CONTINUE THE MOMENTUM EVEN WHEN YOU WORK FROM HOME

Working from home / WFH, most trending words nowadays and most of them started to hate these words already. Even though the majority of the multinational companies already use this concept but now COVID 19 led most of the other private and public companies to get into this new reality. 

Working from home has astonishing benefits for both employees and organization in terms of cost, productivity, accountability, work life balance and etc but lack of practices, experiences and tools will make this concept impracticable and boring most of the time and the management feel it’s hard for them to track what their employees are doing, overcoming this is so simple by implementing the WFH as a mandatory element in the company’s operations even after the COVID 19 situation is solved.

How can the organization have this as a continued practice? 

1. Introduce WFH day: Allow each department to choose their working from home day twice / thrice in every month and make it mandatory. Through this the employees will be forced to work from home and improve their practices throughout. 
2. Continuous training to the employees: Organize training to employees on remote working tools and best practices, for them to get familiarized with the concept.
3. Hire new employees on WFH basis: If organizations are hiring the back end employees who are not exposed to the clients it’s better to hire them on a full / partial WFH basis. 

Get the concept straight and follow this 8C best practices to make WFH productive and beneficial;

1. Continue the morning routine: Practice the same routine as what you had when you were travelling to office. Wake up at the same time and carry out all your morning rituals. More freedom and laziness will kill your productivity. 
2. Create a work station: Find a spot at your home and create a dedicated workstation for yourself. Sitting on the bed / couch and working will definitely distract you and it’s unhealthy when it comes to using a laptop etc. 
3. Create a plan for each day: Distancing yourself from colleagues might result in forgetting tasks therefore create your plan everyday and execute accordingly. 
4. Choose to eat a proper diet: Limit your access to the kitchen when you work from home. Have your usual diet on time and stop cooking in the middle whenever you want. 
5. Come up with breaks: Have your coffee break and phone a friend / family member. Have a control of your work. Do not stress and over work. 
6. Connect with people face to face: Use a proper video conferencing tool to connect with your colleagues and client face to face. Productivity increases and the meeting will become meaningful when you have a face to face approach. 
7. Communicate with those around you: Communicate your daily agenda to those around you to avoid distractions and unnecessary tasks. 
8. Cancel noise around: If possible find your workstation spot in a  less noisy place at your home and also it’s important to invest in active noise cancelling headphones when you work from home. It’s important to cancel the unnecessary noises when having conference calls. Thinking it’s too early to invest in noise cancelling headphones? Don’t worry, keep your side mute when you are not talking.

Best practices with smart tools will make the concept super productive, there are so many tools / applications you find on the internet today which are sometimes complicated to use, expensive, have security loopholes which can expose your confidential data to outside and have many distractions therefore choose your productivity tool wisely. 

Google is a technology company engineering and testing the productivity tools called G Suite for many years and re-defined the concept of remote working. Lots of companies around the world are getting 100% benefits when working remotely using G Suite, here are some tools on  G Suite and how you can apply them when you work remotely to maximize your productivity. 

1. G-mail: Simple, easy to use and secured email solution to communicate with your colleagues and customers. 
2. Calendar: Google calendar can be shared among your colleagues who are connected. This will increase the connectivity with your team. Team members can see what others are upto when they schedule the meeting. Easy to schedule meetings with clients, meeting minutes and other relevant documents required for the meeting can be attached on the calendar invitation itself. 
3. Drive: Store all your work related documents on the secured Google Drive. Team members who have access to the documents can access anytime they want. 
4. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms: Great collaboration tools from Google. Create the document and share with your team to collaborate at same time. Avoid multiple versions of the document and do not wait until one of your teammates to complete their work to start yours, work at  the same time. 
5. Hangout / Meet: Connect with your customers and teammates seamlessly with the hangout / meet video conferencing tool. Share your presentation with your colleagues and have an effective meeting remotely. 
6. Keep: Don’t miss out anything. Record everything you wanted to do on Keep. Don’t mess up your home office with lots of sticky notes which can be easily swept away at home, replace it with Google Keep. 

Stop hating the word and start exploring the benefits, WFH will be crucial and mandatory in upcoming years. Get yourself prepared and be ready to continue the momentum.