Working from Home in 2020? Everything You Need to Work Remotely—for an Employer or Yourself. Grab a Snack and Let’s Dive in!

Organizations must have laid down policies and procedures associated with working from home. The human resources team must formulate the policies keeping in mind the environment prevalent across the homes of their employees. The systems need to be employee-friendly.

Some companies regularly allow their employees to work remotely. It is quite prevalent in the IT industry while other industries are also picking up fast. It helps to reduce overheads and allows organisations to penetrate the hinterland without incurring much cost. We will now discuss a few pointers to keep in mind while dealing with remote working.

Organisations must decide the level of employees who can be allowed to work remotely. They may open up small sales offices. It is unnecessary to incur administration costs for a few odd sales employees who are operating from the hinterland. These employees should work from home to reduce costs.

You must also consider the activities that do not require employees to come to the office. It could be people from the human resources department or the administrations, or even the marketing department. Most of the employees can work alone and do not need to be present in the office. These employees can be provided with specific policies that they need to adhere to if they are working remotely.

The seniority of the employees is also a factor in deciding who can work from home. Senior employees only need to manage their subordinates and may not need to be present in the office every day. These people can be exempted from being in office other than any important meetings.

Remote employees will need more active technical support. It is also a bit cumbersome to provide technical assistance to these employees. Remote technical support for these employees also needs to form an integral part of your HR policy. There should be a specified process to respond to critical issues within a specified timeframe. There should be a number to talk directly to a technical support colleague.

You will need to notify your IT team about all employees who have opted for working remotely. The IT team has to allocate resources accordingly to attend to the queries coming in from these employees. The remote requests may come at any time with varying priorities. For example, the employee could not connect to video conferencing software just before essential meetings. The remote tech support needs to troubleshoot this case urgently.

IT security is an important aspect that you must address. It is addressed by various companies differently. Some companies may allow employees not working on critical projects to use their laptop or desktop when working from home. However, most companies are quite strict and have stringent IT policies.

Employees are provided with a laptop from the office, which has to be for official work only. Mostly, these terminals do not have access to social media. Employees can access internet services using dongles. Specialised software is loaded into these laptops to track the time the employees logged into and the number of hours worked. It also prevents employees from accessing websites other than those required for regular work. A firewall prevents unauthorised access to the system.

It is understandably challenging to ensure confidentiality when you have employees who are working from a remote location. It is easier to ensure confidentiality in your office premises. You need to document the dos and don'ts for employees to follow.

If your employee does a client call from a restaurant, how will you ensure that no confidential information is given out? You will need to have policies towards this end. It can be stated that the employee must not share confidential information when he makes calls. The call records must be checked whether any personal calls have been made form the mobile. However, this can be carried out only when you provide the employee with a handset for official calls.

Working from home can be a great idea. It allows you to work with a peace of mind. Without some of the employees meddling in your work or the odd person gossiping in front of you. You have the luxury to work from work. But, at the same time, work needs to be done.

At home, you can be your worst enemy. You need to have proper steps to make sure you are not distracted. Understandably, you may run some errands for your house, but it should not affect your productivity. Below are some tips to remain productive even when you are working from home.

It starts by putting a structure to your work. Get prepared to work as it could be quite a task to go from your bed to the workstation. Start on time if there is a strict policy to do so. If there is no such policy, do start a bit early and check your pending emails and respond to them. It is the best time to respond to emails as you have a clear mind.

Once you have browsed through your emails, make a list of activities that need to be completed during the day. Also, take note of any meetings or any calls that need to be done. You must also create a work plan for the day and stick to it religiously. It is best to do your calls in the afternoon. By that time, most of your work will be done.

You must pretend that you are in the office even when working from home. You should have a setup just like your office. You must select a cosy place in your house to have it like your office workstation. Have a table for yourself along with a wooden chair. A sofa is suitable for comfort but could be distracting at the same time. Put your official handset on a charger and keep it fully charged at all times.

You must not set up your home workstation in the bedroom as you will be tempted to move to the bed, and it will result in losing concentration. It is best that you take your coffee with you can do away with the need to go up and bring it later. It is not advisable to welcome guests to your house when you are working. Also, request your family to stay away as you need some peace of mind when you are working.

Being at home will tempt you to bring out your smartphone and browse through your social media page. It is the worst form of distraction that can happen to you. Ideally, your official laptop should block all social media websites and other websites that you need not visit during office hours. To start with, remove them from the browser shortcuts and delete the social media apps from your smartphone.

You can log out of all your social media accounts from your mobile and block them during office hours. Ideally, you can work through the Incognito browser mode if you are using Google Chrome. It will automatically log you out from social media accounts and prevent the auto-completion of search results.

Not logging into social media does not mean you have to be unsocial. You can take logical breaks and have a mouthful at regular intervals. You must remove the gateways to social media networks, but you can always interact with your family. But do put a limit to those interactions.

You are the best judge of yourself, and you are the only person who can say when you are most productive. Select your working hours and make sure that the most productive hours are usually kept during the starting three to four hours. It will help to finish the designated activities on time. You can do your meetings at the latter half of your schedule as most of your work will be completed by then.

You will need to do the thoughtful activities, like planning during your most productive hours. The menial tasks can be done when your productivity ebbs out. The small acts of success will help you to move on to more substantial tasks across the day.