With a further lockdown extension announced and speculation that it will continue even longer than that, we decided to share some working from home best practice. You’ll find that many of the tips cross over in some way, making it easy to achieve. Our team remains fully operational and is staying updated with all the latest news and guidance in order to ensure the high quality service for our clients. We continue to hold weekly challenges amongst the team to keep spirits high. A recent challenge was to recreate our favorite holiday photos at home. We’ve included some of the results the bottom of the page, enjoy!
Best Practice Tips
- A Dedicated Space - Make sure to assign a space in your home dedicated to work. By having an area set up with supplies that you commit to using every day, you create a home office effect. In turn this helps to minimize distractions and allow you to focus. Whilst working from home might mean that your commute is just from bed to kitchen to desk, it’s important to make the distinction between areas for relaxing and areas for working.
- A Daily Routine - It’s important to wake up and get ready as you would do on a normal workday. While social distancing and working from home, create a routine that will keep your day flowing the same way it would in the office. That means logging in at the same time you would usually start work, taking regular water and coffee breaks throughout the day, stopping to have lunch and stopping work and logging off at the same time you usually would. Losing the need to leave the office to have lunch or travel home makes it easy to work longer hours than normal. Setting a daily routine will allow you work in a more productive and sustainable way.
- Maintain Communication - Working at a distance from your team creates a gap in daily communications. It is important to maintain regular open dialogue with your colleagues, as we miss out on the more casual conversations we have in a shared office. This means we can forget to keep colleagues updated on all things we’re working on and messages can also become lost in translation. It is important to be clear with instructions, questions and answers in all your communications and to share even the small details with our teams.
- Move And Be Social – It’s easy to sit in the same place all day when working from home and you probably don’t have to move far to your sofa after your work day has finished. Being inactive and staying in the same place all day can make it harder to concentrate and also be very uncomfortable. Making sure to move away from your work area to have lunch will give your brain a break from working so your can return to your desk refreshed for the afternoon. Make sure to get out for regular walks to stretch your legs, whilst staying within government guidelines of course. If you are used to exercising in the gym or attending classes, find ways to continue your work-out in the house, many organisations are sharing lots of fitness content online to help with this. If you are part of a sociable team, remember to take time to chat with colleagues socially and separate from your daily updates and conference calls. Arrange to have virtual coffee breaks and even arrange virtual activities for out of hours.
