Working From Home Productively in 5 Steps

When wondering about the impact of WFH on the productivity of employees, you would tend to think that remote workers are less productive. You would be wrong. Remote work has been quite the opposite, with people’s productivity and performance increasing.

By time consumption alone, remote workers would spend 1.4 more days more on productive activities than on-site workers would. But this longer time spent also entails a struggle to keep a balance between work and the rest of our lives sometimes.

The changes that workplaces underwent were so rapid due to the lockdowns that few companies got enough time to prepare their resources and strengthen their mentality. As a result, most employees face the hurdles of remote work alone at their homes. This doesn’t have to be a struggle though. With a few tips, productive working from home can be achieved.

Create a schedule; Stick to it!

Just as you would for an on-site job, the first step towards productively working from home would be to create a schedule. This may seem straightforward yet is easier said than done once you have a lot of time to manage multiple deliverables on your own.

You’re facing a barrage of endless meetings, with a volley of interruptions, and urgent last-minute tasks. In other words, you end up being busy all day, without any progress made on your top priorities. Without a fixed timetable to follow in detail, the likely result would be repeated putting off deliverables until it’s too late to achieve a deadline on time

This is exactly why one needs to master the art of scheduling productively. In the process you not only can make the necessary time for work that matters, but you still can also ensure there’s a work-life balance as well. You can have a look at how to do this here .

Take a break

Bad time management equals correspondingly bad results. But we’re not talking just about managing your deliverables here, we’re talking about managing your breaks too. You know how you work best, so remember to accordingly schedule breaks just as well.

Remember – Body, Mind and Spirit. Stress on your mind can affect the rest of your body too. This can be good news. Incorporating aspects to mind your physical and mental health, such as exercise and meditation respectively help lower the stress levels you face.

Things in your life take precedent too; a family member who is ailing, or a child demanding your attention. Work will always happen. But so does the life outside of it too. And the latter may not wait as long. Plan out your time, and delegate the flow of your work to other team members during off hours.

Of course, remember not to fall behind with work because of having one break too many. Prolonged periods of inactivity at work will make you subconsciously get used to this way of spending time and think you can get away with not doing much at work. Knowing the problems WFH can entail is a step forward to ensure this doesn’t happen, which you can read more about here .

Prioritize your time

There aren’t that many of us who have perfected down techniques on how to get our activities in order. And more often than not, it constantly feel like we have enough time to do it all. People are just desperate to get their activities organized. The 80-20 principle serves at this point, not just as an excellent task management technique but for communication as well. You can read more about it here.

Stay undistracted during calls

How many distractions came up in your last meeting? Trying to resolve distractions means a loss of time, and in turn a loss of productivity, defeating the very purpose of the meeting. Compounding this would be problems such as background noise. Not being able to correctly understand or hear your team will only result in delays, frustration, and prolonged or cancelled meetings.

Deliverables are easy to list, execute and clear off. Calls are a bit more complex. For this, a good tool would be needed, not just in the ability to call many, but to also effectively keep calls monitored depending on the situation. That’s where MultiCall comes in as a solution.

A MultiCall, brings people together, and gives everyone the right and ability to contribute value to the conversation. In doing so, one of its most noted features to stay undistracted during calls is Call Monitoring, the handling of which you can explore here.