Running for the metro or train every weekday, sitting for long hours in the office, struggling hard to meet deadlines; these are common for people attending office in usual hours. But there is another scenario too. Attending office meetings in your favorite pajamas, video conferencing while traveling or doing your home errands while attending office training; these are common scenarios for people working from home.
Work from home is the new normal now, especially after covid 19 pandemic. Though started as a necessity, this trend in businesses and organizations has been preferred by employers and employees alike. All thanks to several benefits, it brings to both.
The Shift to Home-based Work
Working from home always seems to be alluring as there is no office politics, no distractions and no bosses around. At the same time, remote work brings flexibility in office hours, saves your commuting time and gives you more time for your personal life.
Though the benefits of working from home are countless, there are also many problems with working from home. Whether it’s setting up a new workplace at home or ensuring effective communication with team members, working from home is not everyone’s cup of tea. With the evolving technology and companies introducing new operating ways, this home-based work is surely bringing a significant impact on an individual’s life.
So, here we analyze the remote working challenges and how you can get over them.
Common Challenges Faced by Remote Workers
Let’s take a closer look at the challenges faced by remote employees. However, research shows that despite these challenges, people still want to continue working from home for at least four days in a week for the rest of their lives.
Collaboration and Communication
Mostly, remote working relies on non-verbal communication. So, you need to make it effective enough to convey messages clearly.
Also, without any personal interactions, it is difficult to build rapport and set connections with your colleagues. In absence of effective communication, collaborating with team members on a project seems difficult. Also, the probability of misinterpreting your messages and information increases.
Time Management
Failing to manage time is another working from home challenge. As you do not have any fixed routine of starting and ending your day, you often take your job into your personal time. Also, due to loneliness, you feel less motivated, leading to procrastination.
Further, as there are innumerable distractions at home, you fail to deliver tasks on time. As you have pending tasks lying around you, you tend to overdo and fail to give time to personal life.
Managing Distractions and Staying Productive
Homes are not quiet places like offices. Crying babies, fighting siblings, loud sounds of grinder, TV or vacuum cleaners, barking dogs are common scenarios in every home. No matter how organized and disciplined you are, distraction is obvious. Further, even if you get up to take a 10 minute break, these distractions do not make it less than an hour.
So, it is difficult to manage these distractions and stay productive with them.
Balancing Work and Personal Life
If there is no physical separation of your office while you work from home, it becomes difficult to set clear boundaries for office and personal time. Employers expect you to remain engaged even after office hours that often encroach your personal time. Often, you may find it difficult to engage in any personal activity as you are never switched off when working from home.
Balancing work and personal life become more difficult when there are no clear boundaries for office and personal responsibilities. Inability to neither focus on your projects completely nor on personal life often leads to this imbalance.
Maintaining Physical and Mental Health
An imbalance in your personal and professional life often affects your health mentally and physically. While at home, it becomes challenging to extract even an hour for your relaxation. You never remain at ease even after office hours, leading to stress. High workload with personal responsibilities often makes you feel burnout, affecting your physical and mental health.
Loneliness and isolation while working remotely is another major contributor to your mental illness. Glued to your laptop for long hours without any team interaction may lead to stress and depression. On the contrary, 5-10 minutes of tea/coffee breaks in the office and chit-chats with your colleagues are enough to energize you during a stressful day.
Other than these, you may fail to build trust among your teammates, to build networks, and may face technological and logistic issues while involved in home-based employment.
Tips for Overcoming Remote Work Challenges
While we know that you cannot completely avoid all these issues, some working from home hacks can help you to overcome some of them. Some of these tips are:
- Give some time to yourself, if required, plan a vacation or a day off.
- Plan a holiday when you don’t go anywhere but spend time with your kids and family at home.
- Make clear lines between your personal and professional life. Try to stick to these boundaries and avoid overlapping. Create a dedicated office space and work only when you are there. As soon as you get up from your place, be with yourself or your family.
- To enhance your efficiency and productivity, avoid distractions. For this, you can try headphones with noise cancellation features.
- If you are in the HR team, you can switch to Ruul’s global invoicing solutions for creating employees’ invoices. With Ruul’s invoice automation feature, you can quicken the invoicing and payment process, saving some time for your personal life.
- Take frequent breaks from your laptop and walk a few steps to ensure you maintain good physical health. Though there are many home workout challenges, try to stick to at least a few minutes exercise routine. For a healthy mind, get in touch with some friends during weekends or you can even plan a Zoom lunch with your colleague.
- To facilitate clear and effective communication, adopt Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack options. Try to organize regular meetings and let your team members express their thoughts and ideas freely.
Conclusion
Working from home issues are here to stay and they have tested the adaptability of both organizations and employees. However, remote employees need to navigate through this new job dynamics while maintaining work-life balance. In this, right strategies and modern tools and techniques help you in addressing challenges.
If you want to thrive in this digital era, you must accept the flexibility of remote work and at the same time need to be smart enough to tackle the inherited issues.
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