Introduction
Covid-19 has changed the way people do many things, including the way they work. Today, transitioning to work remotely, and to new styles of doing work from home can be exciting, and for most organizations and people, it is now a new normal. The majority of contact centers had to implement work from home set-ups in the bid to curtail employee exposure to COVID – 19 without necessarily discontinuing work.
Generally, COvid-19 forced most people to adjust their working methods, including working remotely from home rather than from one commonplace. Now working from home is just as normal. Nonetheless, not everybody has settled into the new normal comfortably. Most people are struggling with the transition to work from home, having been familiar with working in teams and in a contact center. Are you one of them? Here are 5 steps you can take.
- Make home conducive for work
Well, you can only work from home if it is conducive to work in. But as you will likely notice, you did not originally build and/or set your house for work. That means that the first step in your transition to work from home is to make your house conducive for work. You need to rearrange the furniture, perhaps shift a thing or two to create your working space. Since the tables were not for work, you might need to hire a carpenter to make for you are a new one, or adjust an existing one to match your work desk.
Generally, the first task as you transition to work from home is to create a working environment. Start by designating a special workspace inside your house, avail all the working tools that you will need, and set them up in the format you find most conducive. One of the things you will likely struggle with is to shake off the home nostalgia and assume a work disposition under the same setting. However, a well-set workplace that reflects your work environment is a good way to start.
- Schedule your day
The added challenge of working from home is that it comes with numerous distractions. If unmanaged, you will be unproductive for much of the day, and will likely – most likely – miss your work targets. In addition, the fact that you are working alone, far from the watchful eye of your boss, does not exactly mean that you are free to do as you wish. Instead, you have the added responsibility of supervising yourself to achieve performance targets. You must fight the distraction – including of domestic chores – from your professional tasks.
The solution is to schedule your day. Doing so will allow you to prioritize and schedule both your professional and domestic chores against the time you have available. This will increase your chance of evading any distraction involving domestic chores when at that material time; the schedule indicates you should be doing a professional task. Scheduling your tasks, this way is your best chance to beat work deadlines and achieve performance targets.
- Continue communication
Were you previously working in a contact center with colleagues, and were perhaps a member of a task team? Well, working from home does not mean that they have dissolved the team! Instead, it is essential that team members working in their respective homes maintain good communication. Fortunately, advanced internet and communication technologies nowadays make communication easy and in real-time.
Smoothening your transition to work from home requires that you maintain good communication with your colleagues. Task-related issues might arise that require another colleague to address before you can proceed, so you must be in constant contact. At any rate, you still have to prepare progress reports, file relevant data, and report on your performance, including met targets. Indeed, depending on the work from home policy of your employer, it is possible you will also have to routinely join in and take part in departmental sessions and presentations via a preferred remote video platform.
- Dress as though going office
The benefit of working from home, and one that one might wish to savor is the freedom to wear any cloth of your choice. Nevertheless, you do not do yourself justice wearing a jumpsuit even as you take the chair in your workplace. You only add to the difficulty of shaking off the casual feel of being home to adopt a somberness of work at home.
How you dress during work from home hours is critical to your performance. The dress code rather sets the mood one adopts. A psychological factor that influences your level of confidence and readiness to accomplish the day’s tasks starts with your dress code. If you dress casually, you are likely going to treat the day’s tasks casually, and thereby not get the tasks done on time. To transition to work from home smoothly. You need to mind what you wear. Generally, dress up as you previously used to, as though you are going to the office. Doing so builds confidence to take on the day’s tasks, and puts a sense of urgency into your days. In that sense, you will treat work tasks more seriously as you would, if you were working under the watch of your supervisor.
- Take a break occasionally and routinely workout
When working from home, you run the risk of working marathon, and going past official work hours. Previously, your colleagues would cue you for break tea and lunch hour breaks, but at home, you are all alone. You must be conscious of time and deliberately take those breaks. Your body needs to regenerate and you need more energy to keep working.
Besides, whereas you will be taking more time doing work-related tasks, you should also include in your schedule, time for working out in between office work sessions. The idea is to keep yourself mentally and physically fit and healthy, and shrug off the lethargy of working alone. You do not need to work out intensively. Instead, some simple body stretches press-ups, or walking exercises suffice.
