Remote work is not for everyone
Welcome to the year of Remote Work!
In this article, you are going to find the issues that any of you can be facing while working from home, and how you can improve the conditions to mitigate its negative impacts.
Yes, you heard it right, this year has brought forward so many unexpected things. Highlights of which could be either going from good savings accounts to empty ones or from active and social office life to alone remote work. Why am I so concerned about the remote work? Well, here are the reasons.
For the people who are introverts, love their private lives and do not like to go out much, this year is heaven. But people like me who are outgoing and social, feel pretty much locked in and frustrated for reasons beyond our control.
This year started with great energy and long lists of “things to do”, but as we are reaching towards the end of this year, everything is different and certainly not as planned.
However, besides the disadvantages of working from home, I’ve gotten myself into other activities and unplanned achievements that I have made so far to ensure I am not left with a plain sheet of paper with no list of achievements for this year on it.
As we have reached almost 8th month of the pandemic, I can actually feel that remote work is not for everyone. While a few of the industries like education, … etc. have somewhat adapted to the online world successfully, others are still struggling.
What are the things that are indicating that remote work is not easy and how can you overcome them?
Let’s find out!
You Feel Left Out Sometimes
Remote employment is an excellent way of life for so many individuals and businesses worldwide, but it still has a tremendous range of obstacles.
Although, remote work means you can go anywhere anytime and can perform your tasks online while enjoying other things in life. You don’t have to be location dependent or travel to and from work. Just get your laptop and start working from your home, café or any site you want. But with all these perks, loneliness is something that is there to haunt you most of the time.
However, you can overcome it by constantly communicating and even catching up with your close friends, weekend family meetups, going for short walks every now and then with some walk buddy, taking short breaks from work for quick coffee or smoke.
Few of you may think that you have company of your pet or your house matte. But, catching up with someone out of your regular life makes a hell lot of difference. You talk about different perspectives and different topics, which are refreshing. Not many of us realize, but these small measures make a lot of difference. You feel energized and more motivated instead of staying indoors without a variety of company.
Further, Weekly official meetings with proper precautionary measures also works wonders when it comes to improvements in loneliness, demotivated behaviors and productivity.
Online Communication is much Harder
Early days of March clarified whether we were good online communicators or not. People who were already tech savvy, did not find it difficult to shift the communication to an online platform. However, many of us weren’t so much into this mode of communication, therefore, we find it hard to convey the full picture or a scenario over a message, an email or a call.
The Pandemic and remote working has its drawbacks but don’t forget it is also a very good time to upgrade ourselves. To be up to date with what is needed in this era. This is a perfect time to learn new softwares, including those that help in communicating better.
By far, I have found that the video callings are the best to convey the message or hold a meeting, instead of an audio call or an email. As with those ways, you have to combine them with more than one mode to convey the whole message properly, such as sending an email and then making an audio call to better understand it. However, in video calling softwares, such as Zoom, you can share video, audio, messages, screens that allows a better communication than any other means. There are plenty of other video calling apps that you can easily learn, as they are very user friendly, and use them effectively to communicate.
Something you didn’t realize is that you are actually becoming more skilled communicator while learning how to work remotely.
Productivity level is not same as before
When you are working in an office, surrounded by other employees, you feel more motivated and disciplined. Just as you feel more motivated in gyms than working at home. However, Covid-19 has bound us to our homes and requires us to live a tough life of social distancing from our loved ones.
This has definitely impacted the productivity level which has ultimately affected the economy of many countries. Due to less productivity, many of the companies have either downsized, liquidated or moved to a cheaper country, leaving many of the employees jobless. Such employees then cannot afford to spend more, impacting other industries as well.
If you suddenly find yourself less motivated due to being alone or socially distant, the productivity level drops. Therefore, fighting this is so much important then you might have even realized.
Invest your idle time in some other non job-related things. Such as learning a new skill, software or something you always wanted to do but you never had time for it.
If you Still don’t like working remotely ITS OK!
If you still don’t like working remotely, after the passage of 8 months of pandemic, it’s OK. As many of us are feeling the same.
We all were excited in the beginning of March about the idea of staying at home and resting, having a time off from going back and forth to the workplace. As the time has passed, many of us feel depressed and find ourselves with less or no motivation at all. Make small changes and take few steps further to be more active and include new activities into your daily routines. Such as working out, learning new recipes, starting a blog and learn new skills.
In case you are missing the sound of office, you can plug in to this site “coffitivity “and listen to few of the play list that makes you feel less lonely. Or any music of your choice will work perfectly.
Or you can sign up for LinkedIn Learning, coursera or any other website for learning new courses. The plus point here is that they even offer trails that vary from a weeklong to month. Yes, you hear it right. A month! I personally have completed and got the certifications for free and I pretty much feel amazing about them. You can also search about the free courses that few amazing universities offer, like Harvard university.
Its not easy to draw a line between your personal life and remote working time, as you will be working on and off while having ton of distractions at home. But you track your working time using few apps such as rescues time.
At the end, my advice would be to take this challenge as an opportunity of having enough time to invest in yourself !
