July 02, 2020 / By mobanmarket
Long before the threat of the new coronavirus outbreak sent workers home to perform their duties remotely, a growing number of U.S. companies had solved the riddle of how to remain productive and profitable while overcoming the isolation and distractions that can plague flexible work-from-home employment policies.
Now, it seems anybody who can is working from home.
Studies show when successfully implemented, work-from-home policies can help drive operational costs down and productivity up, as well as reduce turnover — all big pluses contributing big leap in the number of U.S. workers who telecommute over a recent five-year period.
Companies having to quickly shift gears to implement full or partial telecommuting policies in response to the coronavirus don’t have the same luxury to make changes in workplace culture that can make work-from-home shifts run smoothly. That can mean everything from making sure everyone’s connected via meeting and collaboration tools such as Zoom and Slack, but also including them in office pizza day with an at-home delivery.
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“You have to create new processes that support remote work,” said Harvard Business School’s Prithwiraj Choudhury, the lead author in a study that showed productivity increased 4.4 percent among U.S. Patent Office and Trademark employees working exclusively at home
“If you have a team where some people are remote, you need to recognize the pain that remote people go through,” Choudhury told the Los Angeles Times. “Not just the communication loss but also in some ways the different self-identity.”
The U.S. workplace landscape is changing by the day as additional cases of the new coronavirus are confirmed. There were 1,323 confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases responsible for 38 deaths at midday Thursday, according to an interactive map from Johns Hopkins University.
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Everything You Need To Productively Work From Home
About 8 million Americans, or 5.2 percent of U.S. workers, were working from home in 2017, according to the latest available U.S. Census telecommuting data.
No one knows exactly how much that number will swell under the threat of coronavirus, but two recent CNBC flash surveys of CEOs and chief financial officers found a third of companies have workers who are “stranded” away from their physical offices for an extended period due to the coronavirus. Additionally, 62 percent of CFOs said their companies are spending more money to make telecommuting work.
With the threat of the new coronavirus changing daily, some companies are quickly pivoting, necessarily stepping over the investments in workplace culture to tend to more-immediate concerns of keeping employees, and their financial bottom lines, healthy. Executives don’t always have enough advance warning to figure out such things as how the nuances of labor law apply to telecommuting, Amber Clayton, who directs the Society for Human Resource Management’s Knowledge Center, told CNBC.
To help workers suddenly thrust into a virtual office feel less “stranded,” here are 12 essential tips:
1. If you can’t get on the internet, you’ll get nowhere. Just having a sweet laptap you can take home won’t be enough. You’ll need a strong, secure internet connection to effectively telecommute; failing that, you may need to use a personal hotspot on your phone, but that could trigger huge data use charges. Rick Phillips, director of infrastructure solutions and managed cloud services at Weidenhammer Solutions, told Business News Daily that allowing employees to use their personal computers may not be a sound option — first because they may already be compromised with viruses and malware, but also because they often aren’t equipped in a way they can be managed by the company’s IT department.
2. Keep your morning routine. If you get up and work out before going into the office, continue doing that to the extent you can while remaining mindful of precautions you should take to protect yourself from the new coronavirus. Take a shower and dress in office attire. There’s a good chance that in-person meetings will be conducted via videoconference, and putting on a suit will spare you the embarrassment of appearing on video in your pajamas and with your hair looking like it had been styled by a weed wacker. More important, dressing as you normally would to work carries a psychological boost that makes you feel as if you’re still in the game.
3. Create a to-do list and stick to it. Michael Pesochinsky, the vice president, general counselor and chief technical officer of Great Neck, New York-based GovernmentBargains, told Inc.com, that as long as he has a plan to complete job tasks, “it doesn’t matter if or how I may be interrupted, as long as I get things done by the end of the day.”
4. Being online isn’t the same as being there. You won’t be able to read the room on a conference line. Jonathan Wasserstrum, the CEO of the New York City commercial real estate company SquareFoot, told National Public Radio the company ordered its employees to work from home, which will be especially difficult for the third of his staff who are brokers and won’t be able to personally show buildings to clients. “If all of a sudden they said you can’t have face-to-face meetings with people, it’d be harder for us to do a bunch of those transactions,” Wasserstrum said.
5. Use the cloud for document storage. Klaus Sonnenleiter, president and CEO of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey-based PrintedArt, told Inc. that using cloud storage services such as Dropbox or Google Drive allows telecommuters to “log in from anywhere and never need to worry about having your files with you.”
6. Check in with the boss and co-workers early and often. This not only reassures them you’re on task and not loafing, but it also keeps you connected. Inc. also advises that if circumstances allow it — and the coronavirus threat may not — plan some meetups with colleagues when you’re off the clock.
7. Schedule your non-work appointments just as you would if you were reporting to an office. “I try to make doctor and dentist appointments just as I would in a company office, first thing in the morning, last thing in the day to minimize disruptions of my work,” Linda Stokes, the managing partner of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, physician recruiting company Academy Physicians, told Inc.
8. Just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you’re not working. To remain productive, it’s important to set boundaries with family and friends. “It doesn’t seem nice to call friends and family distractions, but if they don’t understand that when you are ‘working from home’ that means you are working, then they are a distraction,” TheBalanceCareers said. “And it’s not just children, spouses, friends and neighbors can all make demands on your time that they wouldn’t if you worked in an office. It is important to put the proper amount of child care in place and set work-at-home ground rules.”
9. Avoid the equivalent of the “freshman 15.” People who work from home often lament they gained weight because they couldn’t stay out of the kitchen, which Joy Martini, president of the New York City-based marketing and communications firm Martini Consulting, calls “sort of the dirty little secret of telecommuters. “I shudder at the thought of how many times I opened that fridge that first year,” Martini told Inc. “So you need a kind of discipline, and that’s really the clincher for the whole thing: having the discipline to get done what you need to get done; the discipline to avoid the kitchen; the discipline to kick your drop-in friends out.”
10. Take an actual lunch break and get up from your desk. One of the keys to avoiding the “work-from-home 15” is to stay on a regular meal schedule. And though the temptation is great, don’t bring your lunch to your desk and go back to work. One of the perks of working from home is that it’s easier to take a walk or bike ride over the noon hour and get some fresh air.
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