Working from Home, long term

Working from home long term, otherwise known as perma-wfh, is not a familiar phenomenon for most of us. Yet, in today’s world, we face it. I have been working from home for about a month now. A lot of people, including senior leadership at my current workplace, Google, are concerned about and are actively seeking to have better work from home experience and maintain work life balance. Here are some things I found to be useful so far -

• Set up an ergonomic working environment at home; i.e., have large monitors, proper mouse and keyboard that minimizes RSA and other desk job risks. It is hardly possible to set up a work environment exactly like your office, but make sure you can sit at your home-work desk all-day comfortably for months. By comfort I do not mean from bed or couch.
• Create work life boundaries — with the workplace being right where one lives, with the physical isolation between work and home vanished, it is likely that you cannot maintain a clear isolation between being at work and being at home. I found, getting dressed with what I’d normally wear to work gives a mindful isolation between work hours and non work hours. Some suggested wearing your badges, carrying office ID cards etc. can provide some sense of distinction between work and life. Whatever daily ritual you normally had, keeping some of those can help.
• Adhering to a daily work routine — with always being one step away from work or one step away from home can blur the boundary between work hours and non working hours. So, keeping the same hours as you used to do can help better maintain work-life isolation.
• Set up regular hangouts at work — usually at work people would bump into each other and have water cooler conversations or hallway conversations. Since those types of social interaction disappear when everyone is remote, it helps if you can set aside some time for virtual coffee break, video lunch hangout etc. Some of us play online social games together once a week and it helps.
• Have more frequent team sync — different teams do regular sync differently. Some have weekly syncs, some have daily stand ups etc. But as we all know, at regular work from work setup, we get to sync a lot more frequently off line than those scheduled meetings. When everyone is working remotely, that won’t happen. So, setting up more frequent sync can help retain a good team cohesion.
• Take healthier breaks — when working from office, we do not always have ourselves tied to our chairs, we walk from one meeting to another, do brainstorming sessions or have discussions. (Some of us also have developed a healthy habit of taking regular breaks to keep ourselves less sedentary.) When working from home, you are not doing any of that. So, develop a habit to take some break, take a walk from your Deskland to your El Kitchenia.

image source: https://dribbble.com/shots/10764642-Work-from-home

Originally published at https://www.facebook.com.