The majority of our working life has been at office and lifestyle built around the concept of working from 9-5 in an office environment. Suddenly we are now faced with a situation to work from home for an extended period of time. This has blurred the working and life balance completely. Working from home has saved precious quality time and saved us expenses on transportation, parking fees, and insurance premium.
The best way to maintain balance and adjust to the full-time work from home environment is to minimize the changes. You can do it by maintaining the office schedule as if you are still working at the office. Also, this is not going to be a permanent work culture. After a few months, the majority of the working population will go to the worksite to work. Try to avoid incurring heavy expenses to set up a home office.
There are few things to follow to have a smooth working environment at home:
Find a corner in the room where you can sit with back to the wall. This will help you to control the background while having a video call with your partners and colleagues.
Keep a lamp near your table so that you can have an ample amount of light to focus on your face while having a video call.
Use a Bluetooth headphone or hand free headphone to communicate with others.
If you have spare LED/LCD TV then you can also use that as an additional monitor.
Take a coffee break at regular intervals. If possible maintain the same schedule that you had at the office.
Work from home will increase your actual working hours and research has observed that people are working 10 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day as was the practice. You can keep a strict shutdown time and stop any office work from that time to give some quality time for yourselves.
Out of sight and out of mind, the biggest impact due to work from home is the in-person interaction. You had easy access to all your colleagues at the office but working from home has severely restricted that access. You can manage this obstacle by noting down the individuals who are important to your work and promotions. You can have some time dedicated to having personal interactions with them. It is better to call them or have a video chat with them to update them regarding the work that you are doing and your plan.
The remote work is also a problem for your supervisor and your colleagues. It is better for you to take the initiative and arrange a regular call with important stakeholders so that they can feel that you are still close to them and working diligently to achieve the organization’s goal.