All you need to know about work from home!

“ Timber Woods doesn’t grow with ease, Stronger the wind the stronger the trees”

It was not a long time ago when people who used to work from home were called freelancers or special consultants. The new age overpowered the ecosystem with connected solutions and increased productivity globally. People took the leap out of boundaries, they travel, they hustle, they learn, they teach and they follow their passion without being physically confined to one particular office space, they can be anywhere and yet remain productive for the business.

Until lately people who were self-motivated and single point solution providers were working from home and delivering results but the onset of new world order with pandemics, traffic, pollution and what not posted a new challenge among business leaders to get the work done from the Teams. Because the professional ecosystem inside work offices is embedded in muscle memories of each and every professional, they get up, get ready, reach office, deliver work, go home, sleep and repeat. This is more of a routine for almost everyone.

Breaking the routine and adopting a new one can be challenging for anyone. We are going to cover following in this article

1. Top 5 Struggles during work from home
2. How to set up your home office and tools
3. How to conduct during virtual meetings and remote works
4. How to set up your teams for enhanced productivity during work from home.
5. Data-Backed productivity practices during work from home

Top 5 struggles during working from home:-

Here we list down the top 5 issues one faces during work from home. Later we will let you know the solutions to handle such problems.

1. Adapting to a new routine

Let’s accept this, it is not easy to change habits for any person, we all are conditioned to perform based on repetitive activities we have done in the past.  Most of the people are mentally conditioned to work in a pattern. 

In our case, the most difficult part is your office is where you live. Most of the people had issues maintaining work-life balance and it gets difficult a degree further when you are working from home. Your personal and professional space blend into one.

     2)Handling Distractions

Work from home becomes even more challenging when you see your daily personal chores in front of you. If you live alone, with pets or with family, you might get unexpected doorbells, bills, alerts. You tend to get distracted with conversations, bills, news alerts and all these are in human nature wherein attention span is often reduced during homestays. Unannounced interruptions can switch the focus in an instant.

    3) Lack of office interactions

Office social circle is super addictive, in fact, most of the people do visit the office for their office social circle only.  Work from home can induce the feeling of loneliness, which directly impacts the work quality and productivity. During office working, anyone can walk up to anyone to seek help wherein during work from home, it can get really annoying to ping someone and seeking the revert. 

    4)Technical Faults

Office spaces are designed with contingency plans for technical faults. Proactive process and decision protocols are available at offices to mitigate the risk during service delivery. While at home things can get annoying if your computer stops working or internet speeds went down or your keyboard behaving sluggishly.  Any such event can lead to delays often results in frustrations.

    5) Setting Priorities for work

Working from home can be tedious in terms of discipline. One can often get delayed to initiate the work or at times feels that the system is there and we have time to get the work completed later. But this never happens unless you prioritize the work.  Working in a set duration dedicatedly enhances the quality of work and productivity.

How to set up your Home Office.

Work from home requires equal or sometimes more effort than working from an office. The process starts with getting ready mentally for working from home. One needs to understand that working from home is not a holiday or part-time work. Its a full-time responsibility and requires 100 percent attention.

We have to address the above 5 struggles through optimizing our workplace to stay organized, focused, distraction-free and productive. The process is simple and we call it IAAPB approach

1. Identify
2. Arrange
3. Allocate
4. Perform
5. Backup

Identify where do you want to place your work table, ideally it should be facing a wall with appropriate overhead lighting.  Ensure we have good network reception and wifi signals at the work table. 

If it’s a dedicated room, do check if you can put up the “Do Not Disturb” board whenever you close the door.

Arrange Worktable near the electrical sockets or use extension cable in such a way that it should not be visible directly during your work. Ensure the worktable has enough space to put your laptop /computer screen along with diaries, calender, stationery holder, telephone/mobile space and a water bottle or an instant coffee maker.

Allocate yourself fixed timings, Use the 90 Minutes session rule. Working in sessions helps a lot usually 4-6 numbers of 90 minutes sessions usually result in great productivity. Take 15-20 minutes breaks, during each session. Decide what you want to wear the next day during your work from home in advance a night before, get dressed formally and be available during your operational hours.

Perform as you work in your office, understand the requirement and perform according to the plan. Be available online, on office chat application, keep your cell phone handy and ensure that you are available whenever your work needs you.

Backup plans are most important, as you are staying at home and anything can happen unannounced. Your computer may falter, keep a backup PC ready in advance or sync your emails to your phone and tablet. Wifi Internet can throw slow speeds, in response, you can use your cellphone hotspot or USB tethering feature to use as a backup internet solution. 

Keep technical support numbers handy at all times.

Tools & Services for Remote jobs

One would need the following list of physical products 

1. A work table and an ergonomic desk chair
2. A Table Organiser for stationaries
3. A Table Lamp or an Overhead light
4. Strong Internet Connection with  Good Router, preferably the one which support multiple SSID wherein you can allocate dedicated bandwidth for work SSID
5. A good quality Noice Cancelling headphones and a good quality WebCam.
6. All in One Printer/Scanner.
7. Coffee Maker/Water Dispenser/Light Snacks.
8. ArtWorks, Plants, Painting to induce calmness.
9. A Calender.
10. A Notepad 

Apart from Physical products, there are certain intangible products and services that are essential for working from home

1. A cloud-based service like GSuite or Dropbox, wherein you can save your work. This enables you to work from anywhere and any location.
2. Softwares like TeamViewer or Anydesk  for screen sharing or remotely accessing computers and devices
3. Meeting Softwares like Zoom and Skype should be installed on your work computer. Both of these software is excellent for team meetings.
4. Team collaboration software like Slack and Trello are excellent, for working on multiple projects at once.
5. For broad communication desktop apps of WhatsApp and Telegram are also helpful

How to Conduct during virtual meetings and remote jobs

The people you work with and work for are mostly aware of your location. You need to remain honest and confident during your work from home. It’s okay if you have not so perfect backdrop or background as long as you are delivering your work efficiently.

One needs to wear formal clothes during their work hours, this only helps you feel confident in front of the camera. However, be rest assured that your content in front of the camera is more important than your looks but it’s no harm to look and feel good.

Since you are working from home, there might be some unexpected events that can happen during virtual meetings like doorbells, TV sounds, pet noises or anything unimaginable, in such scenarios please remain calm and no need to react unless it’s important. 

Everyone is human and everyone will understand your presence in such scenarios. So just stay confident.

How to set up your teams for enhanced productivity during work from home?

Managing remote teams can be quite tiring at times. Every leader should prepare themselves for better instruction deliveries, feedbacks, followups and expectation settings. 

Teams should be educated on long term goals and short terms goals. Every team should be provided a detailed plan for the day, for the week and for the month.

Inform your teams that their work hours, attendance, availability, and productivity is tracked and how their work will be quantified. 

Develop a system, or a template for onboarding teams, explanation of the repetitive task. Create a video or audio-based instructions.

Your teams might be working from different time zones, so one needs to identify an overlapping time for better communication and for conducting a team meeting

Display progress reports for teams, and share feedbacks individually along with individual progress with team members.

Since working from home can become monotonous or boring, Team leaders should enforce an open team chat conversation at all times. It might provide small distractions but can also help team members to stay connected with each other.  So just the right amount of chat notifications and emails helps the team members to remain on point and focused towards the assigned tasks

Choosing the right mode of communication with team members is very important since we have email, chat, video chat, screen sharing, pre-recorded messaging and other project management tools. We can collaborate with team members according to the need.

We need to honor the human factor during virtual offices’ work. People work from home, they do real work and they need the motivation to get the quality and quantity of work delivery. Team manager’s roles get even more complicated as one needs to not only get the work delivered but also keep themselves proactive in tracking and measuring productivity at all times.

What Data Says about working remotely

There was a survey done by HighFive a video conferencing company wherein they measured, productivity, satisfaction, connectivity and, work-life balance parameters. Please do read the facts below

1. 77% reported greater productivity.
2. 24% were willing to work for longer hours to accomplish goals.
3. 30% accomplished more in less time.
4. 44% felt just as connected with colleagues as on site..
5. 10% felt even more connected.
6. 45% got more sleep.
7. 35% got more exercise.
8. 42% ate healthier.
9. 53% were less stressed
10.  52% were less likely to take time off while working from home

Above numbers proves that work from home improves productivity , increases satisfaction and better work life balances. Tweeking from a regular office going workstyle can be terrifying initially but minor adjustments and the right mindset can help anyone achieve more.

Remote work is awesome , you save time on commute , no one gets over your shoulder be it your manager or colleagues. Benefits are advantageous over regular office work

Productivity tips for Work from home

1)Always setup reminders or alerts for breaks , office hours and follow them.

2)Always communicate with team members whenever you log out 

3)Ensure to turn off notification on your office phone or computers so that you avoid going back to work post office hours.

4)Perform the most critical task at the beginning of the day. Work in Sessions 

5)Do keep one or two social interaction sessions with your team members.

6)Always pretend that you are in office , prepare yourself mentally about the same.

7) Do Not work from bed , couch or any other place . Always work from a dedicated work space.

8) Always plan what you would do after completing your office hours.

9) Use technology to stay connected but ensure you logout from social media

10)Set correct expectations with friends and family .