coronavirus | Telecommute Job Online

There has been a great deal of anticipation about the COVID work from home experiment, and it appears that the upside is the many benefits of remote work which has generally improved the performance of office workers by nearly 30% in productivity with very low overhead costs. A huge win in the workforce in the United States of America.

Even with the overwhelmingly positive results and huge benefits to the bottom lines of companies and organizations who have successfully embraced (and cashed-in on) the telecommute work-from-home model has not without its challenges.

At the very least, Internet connectivity, having the basic electronic devices required, being able to have an effective workspace within the home, and managing family around the home office are the basic requirements to have nailed down in the beginning.

The first real concern to show up was paranoia among management. “How can we be expected to trust employees working from home?” The first wave of response was to attempt to initiate surveillance efforts to micromanage remote workers. The results appear to indicate counterproductivity as initial increases in productivity began to decline.

In the new world of the telecommuter, a reasonable degree of trust must be part of the foundation of the teleworking agreement. Employers must find other ways and means of tracking individual employee productivity over time, besides looking over the shoulder of staff members.

After all, they are working from home, which means they could be doing practically anything from drinking on the job to working naked for all we know (and they are).

Nevertheless, for the companies and organizations who fully embrace the idea of staff working from home, their number are up, and expenses are down.

While all the numbers are looking good, it appears that telecommuters in the $150,000-range (and up) are seeing the greatest increase in productivity and value to the employers during this period of time when we are testing the waters of sending workers home to work.

At the same time, other industries that do not translate as well to the telework atmosphere, are barely staying alive, and some of them are closing their doors forever. Channels such as manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, and hospitality, are experiencing the greatest challenges and struggle for survivability during these unprecedented times.

Telecommuters are facing their own set of challenges, such as a general decline of overall mental health, while family viability in workers’ households is declining at an alarming rate, causing some parents to have to make a choice between work and family.

One of the biggest issues for remote workers to tackle is how to manage work tasks amid the various distractions that might vie for one’s attention in a work from home environment. This is in huge contrast to being secluded in a safe and sane corporate office setting, where very little effort need be exerted to focus on tasks at hand.

Instead of the brief interactions that may distract you briefly at the office, home office interruptions may include anything from doorbells, phones ringing, dishes in the sink, impatient children and/or pets desiring attention, and the list goes on and on.

Kids at home who are attending schools remotely online are also a growing concern for telecommuters.

Being able to set up a home office space that has separations from the rest of the household and establishing boundaries seems to help remote workers manage distractions that might otherwise negatively affect their overall performance.

To ready yourself for the new world that is developing before our very eyes, it will require a major readjustment in the way you think about your work, job, and career. In the last 100 years, work was all about finding a way to get from your home to your work establishment to earn an income and return to your home, where you may enjoy some rest and relaxation.

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If you were like the growing majority of us, you may have found yourself shuttling between to or more jobs just to make the ends meet. Even with the raising of minimum wages across the USA, the minimum wage was not keeping up with inflation.

This meant we were working harder for less, and were exerting time, effort, and absorbing the expense of traveling to and from one or more work destinations to support our families.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which changed the way we do business in America. To survive the worst part of the pandemic those who lost their jobs due to the coronavirus lock-downs, they were granted unemployment wages, plus a government stipend to help mitigate the damages of the shutdown.

During the period of the lock-down, essential workers were allowed to continue to travel to and from work, while others were permitted to continue to work if they could transform their work into a telecommuting job, which meant they would have to find ways to perform their duties from home in order to retain their jobs.

Telecommuting or working from home is not as easy as it sounds it means having to adopt a new state of mind when it comes to how you think about “being home.” You must set aside some separate workspace where you conduct your work activities without being interrupted. If you live alone, no problem, you may be comfortable kicking back on the couch and working in your pajamas (if your work does not include some videoconferencing).

Otherwise, you need to set aside a dedicated space to conduct your work, which could be in a spare room if you have one, otherwise, you can carve space out of an existing space, like a corner of the living room or bedroom, where you can set up a pseudo-office space to work at from home.

This is the future:

Most of the American work will be done from home.

The biggest fear of businesses in the United States is that without the constant overseeing of employees, production numbers would drop. Employers feared that left to their own devices, without supervision, employees would goof off, watch TV, or spend hours surfing the Internet instead of working.

This is what held back most employers from even considering making the shift from the office to telecommuting. When the coronavirus threat all but shut down American business, the only hope for survival was to hope that being able to telecommute and work from home would potentially save the non-essential businesses.

And what they discovered was that productivity for the work-from-home staff was increased by nearly 20 percent. As time went on and the COVID lock-down lingered, business owners and employers started to see the new future of business unfold before them.

They could imagine embracing this new methodology of conducting business as a positive way to greatly reduce expenses and expand their bottom line.