Maintaining Productivity When Working From Home

Maintaining Productivity When Working From Home

During the Coronavirus pandemic working from home has become a necessity for a lot of office-based workers. This style of working can be seen by most employees as presenting numerous benefits, but what about businesses?

For most companies, the main question that comes with working from home is how to maintain employee wellbeing and productivity. The home environment can be comfortable, but distractive, for example when family members are around. And employees can have their mind wander after other activities, like the news, or social media, or just lose focus on their task for lack of planning over their day.

Here are a few tips to help you stay on track and be productive when working from home:

Planning ahead

Beginning the day with admin and planning actually detracts from doing those tasks in the first place. Planning out the day ahead of time will ensure employees have a plan to stick to and are less likely to change it. Setting a target for their workday will ensure they have something to commit to and all of the assignments are completed.

Stay connected to your work colleagues

Sometimes working from home can make employees feel isolated from the rest of the company. What businesses can do is to organise social or wellbeing activities so that team members can still be in touch with each other. Team building activities or wellbeing services such as wellbeing workshops or fitness classes can at the same time relief stress and create a chance for socialising. Making sure your technology is up to scratch is vital as nobody wants to drop out midway through a zoom meeting.

Social Media detox

Social media is a big-time sap both in the office and working from home, so a way to avoid this affecting productivity is by logging out of social media during working hours. Another step is to remove any links to these sites from your browser’s bookmarks to avoid the temptation of wasting precious time.

Getting fresh air and sunshine breaks

Working from home doesn’t mean you staying at home all the time. Our mind can only stay focused on a task for a certain amount of time and after that it gets tired, affecting the ability to stay productive. It’s a good practice, even when in the office, to regularly take short breaks to get some fresh air, sunlight and rest mentally. In addition to being beneficial to employee mental and physical wellbeing, a change of scenery might be just what is needed to stay productive and get that final piece of work done.

Break up your day

Remember to take breaks regularly to stay focussed and productive. Studies have shown taking regular breaks improves your productivity and helps with getting multiple tasks finished. There are various time management techniques you can implement into your daily working routine to help you stay focused. Working solidly on one task for 25 minutes at a time and then taking a 5-minute break is one of these techniques.

Having a routine as if in the office

Dress as if you were going into the office. This includes a change of clothes, showering and other morning hygiene routines. Sitting in pyjamas might be comfortable but may cause you to feel tired and unmotivated. Plan an outing on your break, this will force you into the habit of getting changed in the morning.

A change to your work environment is challenging, so trying some of the tips above will help you towards a more productive work day.

Here at Joyful Living, we offer a workshop on managing productivity when working from home. Our workshops are run both online and in person so you can pick whichever suits you the most.

You can find a list of our workshops at our page here https://joyful-living.co/our-services/wellbeing-workshops/