Working From Home Best Practices
Although for many of us the situation was forced by the pandemic, working from home has increasingly become the norm for people in recent years, and for the most part it has been a net positive. The time taken out of the day by commuting is now available for gaining a bit of extra sleep or for cracking the surface of the day’s work. We don’t need to contend with traffic at the end of the day, just switch off the laptop and walk into another room. We now have more time available to spend with friends, family and pets, so it’s all good.
That being said, it would be naive to imagine that there wasn’t a downside to remote working, and for many people there are quite a few. One persistent consideration we all need to bear in mind is that stress is still something that can happen when you are working from home. There is certainly something to be said for ensuring that your home, which wasn’t initially intended to be a workplace, is well-enough appointed to aid you in keeping stress at bay. Now there is reason to believe that home-working is more than just an emergency precaution, keep the following in mind to ensure that it fits around you.
Maintain comfort
Physical comfort, and the absence of it, have a definitive part to play in your stress levels. If your home is set up just for living in, then it might not be a comfortable place in which to work. The same furnishings and home decor that are just right for watching TV or enjoying a family meal may not be right for working. You may need to make a more permanent workspace, and even hire an electrician to make it so that that area is easy to heat, light and manage in a way that fits working. This will also make it easier to transition back into home life at the end of a day.
Just because you’re not in an office, doesn’t mean the rules change
Working from home does mean, to a certain extent, welcoming work into your home. We all realized that the first time we had a Zoom call in front of our bookcase, trying to look uber-professional, before being interrupted by cats or toddlers. Again, that was in a time when we were all just scraping together the best working environment we could muster at short notice. Now, things are different, and we need to be strict about how much we allow the office to enter the home. It may seem like you’ve got to answer an email that’s sent at 10pm, because after all you’re in your workplace. The truth is, as soon as the appointed working day ends, your time is your own.
Be prepared to fight your corner
For many people, remote working stress arises from the feeling that it is a privilege bestowed upon them which their bosses can rescind at any time, for any reason or none. The reality is that home working works for you, and if your bosses have any vision they’ll see it works for them too, in terms of your productivity and well-being. There may be debates over whether your home-working arrangement is a bar to progressing within the company, but if some people need reminding how much more expensive it would be to replace you than to maintain your position and give you the same perks an office worker would get, then maybe you need to remind them of that.
