07 Jan Top Tips to Create the Perfect Work from Home Environment
Impromptu home offices created during the Covid-19 pandemic are now beginning to look more and more like the ‘new normal’ for many office-based workers across the country.
With this unlikely to change anytime soon, DH&Co IT Consultants have been investigating some of the best ways to optimise your work from home setup.
A setup that works for you
Navigating that fine balance between productivity and a healthy home environment is an essential part of maintaining your staff’s wellbeing and keeping your business running as efficiently as possible during these extraordinary times.
It might sound obvious, but perhaps one of the most important things you can do is make sure that your staff have a strong Wi-Fi connection at all times. This will not only increase productivity but can also reduce stress.
Furthermore, working collaboratively, like you would in a physical office, is key to carrying on working efficiently from home. Simple ways to facilitate this include setting colleagues up with shared drives, videoconferencing software and remote access to their work computers. DH&Co IT Consultants can provide staff training in these areas, ensuring that your team gets the most out of the resources available to them.
Maintain the gap between home and work
Many office workers are currently having to sacrifice their own phones for work calls, as they now don’t have access to a normal office desk phone. This can create an unhealthy barrier to switching off from work in the evenings, as many are now receiving work-related messages and calls on their mobiles.
Thankfully, Microsoft Teams provides an easy solution to this. It has its own built in calling feature, meaning businesses can call from the app on a mobile, from Outlook, or from Teams itself. This can help you and your team to maintain important work-home boundaries, allowing you to switch off from work calls while you’re ‘out of the office’.
Cloud storage is another effective way to maintain the gap between home and professional work.
Rather than quickly becoming clogged up with new files and documents that would normally be saved to storage in an office, cloud storage allows data to be saved in an off-site location that you will be able access whenever you need.
In doing this, you can save your personal computer from mass storage. The switch to cloud-based systems proves to be cost effective as well, as you no longer need worry about upgrading your manual hard drives when they are full.
Turn emails off out of hours
Working and relaxing from home may feel difficult to balance at the moment. An unfortunate reality is that many home-workers increase the hours they work, as they incorrectly feel obliged to, to make sure they are keeping as productive as they were in the office.
Looking at emails out of office hours is a common trap that working from home can lead to. Thankfully, email apps like Microsoft Outlook now include ‘Do Not Disturb’ features on their mobile app. Users just need to tap the ‘bell’ symbol in the app, allowing you to select a time frame when you will not see new email notifications.
If you’d like to learn more about how we could help fine-tune your team’s remote work setup, get in touch with the DH&Co IT Consultants team at mail@dhcoit.co.uk or call us on 01573 225 082.