Working from Home: Five Tips for Newly Affected Workers

March 2020. The month that changed life in America as we know it, at least for the time being. As the coronavirus sweeps across the country, millions are unfortunately are newly unemployed and millions more are now working at home for the first time in their lives. While it is everyone’s hope that the dust settles quickly with this pandemic, working from home is a new reality for many workers and businesses.

The team behind Master Millennials has worked remotely for several years now so we put together our five tips to help you navigate this new terrain and maintain your sanity.

Find a Home Office Spot

This needs to be an area of your house that you will ONLY use for work if that is possible. Ideally, a spare bedroom, den, maybe even a closet if space is limited. Now it may not be possible to block off a whole room for work in your house/apartment but at a bare minimum, it needs to be a dedicated part of a room just for work. Why you ask? Well there is actually a psychological reason behind it that we can personally vouch for.

If you have an “office” location at home, when you go to/start work, you trick your brain into work mode just like you did when you traveled to the office or workplace. If you do not do this and just work at various places throughout your house, soon your work world and personal life become interchangeable and indistinguishable.

You will find that even on your off-days you will have the urge to fire off emails or check on projects. Other parts of your house then become not as comfortable as they may have been earlier because you’ve got work now constantly on the brain. The very best initial move you can make when working from home is to find this dedicated workspace.

Set Up Your Office

You have set aside the room or area in your home for work, now you need to set it up for success. I would encourage you to have a professional looking wall in the background for video chats or Skype calls. Maybe a bookshelf or at the least a nicely painted wall without holes, chipped paint, or structural issues showing.

Also test out technology with your company’s IT department and a non-judgmental coworker before you go live. You will want to make sure all of your passwords and access made the transition to your home and you will also want to try video chats to see what your room looks like from a professional and lighting standpoint.

Another great idea, especially if your workspace is in a room with a door is to put a two-sided sign on that door to let the people you live with know when you are on a call or not. We will get into the people boundaries theme in a bit but if you do not want husbands, wives, or roommates walking in and shouting something at you while you are on an important call, this is a very good choice. Do you have crazy barking dogs or live on a noisy crowded street? Noise cancelling Bluetooth devices need to become your best friend. In most cases, you will not be able to control these interruptions but you can minimize the disruption with these Bluetooth headset products.

Please, for the love of God, get yourself a laptop camera cover or have tape or a sticker on there when your camera is not in use during video chats. The photo below from the newly viral conference call should show you why this is important (hint: look to the left) and reinforce the message that if that camera area of your computer is not covered, you should assume someone can see you.

On the otherhand, a work from home setup is perhaps the best time for your co-workers to truly get to know you. You’ll have to determine what’s acceptable based on your newly established online culture, but the occational visit from a child or pet on a video call can help create a stronger bond with your colleagues and help to remind us all not to take life too seriously and remember what’s truly important. The right boss loves a cut kid or pet!

Establish Time and People Boundaries

Work creep is a real thing for people working from home. A quick definition of work creep is that, before you know it, you are answering work emails and are essentially on call 24/7. Your work life and personal life become the same thing and this is not a good place to be.

Maybe you love your work (awesome if you do) but everyone needs breaks and very few people can pull this off forever. Work creep will happen to you if you do not set time boundaries. One of the most critical things you can do is to make sure your work day has a start time and an end time. You and your employer pick times, whether that is 9-5, 10-7, 4-12am and stick to it. Every single day. It doesn’t have to start or end at exactly the same time everyday but just make sure that they are all pretty close.

Remote workers are also at a high risk for burnout if they do not follow those first two tips. Burnout is what results after you have had work creep for some time. Burnout is when you become so tired/overwhelmed with your work you start to shut down productively, creatively, and you become highly negative. If you think about it, its not much of a stretch to see how people could become that way if they were working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I know you are saying “that won’t happen to me.” If you do not draw those work time boundaries, it has a good chance of getting you too. With burnout, productivity decreases, you lose faith in the company, and you start thinking about other jobs. You will feel that you always need to “be on” or “plugged in.” For the majority of jobs, you do not need to be a 24/7 employee, so do not let that happen. If you have a work phone, shut it off every day or leave it in your work office when quitting time hits. Do not let work emails come through on your personal cell phone after work hours.

You also need to draw people boundaries, with co-workers and with those you live with. Boundaries with co-workers should follow your scheduled work time boundaries. That’s as simple as, “hey, I’ll have my work phone on until 5pm each day” or “I have family time from five on but you can let me know if its an emergency.” If they reach out with a non-emergency, do not respond.

Perhaps if you are in sales or a field in which you have clients who require schedule flexibility, this might not be as possible since they are your bread and butter. However, for all other positions, at a minimum, I would have my supervisor and coworkers know that I will not be available after a certain time on work days unless there is a work emergency.

Boundaries for those that live in your house are essential too. You need to let them know your signal for when you have important calls or critical project time. A sign on the door or letting them know in advance is critical to avoiding awkward scenarios. You also need to be firm on personal life requests.

There are many benefits to working from home, like taking care of your own pets, being able to get in Amazon packages or other deliveries, run small errands. Sometimes the people you live with will equate working from home with not working at all. “Why are the dishes not done” or “why weren’t you able to answer the door and talk to the neighbor?”

These are small things but you will want to let your co-habitants know the hours you have set up to work every day and when your most critical times are so that they can respect that and know the boundaries exist. You will also have to tell them more than once and reinforce that message if you want it to resonate.

Create Routines

Routines are essential in remote positions because there are so many distractions. Netflix, sunny days, personal phone calls, errands - these all will want to pull you away. Establish a work routine as soon as possible.

Same spot in the house, same work hours (as much as possible), schedule out as much of your day as possible via a checklist or daily planner. Shower and get dressed in the morning. That is sometimes hard to do for those of us who work remotely but it is a great way to get your mind right and in the “I’m going to work” mode.

Make sure you take your allotted lunchtime and actually eat lunch during it. If you have leftover break time, we like to go outside and maybe take a short walk and get fresh air. You do not need to be a machine but setting up some very basic routines will help you prevent these personal life distractions from sabotaging your work.

Be Social

This one is a bit hard to do these days with everyone on lockdown and quarantined but working from home does deprive you of social interaction in the workplace and you will need to replace that somehow.

You won’t realize how much of your daily socialization occurred in the workplace until it is gone. Even the toughest of you out there will realize this after working remotely for an extended period. I hope that your employer has regular video chats and virtual connections to keep those social connections solid, but you will still occasionally find yourself getting stir crazy.

When the dust settles on virus mania and places of business re-open, if you are able to continue with a work from home arrangement with your employer, you will want to mix in some coffee shops, lunch with friends, dinner with family or a trip to the gym. You will actually need more socialization since you no longer go to the office, which is where most of us got the majority of our social fix.

It is very easy to feel isolated working from home and you will have to be more proactive than you have ever been before with reaching out to people. With the world becoming a more uncertain place each day, we need each other more than ever. If you are unemployed, we hope you find that next job as quickly as possible. If you are new to working at home, we hope that these tips have helped you make that transition. Stay strong and connected America!