Because of the new developments and trends that have occurred as a result of the pandemic, more and more businesses have opted to become flexible and provide a new definition: hybrid work, which incorporates working from home and office work.
No matter if you are an engineer, marketer, or salesperson… As long as your job is done in front of a screen, you can easily move your office. However, it might be the first time for many employees to convert their home, sweet home into a productive office.
But this shouldn’t be taken as a con - at all! In fact, a survey carried out earlier this year shows that 85% of businesses saw an increase in their productivity working from home they started offering remote working options.
Doesn’t sound that scary now, right?
We also know that, at first, it might be difficult to know how to make your place a performance-friendly space and increase your productivity to the maximum while working at home . After all, your house is where you chill and disconnect from work!
How to increase productivity working from home?
Well, we are here to tell you, loud and clear, that you can still rock those numbers and hit the best performance from the comfort of your own house!
Here you have 5 easy tricks to increase productivity while working from home:
1. Routine is your ally
Routine is nothing else than a group of habits, right? And how many of them are actually directly linked to your workspace?
For instance, you might be used to taking a coffee as soon as you get to the office, or having lunch at a specific time, maybe even using a certain time of the day to reply to your emails or make some calls…
But can this only be done in the office? Doesn’t sound like!
Of course, a workplace is usually equipped with the tools you need to get your job done on a daily basis. And it would probably be a good idea to invest in some of them if your teleworking situation is long-term.
However, if it’s a temporary solution, you can use the tools that you already have to make the best out of your new office space. You definitely don’t need investment to be productive! A computer, a phone and a pair of headphones are, in most cases, enough to get you up and running - and hitting the best performance! Just small essentials around, and you will feel that working from home increases productivity enormously. Â
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Everything matters
For instance, maintaining your morning routine. This entails everything you would usually do before going to work; from setting the alarm at a specific hour to doing exercise, walking the dog, taking a long shower or sharing a coffee with a friend.
Repeating the same habits even if you are now in a different location will help you keep an active mood, ready to get started with your day and have a high-level of motivation.
If this sounds too hard to follow when working from home, you can also start with smaller - but also effective - tricks. One of these is getting out of your pajamas and into something more office-like. Even though it might sound funny, this will actually tell your brain that it is not time to be cozy but to get your tasks done.
Everything starts with a bit of the right attitude!
As for the habits during working hours, it’s also helpful for your motivation to try to replicate them at home. You probably don’t have the same coffee machine at home, but it’s still coffee, right?
The same happens with your usual breaks, the more able you are to respect them while working from home, the easier it will be for you to keep your motivation up.
It’s all about making it feel like nothing changed at all!
2. Bring your performance home
Your boss is not sitting beside you, your colleagues are out of sight now… How can you actually know if you are being productive working from home?
It might be challenging at first to maintain an office mood if you no longer see what’s going on around it. We get it. However, there are some tools that can make this transition way easier!
And, of course, one of them is Plecto. The benefit of it being a dashboard software is that you don’t really need to be in the office in order to use it - because you can access it from everywhere around the globe!
Working from home can be the perfect occasion to connect your laptop, smartphone or TV to your Plecto account and start displaying your team’s progress KPI in real-time. Seeing your co-workers performing and working hard will help you do the same! This will not only boost your motivation, but will also increase your productivity working from home and not letting yourself down!
If you need a little boost to the team’s motivation, you can also organize some fun contests to involve all your employees working from home. As in Game of Thrones, you can challenge the different houses to reach a high target… although you can’t promise dragons as a prize.
Another trick that can be useful to keep them focused during working hours is to create notifications to trigger whenever someone reaches a new goal. Moreover, you can set new alerts to keep up the office spirit and engage teamwork from a distance.
Even though they are at home and can’t celebrate with one another, knowing that they are still reaching goals can stimulate online conversations - which also helps keep an office mindset and increase your productivity while working from home!
Let’s make it fun
There’s no performance without motivation, and there’s no motivation without some fun!
That’s why, apart from making sure your employees have the tools to maintain their performance, you should also save some time for entertainment. And there are as many options as you want for this!
An idea can be, for instance, establishing a break at some point in the afternoon where people can join and play an online game together. It can be something fun and competitive like Chess or Backgammon, or even a Solitaire card game. It doesn’t need to take a long time, an entertaining 5 minutes can be more than enough to raise your employees’ working spirit!
3. Stay in touch
Maybe you don’t come across with your colleagues in the hallway, but surely your office at home is also much less noisy than the actual workplace. Take the best of both worlds!
The Internet is your best friend, so keep on using it to communicate with your co-workers - wherever you all are. It can be through either your intranet, SoMe channels, video calls or any other tool that works best in your organization.
Talking about communication, research carried out by Queens University of Charlotte in companies offering remote work showed that about 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important”.
The purpose, once again, is to make the change as smooth as possible. And we all know that communicating with the rest of the office is a big part of the daily routine. That’s why you shouldn’t give up on it!
You are working from home, but so are the rest of your colleagues. That means that communication, apart from nice-to-have, is also quite relevant!
As in any other normal day at the office, issues still appear from time to time and probably need more than one person to solve them. The same happens when dealing with clients, suppliers or even for collaboration across departments. Conversations are always on the go!
Is the container that changes, not the content
Maintaining your regular schedules as much as possible will help you adapt easier to working from home. The less the change impacts, the earlier you’ll get used to it.
For instance, a nice way of breaking up with the routine of being in front of the screen alone can be to promote short video calls within teams.
It can be a 10 minute call where the team checks in and catch up on what they are working on, the challenges and whether they need something from someone else. Sometimes it’s enough just seeing a familiar face to talk to, rather than an open chat.
Lastly, we would like to remind you that Plecto can be used from home as well, so that your performance is not compromised for changing locations. Therefore, you can enable your employees to access the dashboards from their laptops, to stay connected to their performance and focused on reaching their goals on time!
