How to survive the home office in 5 steps

Learning Center | Play.Interactive®

How to survive the home office in 5 steps

The home office, or work at home, is a modality that most companies will have to adopt sooner or later. Although it is true that it has some disadvantages, the benefits in terms of:

Efficiency.
Productivity.
And resource savings are too many not to take into account.

Almost 10 years ago I founded Play.Interactive, we made the decision to adopt the home office as a basic scheme. At first, it was very difficult, but over time we found the processes, the tools, and especially the people who make up our team and who have shown that remote work was one of the greatest successes we have had.

1. Never work in your pijamas

Nor in bed, the first time someone considers the possibility of working from home, it is normal for them to imagine themselves comfortably in bed and watching TV. This does not work and it will lower your productivity.

Ideally, you should have a routine similar to the one you maintain in your face-to-face work. If you want to sleep as much as possible at least change your clothes, even if you wear sports it is important that your brain perceives that it is time to work.

2. Choose a suitable place

One of the most complicated parts of working at home is interruptions. It is very common for someone else to be at home, be it a partner, children, parents or a roommate who thinks that you are not “really working” and who wants to talk or ask you for favors. Or simply that the postman arrives or passes the garbage, the ideal is that you find a quiet place. It can be a room that is little used and preferably that you can use regularly, the routine helps you focus.

If you do not have that option or you live in a very small place, the home office does not necessarily mean working at home (yes I know that is the translation but that is not the point, if it bothers you you can call it remote work or telework as they say in Spain). The important thing is to find a place where you can concentrate without interruptions, it can be a cafe or a restaurant, most will allow you to spend several hours without problems.

3. Stay in touch

Many people prefer to be in the office because of the ease of turning to the next desk or taking a few steps for whatever they need. When you work in the home office the feeling should be similar.

Dedicate the same hours that you would dedicate being in the office, answer the calls, messages and emails as soon as possible. And if you have to be absent for something, communicate it to your team in the same way that you notify at work if you need to go to the bank or the store.

4. Invest in your team

Working at home will save you money, but only if you can generate similar or better results than you get in the office, and for that you will need the right tools.

The money that you will not spend on transportation and meals you can invest in the necessary equipment, it depends on the work you do but surely you will need a comfortable chair and/or a desk, keyboard and mouse in good condition, an internet service with enough speed, perhaps a monitor or a stand for your laptop that helps you not hurt your neck, that kind of thing.

On the other hand, there are digital tools, I recommend that you try all the necessary ones until you find the right ones for you, almost all platforms have applications in the cloud for collaboration, Google Drive, Apple iWork, Adobe y hasta Office, he child that always You are late for class, they have this option, in general, I recommend Google Drive that allows you to work from any device without worrying about the brand. There are also systems for managing projects like Trello on Monday, which we can talk about in another post.

5. Accept the change

At the time of writing this article on how to survive the home office, the world is facing the COVID-19 pandemic and we are in full quarantine. There is no reason to think that it will be short-lived and even after the crisis is over, many companies will understand that remote working has great advantages. Or at least you can ask to work from home if you managed to demonstrate that your productivity was equal or greater that way.