How to Work from Home in the New Normal

In a more traditional sense, home used to be the escape from work. Now that many of us are now working remotely, home seems to have become the new office. This can come with its additional challenges. 

Although many companies are opening their offices, and many employees are choosing or required to go back to the office part-time or full-time, there are still many working professionals who are still working fully remote or in a hybrid model. 

Even after two years, these challenges mentioned above can still be so prevalent. You may have been one of those people at the beginning of the pandemic where you still got dressed to go to work despite walking two feet to your desk. You may have relaxed that routine since then as you became more comfortable with remote work.

For the past three years since starting Virtudesk, I have had the opportunity to mostly work from home. And from my experience from running a business remotely, I couldn’t stress enough the importance of starting my day off right. Below, I’ll share with you my top four tips for being more productive in your home environment, and what you should focus on to remain successful in this environment.

4 Tips to Being More Productive

1. Wake Up as if You’re Going to Commute to Work

First, you should wake up as if you’re going to commute to work. If you can, get some exercise in, eat a little breakfast, and get ready as if people besides your family members are going to see you.  

The routine shouldn’t stop there though — it should continue throughout the day. 

My rule of thumb of maintaining a productive work schedule is pretty simple – If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. 

2. Plan Your Day Step-by-Step

Go ahead, plan your day out step-by-step, so you know exactly what you should be doing when you’re doing it. This tactic will not only help you remain concentrated, but it will give you a sense of accomplishment when you’re able to cross all of your tasks off the list. 

3. Go for a Walking Break in the Middle of Your Day

Yet, there is one more important element you should consider. The thing is, the digital technology that we have is great, but they will overwhelm you. That’s because you have ten different methods of communication, with all kinds of apps. What I usually do is just go for a walk in the neighborhood just to get my head cleared. At least do a digital detox for about an hour or so, so you can get back and concentrate on your work. Try it to keep a healthy level of consciousness. 

So, if you take anything away today, know that work-life balance is key.

4. Create Goals for Yourself

Create goals for yourself to maintain focus. You’ll want to create daily, weekly, and monthly goals to keep yourself on track for personal growth, achievements, and KPIs. Sometimes, when we don’t have a separation of space, it’s difficult to remain focused at our desk. Map out at the beginning of each day the top tasks you want to accomplish by the end of that day, and by the end of that week.

Lastly, prioritize rest when you take breaks, so your mind can keep going throughout the day.

Focus on Building and Maintaining Relationships

When working remotely, it’s very easy to lose sight of the relationships you had in the office, and the relationships that you have with your employees and customers. Because everything is done with less physical interaction, it can be easy to lose touch with the strength of our relationships, or become passive in how we maintain them. 

You have to be conscious about the strategies you’ll use to maintain relationships with your employees and customers, and brainstorm ways your staff will remain in good standing and strong with each other.

Your Employees

One thing the pandemic has taught us is that our employees are essential. They make up the backbone of any company. More importantly, it’s really important to treat them like family, and take care of them. Not only is employee compensation getting increasingly competitive among companies, but it’s getting harder to retain happy employees because of it, and the remote environment.

There are two things that you should focus on in an environment like this. The first being your employees. In Virtudesk, we view our employees as a large family. They’re our major assets. We love our clients, but more importantly, we love the people who work for us, and that gives them hope.

It’s really important, especially due to the fact that more than 600 of our employees are from Manila. Then, we also have a handful of U.S.-based employees. So, how do you maintain a unified culture where people don’t feel disconnected? 

First, you can send recorded videos of yourself giving your employees an encouraging message for the day, week, quarter, or for the times we are living in. Just by sharing these things with employees through a routine morning message, we have received a generous amount of gratitude from employees. In this current economic and political environment, running on a culture of empathy is so necessary, as it will bring comfort to your employees.

Another way to keep you and your employees connected and engaged is to find ways to keep easy, fun, and open communication alive. When working remotely, it can be hard to stay connected. Opportunities for true connections and conversations beyond work can get missed when working remotely - where you may only feel compelled to reach out and talk to your employees and coworkers on work-related things. 

Setting up multiple streams of communication through messaging apps, VOIPs, and regular one-on-ones, can serve as a bridge to human connection and serve as the new water cooler talk.

Working in 2022: Remote Work is Here to Stay

When the pandemic started roughly two years ago, we all thought that the world would stay home for only a month. However, what turned out to be two years later and many changed habits and normalities, we find ourselves in a world more digitized than before. Instead of enthusiastically going back to “normal”, people are pushing for the change that happened due to COVID to stick forever. We have found great advantages to the forced changes we had to make.

Remote work being one of those changes - and the rapid evolution of digital technology and its use. Now, we have to not only analyze what we can do to manage new routines and ways of doing things, but we have to take it to the next level. 

One trend that has been recognized and valued because of the pandemic besides remote work, has been the use of virtual assistants. Through real life people businesses can outsource business tasks to, it’s helped the business world adapt to our changing environments, stay alive as a business financially, and access a global talent pool. That’s why I am proud to lead my virtual assistant company, Virtudesk, into this new economy, as I can help business owners find new business models and strategies to not only stay alive in these uncertain times, but thrive.

If you're interested in getting the massive help virtual assistants can provide, fill out the contact form on my company’s website, Virtudesk, and one of our Consultants will get in touch with you.

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