One of the best ways to combat the coronavirus and to keep your business afloat is to work from home. Small businesses have had to adopt and evolve at break neck speeds over the last few months. If you work with a team, you need to empower them to do the same as well. Try to encourage them to check in daily and arrange regular Zoom meetings.
Working from home has its obvious pitfalls, particularly if you’re in a shared house. Working from home doesn’t mean procrastinating, scrolling through Facebook for hours on end, and remaining in your pyjamas. Instead, you need to treat it like a workday. Get up, shower, and wear some smart casual clothes. While you don’t have to get all suited and booted, you shouldn’t be in your scruffs. Take a look at these three ways to work from home and remain focused.
How To Work From Home — And Stay Focused
Just because you can no longer head into the office and manage your staff from a central base, this doesn’t mean that you should abandon your business vision and go into crisis mode. Working from home should simply be an extension of your remote working plan. Your business vision should still be followed and implemented, and built upon. If you are planning on launching a product, you can still do this, but you may have to adapt your ‘how’. Say you have retail units, you may need to launch your new product online initially and build up your online shopping experience. The easiest way to do this is to look at a social media campaign. You can click here to see how marketing across social media channels can generate such a buzz that you could surpass your industry competition.
Stay Connected, Stay Calm
Working from home and being physically separate from your team doesn’t mean that you cannot communicate and remain in touch. Set up a ten minute virtual briefing every day to discuss the goals for the day. Ensure that you maintain an open door policy that has a more pastoral focused element for your staff. Working from home and remaining in self isolation can have a massive impact on mental health, so allow your staff to talk about their issues and feel confident enough to talk to one another. Keep virtual meetings light and brief. Stick to the important points and always allow your team to air their views and opinions.
Create Your Calming Work Sanctuary
Being at home and working on your laptop can sound idyllic. However, it can be difficult to remain as productive as you would be in an office. Ensure that you remove yourself from your home life as much as possible by creating a distinct working space. A home office set up with your laptop, relevant documents, a filing system, and a work station can help you maintain a distance from your home life. Trying to conduct a meeting with a client online surrounded by a yapping dog, screaming children, and the TV blaring is not professional. Take a minute to set up your work sanctuary, try to separate work and home life as much as possible.
Working from home successfully is a challenge for many, especially if this isn’t a working setup that you are used to. However, you can follow this simple guide to simplify working from home and benefit your business.
Quick Recap:
- Empower team members to stay connected daily.
- Treat it like a workday.
- Get up, shower, and wear some smart casual clothes.
- Adapt your ‘how’ to stick to your business vision.
- Use social media marketing to promote your business.
- Set up a ten minute virtual briefing every day to discuss the goals.
- Allow your staff to talk about their issues and feel confident enough to talk to one another.
- Create a distinct working space.
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
Paulo Coelho
