Many people are working their normal jobs (or as normal as possible) from home during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. They used to have to go to the office every day and work from there, but now their job has moved online, and now they work from home. And people who hear about your working from home, they may not respect your telecommute or have no idea what it means to work from home.
Of course, there are huge advantages to working at home, but there are also a wide variety of disadvantages as well. The biggest problem when you start shifting your work from the office to your home is that your people don’t get what that means.
If you have a family, they think since you’re at home, you should be able to tend to their whims and demands because you are at home (and that might be normally expected when you are at home). They don’t get the idea that while your physical location is at home, but you are actually working, and cannot break character as an effective employee during work hours, except for possibly during your regularly scheduled breaks.
Those people who are trying to move their jobs online and are not able to establish clear boundaries for the family during work hours, experience huge drops in efficiency. Believe me, if your productivity is not increased by working from home, and especially if your efficiency is going down, your days as a telecommuting employee are numbered.
Once you’ve explained how things are, you can ask your family if they’d like to support the team. Maybe they can pick up some of the chores and help out around the house.
If you have a family or not, for sure your friends don’t get it. Your friends are expecting you to be available for lunch and unlimited phone conversations since you’re working from home.
Unless your friends are also working from home, they have no frame of reference about how it looks to be telecommuting or working from home.
Again, it’s up to you to educate your friends about what it’s like to being employed to work from your home. This is much easier if your telecommuting arrangement with your employer is highly structured with specific work hours and break times. This will be much easier to explain to both friends and family and once they are able to wrap their head around it, they will be more capable of honoring your work from home model.
If you don’t have a strict schedule, you will be miles ahead and more successful in your work from home arrangement by creating a specific work schedule for your telecommuting or job online.
We’ve learned this from at-home workers who have successfully conducted business from home long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to telecommute or move your job online. By far, the establishment of regular business hours has increased their survivability and success over time.
Regular hours for conducting business also increases your quality of life, otherwise, you might either fall behind or find yourself working yourself to death.
Some people do not accept calls during work hours or let them know that they can return their call at a later specific time outside of your work schedule.
Americans are doing the best they can to make the best of an uncomfortable situation during the coronavirus lockdown and finding ways to keep your job while telecommuting and working from home has been hugely advantageous.
The most interesting point to realize is that following the pandemic, when the restrictions are lifted, this will have changed the way business is conducted in the United States of America and possibly the world.