you have half of the muffin you had been eyeing since breakfast. Hopefully, the last thing you want is to have gained 10 pounds (5 kilogrammes) because you were working from home for just two weeks!
Image credit: Arek Socha (Pixabay)
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Very timely!
I was wondering about the internet connectivity strength during the time. There would be more people collaborating online that usual. For example, people I would normally go and meet in person at their offices will likely too to be online. Hence wouldn’t it be essential to re-check internet connectivity?
Distractions are the greatest Achilles’ heel, in my view. Neighbour drops by to enquire about the recent roof ‘do it yourself’, you did recently or just the slow cooked chicken in mushroom sauce dish you had been wanting to fix, but had had no time or a sudden bang outside, just want to check what’s going on….
Yes Kamutula, distractions are the enemy when working from home!
However, you also highlight an important point about Internet connectivity. The quality of residential Internet service tends to be poorer than what is offered to commercial customers. So, matters related to reliability, not solely speed, will perhaps come to the fore… especially since children are being at home and employees are teleworking, there are likely to be even greater demands on residential networks, which telcos may need to address.