Tip of the Week: Maintaining a Work/Life Balance, Working from Home

Working from home—especially for an extended period, as many have—can take its toll on anyone. Just think about it: instead of the home being a place of relative sanctuary that your employees can retreat to after the workday is over, the home has become just another place for work to be done. This quite understandably isn’t healthy, so it becomes important that your team members are able to separate their work life from their home life.

Let’s go over a few tips to share with them that can help.

Set Aside the Workplace

Boundaries are critically important for your remote workers to establish. As we alluded to above, it isn’t beneficial for your team to always be in work mode, but it can be hard to disengage from work when work has invaded the home. That’s why we always recommend that those who are working from home set a designated workspace and differentiate it from their living space as much as possible. Doing so will not only assist them in disengaging from their professional lives, but it will also help them remain focused throughout the day.

Communicate

Communication is imperative for successful remote work to take place, so your team needs to use their solutions to do so as much as possible. Whether your team is sharing information pertinent to work or the occasional casual chat, you need to provide them with the appropriate tools to do so.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) solutions, messaging platforms, and conferencing solutions are all valuable parts of a recommended toolkit that your users should be taking advantage of every day. Encourage your team to keep their lines of communication open and to reach out often—more often than they would otherwise, in fact. This will help people to stay engaged during the workday, while also keeping the whole team apprised of each other’s progress and availability.

Make a Clean Break at the End of the Day

It also helps to encourage your team members to disengage from their work responsibilities completely once “quitting time” rolls around. Suggest that they pick up a hobby, or even take a quick walk, after their day is over.

This will not only help to reinforce how important it is to separate the home environment from the work environment, but it will also allow them to release some of the stress that may accumulate during the workday.

Make Plans for After Hours

To further encourage this clean break, you can also suggest that your team commit to some personal engagements or activities—or even interact with each other in a more casual means outside of work hours. Doing so helps to motivate your team to leave work and—again—shift away from professional concerns when the time comes.

A healthy work/life balance is important to maintain, and there are ways that you can help your team to do so. There are ways that you can encourage your team to live their life, and ways that you can help them make the most of their time at work. SCW can help you with the latter, by providing the tools and technologies that support this goal of productivity.

To find out what we can do for you, reach out to us at (509) 534-1530. Make sure you subscribe to our blogs for more handy tips and tricks!