In front of the circumstances occurring worldwide, the home office allowed different economic sectors to keep their activities and minimize the current crisis consequences.
This is the point where the genuine challenge must be recognized. How do you keep an active business when all employees are working from home? Which practices should we adopt?
First, we will mention several generalities linked to the advantages of working from home. To understand how to face this challenge, later we will show three important disadvantages to adapting work to this era when, probably, the home office would be a working modality for several companies, even after the Covid-19 crisis.
After naming advantages, disadvantages, and how to avoid or control them, we will recommend useful workforce tools.
- We had left the streets and public transportation. Most countries’ capital cities were established in a way where several businesses and important places were in downtown or their north. This configuration forces various workers to pass hours commuting.
Now they save the time and the tiredness provoked by their trips, allowing them to have more mood and energy to do their tasks. These are hours to be enjoyed performing leisure activities or having quality time with family.
Being home means more mood to house affairs
- In several cases, being at the office prevents us from taking care of house affairs, leading to stress and less focus at work.
However, at home, we have more time and mood to monitor familiar and house events without interfering with the working day. Now we can go on with the disadvantages.
It’s necessary to enjoy these advantages, but we can’t fall into the mistake of increasing working hours because of that. There are processes to be optimized, and professional routines can be different.
The balance between office work and time spent at home
- Even though working from home reduces commuting-associated stress, it can lead to raising anxiety and worries about being stuck in a project because of a loss of productivity compared with the office. We should ask ourselves: how do we take responsibility when working remotely? It’s crucial to understand that, even though we have more time for other activities, we can’t realize that it would be the same as being in the office, especially as newcomers.
First, simple attitudes, such as not being all day in pajama or waking up early, are important to get into the mood of facing work from home with responsibility. Second, avoid all distractions (e.g.: telephone, television, music, and others). Everything has its time.
Being sedentary is not a good idea
- Being several hours without exercising, which is necessary for the body, can affect the performance of our daily activities. Programming workout or dancing routines once a week could be a good recommendation for the team because not moving can affect our motor, cardiac and respiratory health.
Communication is more vital now, but it requires total efficiency
- We are using video communications tools today more than ever in history, but they also demand much time and meeting participants not always are straightforward in their pitches. It’s imperative to have the clearest and the quickest video calls possible. It’s also necessary having a call to present an employee's duties and, maybe, another one ending the day.
The difference between working from home today and before pandemics is that we also have our leisure time at home and restricted outdoor and public spaces activities. We aren’t used to being so long at home. Our mental health could be affected not only by not interacting with our colleagues but also by the time we remain distant.
To solve the issue mentioned above, one solution could be to schedule one or two weekly video calls to debate different topics than work. Why not play a game after work hours? The most important is not allowing to cut all interaction off due to distance.
Some home-office useful digital tools
Video calls. Google Meet, Zoom and Ovoo are the most used free video conferencing tools today. In Google Calendar, you can schedule a meeting or video call and all participants can receive a reminder email.
Manage your projects. We recommend using Trello, Asana or Basecamp. Both apps are quite useful and you can quickly learn how to use them. They work as panels in which you schedule your tasks for each ongoing project. We could connect these tools to Google Drive.
Work data storage. The two most used tools for storing and sharing files in the cloud are Google Drive and Dropbox. Have the most benefit from these shared storage services in the cloud provided by Google and Microsoft.
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