Working from the comfort of your home or apartment may seem like the perfect situation for some. However, telecommuting presents several challenges that those accustomed to the office and open space can quickly confront. That’s why we decided to take a look at Neobrain employees, their challenges and their solutions to this new way of working. We hope that by sharing our experience, we can bring solutions to some of you.
Challenge1 – Difficulty concentrating in a familiar environment
At home, it’s easy to get distracted. Trying to work alongside your family can become a real challenge. You feel constantly in demand and soon you don’t know what to do. Even the smallest interactions become problematic as they cut off the momentum of productivity.
In a less professional and more comfortable environment, it’s just as easy to get lost on your phone when you want to answer a message. A glance at the wrong time and it’s a rain of notifications that falls on us. It is very easy to lose 30 precious minutes of your day.
Solution:
To combat this concentration problem, several methods can be put in place. First, it is important to have a way to differentiate between periods of professional focus and periods of downtime. Getting away from noise and human distractions as much as possible is a good start. Find a work area that you come back to every day and that is used only for work. This makes it easier to distinguish work time from personal time. It also helps not to be constantly disturbed, because the people around you also understand the meaning of this workplace: the silence and concentration that lead to productivity.
Regarding multimedia distractions, it is possible to keep only the notifications of essential work applications, such as the to-do list or the professional chat, and to mute the rest. This way, they are reduced to the vital minimum and you don’t feel the temptation to check if you have a new message every 30 seconds.
Challenge2 – Reduced communication between colleagues
One of the difficulties of telecommuting is communication. Not knowing what your colleagues are doing at any given time of the day, when they are on break or when they are too busy to respond to calls is a real challenge for a team. When you work independently, it’s hard to keep track of your colleagues’ different workloads and availability. This often creates bottlenecks in the progress of each person’s tasks.
Solution:
To avoid this problem, it is important to set schedules that you communicate to your colleagues with whom you work regularly. It is also useful to schedule daily meetings to review the situation and the progress of each person. At Neobrain, to overcome this lack of information, we have set up meetings every two days to review the progress of assignments, as well as daily meetings between sub-teams. Keeping in regular contact by call or direct chat (with Slack, for example) helps to circulate information and maximize productivity.
Challenge3 -Procrastination and work overload
I put these two somewhat opposite problems in the same category because their source is the same: the lack of a daily schedule. It may seem obvious, but planning your days and schedules ahead of time is one of the foundations of efficiency at work. However, at home, it’s easy to get lost in your routine and not really plan your day.
We end up not making as much progress as we would like, which forces us to work later in the evening or on weekends. But to come back to my first point, it is important, when telecommuting, to be able to distinguish between one’s professional and personal time. If you start working at times when you should be relaxing and resting, burn-out can happen very quickly.
Solution:
To be efficient in your work time and not to overflow, you have to get organized! To do this, there are many time management applications that can help you organize your day. At Neobrain, we use Clickup, but there are other solutions like MicrosoftTo Do or Tick Tick. Starting the day with a productive task also allows you to get into the right frame of mind from the start, which is essential!
To learn more about how to work remotely, check out“How to effectively organize a workday in a remote job” on the Jobsora blog.
