There’s No Place Like Home (Maybe)

Have you ever walked in the front door of your house after a busy day at the office, loosened your tie (if you were wearing one), kicked off your shoes, and crashed on the couch or your favorite recliner glad that you were finally home?

Most people who, at least until recently, had to report to a physical office for work have had this experience. For those working from home before the pandemic, a traffic jam meant little more than navigating a sleeping dog on the stairs or a strategically placed Lego building block.

All that has changed now that nearly everyone is now working remotely. The question is, are we ready for it? When it comes to work, is there no place like home?

A new mindset

A recent article titled “Homebound: When working from home is no longer optional” talks about technology being only “one element” of our comfort and productivity potential in a remote working environment.

According to this author and others, maintaining a “business as usual” mindset is key. What this means is having the discipline to avoid weekend household duties on a workday or caving to the demands of bored children.

Pants may be optional if you are hosting a radio show, but similar flexibility is not the order of the day when working from home. To be effective, you have to stick to the same routine you had when you were leaving the house to go to work.

Interrupting behavior

While it is not exactly business-as-usual in the physical sense, it is business-as-usual, nonetheless. With everyone is working from home, video facetime is the way we now communicate. We are all in the same boat in that we are being “forced” to become more familiar with the unfamiliar to get our work done.

Since your entire family, including pets, are home, be prepared for the occasional unplanned interruption. The other day, an associate told me that during a business call, a VP’s 4-year-old started pounding on the door yelling, “I’m bored!” repeatedly. Calmly the VP said, “Excuse me, I am just going to mute myself,” and went to deal with the intrusion. A few minutes later the executive came back, apologized for the interruption, and continued with the call.

While the age and the refrain may be different, statistics show that while at the office, 51.5% of us are interrupted frequently by a co-worker. The only difference is that (as much as you would like to) you cannot give the co-worker a timeout.

The other side of the coin

Despite having to make a few adjustments to deal with the above scenarios, you should take comfort in the results of a 2018 survey. According to the survey, remote working decreased interruptions for respondents by 30%. The most notable benefit was a significant reduction in the stress of having to manage unwelcome workplace intrusions.

Another stress reducer was the fact that there was no longer the need to commute. What was even more interesting is that 83% of workers said that their overall mental health improved working away from the office.

So, what impact does this have on our overall performance? Are we able to do our jobs from home as well as we did them at the office?

From a performance standpoint, 53% said that their productivity actually increased while working from home, while 38% said it stayed the same. A paltry 8% complained that they were less effective remotely. Taking into account both the pros and the cons, when it comes to working, it appears that there really is no place like home.