6 Tips For Effective Working From Home – For Bosses And Employees

The pandemic has made one thing clear: it is possible to work from home for long periods of time. Home office is no longer seen as an option, but is already seen as a requirement by many employees.

But how can you as an employer ensure that your employees can work effectively while also taking care of their health? Here you will find 6 tips that you can implement yourself or recommend to your employees.

Set Time Limits

The most important thing is setting boundaries. While in the classic working model the boundary between leisure and work can be clearly drawn through the commute, this boundary becomes blurred in the home office. It happens very quickly that employees overwork themselves, forget to take breaks or unintentionally work a lot of overtime.

This can very quickly lead to them endangering their health through stress. Therefore, as a company you should ensure that the employees themselves set good boundaries and, if necessary, you have to help with appropriate company guidelines that regulate working hours and breaks.

Use Tools With Added Value 

With a distributed world of work, completely new challenges come up for IT service providers or IT departments. Computers are no longer just found “on site” in the office, but are taken home as laptops, or private devices such as smartphones are used for work.

It is very easy for even the most experienced specialist to lose track. It is therefore all the more important that you provide your employees with good tools. With the right ITSM solutions, you and your IT specialists always keep an overview and can monitor even complex IT infrastructures well and react immediately to problems.

Organize Collaboration

With teams working from different locations, it may be necessary to organize the collaboration separately. With shared appointments, such as a daily kick-off, you can ensure that all team members know at all times what tasks are currently pending and why they should be implemented.

At the same time, you also need the right infrastructure. In addition to laptops and mobile devices, you also need systems and WLAN that are accessible on the one hand and protected against unauthorized access on the other. One of the most basic points is creating good passwords, including the WiFi password.

Ensure Work-life Balance

When the boundaries between work and life become very blurred, the work-life balance quickly becomes unbalanced. This means that employees overwork themselves, are stressed by their tasks and find it difficult to switch off or finish work. 

As an employer, you should pay attention to any symptoms that could indicate that your employees are too stressed so that you can intervene at any time and support your employees in maintaining their work-life balance and thus avoiding sick leave or total absences due to burnout, for example to avoid.

Strengthen Team Culture 

Especially if the team members are not in the same office, but at different locations, it is even more important that the team culture is strengthened. Whether it's joint events or group chats after work, try to connect the team with each other as often as possible.

Maybe a daylong chat will help, where team members are constantly on a call where they can quickly ask questions, just as if they were sitting next to each other in the office.

Keeping Clean Your Working Place 

In addition to the right equipment for the workplace, you also need good order. Only then can you do your job well. This applies not only to the surface of the desk, but also to the desktop. Try to organize the files on your computer well so that you can quickly find everything you are looking for. This saves time and nerves - and at the same time you can work much more efficiently and don't waste your valuable time.