Having years of experience with remote work has allowed Malace HR to become familiar with many of the nuances of working from home, and to offer some recommendations for being more effective at remote work. By now, the novelty of working from home has probably worn off for most people, which means sitting around all day in your pajamas is no longer an exciting prospect.
The original appeal of Zoom meetings has also probably worn off, and many people now probably consider them a bit of a chore and something less than desirable on the daily schedule. The plain fact is that working remotely like this will probably be in place for several months to come, and that means you need to do your best to adapt to the changed circumstances. For sure, most people probably still consider working remotely to be advantageous, even if some details have to be addressed.
For instance, you may have tight quarters in your setup for working from home, and there might also be a whole slew of distractions that interrupt your concentration on work requirements. Here are some methods recommended by Malace HR which will help you to make the most of your remote working opportunity, so that you can continue to consider it an advantage rather than an imposition.
Take Care of Yourself
It will be inherently difficult to move around much when you’re trying to work from home. You may have to get involved with home activities with children (who are also obliged to work from home), but for the most part, you won’t have to walk far to get everything you need. This means that you are likely to be far less active working from home, simply because everything you need is in one place and you don’t need to walk around to find anything.
While you’re working from home, you must maintain some level of activity, so you should try to incorporate walking, jogging, or some other form of exercise into your daily routine. If you happen to have an old exercise machine which you haven’t used in ages, now is the time to dust it off and put it back into use. All kinds of research have been done on this topic, and it is known positively that regular exercise will not only improve your mood, but it will also boost your cognitive abilities and make you sharper for doing all your work tasks.
Maintain Communications and Connections
It can be quite a change in your life when you’ve been working around some people every day, and you suddenly find yourself at home alone, or with possibly one or two other people in the household. When you’re in a group environment, it can help you strive toward achieving group goals and to stay on task. Obviously, that will be lacking when you’re home alone, so you need to take some steps to keep in touch with workers remotely.
Try hooking up with your co-workers on Skype or on Zoom, or whatever other hangout software you prefer, and keep in touch while you’re working. It might be highly beneficial for you to have your fellow workers on your monitor where you can see them, so you can all boost each other’s motivation to get work done. This will not only make you feel less alone, but it will probably also help you concentrate, and get your tasks done on schedule.
Look Professional
There’s an old saying which boils down to the fact that in order to be professional, you have to look the part. This means hanging around in your pajamas all day is not going to make you feel very professional, and it may actually inhibit your productivity. This doesn’t mean that you have to dress up in a suit and tie and sit at your computer desk to get work done.
However, you should definitely take a shower, shave if necessary, and do most of the things you would normally do in the morning before going to work. Dressing in a presentable manner will be part of that, and anything else that you would normally do to prepare for a workday should be part of your remote preparations. This is a good routine to get into, because it will become part of your thinking each day, and it will help you associate all the daily details of looking professional, with actually being professional and accomplishing work tasks.
Establish Good Work Habits
You must establish good work habits in your remote environment because if you don’t, your approach will lack consistency and your productivity will suffer. It may take a few days to discover which habits are most beneficial and which tend toward increasing your effectiveness, but when you do discover those habits, you need to repeat them every day. This will help you remember exactly what you should be doing, rather than having to rethink it every day and re-invent the wheel.
Obviously, your daily routine will be much different than it would have been if you were in the office every day. But even if your home routine calls for some period of childcare, you can work that into your daily habits, so that you become as effective as possible in the periods before and after childcare. The key to this is that you need to develop a consistent schedule for it so that both you and they can rely on a certain time frame each day where you are committed to childcare.
Then you’ll be in a much better position to anticipate the kind of time you will have available the rest of the day, and you’ll be able to slot your tasks into those available hours, so you can accomplish as much as possible. Another aspect of creating a routine is to establish specific places that you are going to use as your work area and sticking to that specific workspace. This will help you associate that particular area with doing work, so that any time you actually sit down in that specific area, you will automatically begin to think in terms of accomplishing work tasks.
