Assessing Your Productivity vs. Your Health Risk
In many ways, your home office resembles your office at work. That is, the things you put in place to make you more productive are the same things no matter where you’re working, whether you’re working in a cubicle farm or whether you’re in a work from home arrangement on a porch with a long extension cord. And it works when you incorporate the most common productivity tips, such as:
- Create a space that’s your own, where interruptions are minimized
- Set up a comfortable environment that has a supportive chair, an ergonomic desk and proper lighting
- Keep your desk clean and clutter-free to help your mind focus
- Maintain your schedule, which includes specific break times
- Review what you want to get done every day before you start
Is It Safe to Return to the Office?
Every state seems to be on a different schedule for opening up. Some states have implemented strict containment orders, while others have thrown open the doors and invited workers back. If you have the kind of job that allows you to work from home, you’ve likely been working the entire time during the shutdown, assuming your state had a stay-at-home order.
As society loosens up, it makes sense to ask when or even if you’ll be leaving the home to return to your normal place of business. A lot depends on your employer, but you should have some say in the matter, as your health may be in danger if the pandemic is still raging. You can still work from home and be productive, as you’ve demonstrated over the past eight weeks.
A health assessment should be your first step. How are the infection numbers in your area? Is your local media still reporting deaths? How safe do feel leaving the house? If you return to work, you can expect — you should expect — to wear a mask and perhaps even gloves. Your office should be arranged to leave six feet of space between desks too. These new social norms will still be with us for months to come.
The Benefits of Working from Home
This is a popular topic that we’ve written about in our blog. But that was in March 2019. If you read that article, you can add to the list of benefits that “small” thing about staying healthy. There are many benefits you get when you work from home.
Maybe your employer will see the benefits as well. Why pay for office space when the team can work from home and still be productive? When communications technology is so advanced, team meetings are still easy to pull together, and you don’t need a conference room when you all can be in the same Zoom room.
Will the Future Embrace Work from Home?
No one knows for sure what the future of work will look like. Will cubicle farms go extinct? Will companies ever need a central, open-floor-plan office ever again? Can we all be productive without being in proximity to each other? The quarantine bubble may turn out to have positive consequences, as companies learn to trust their employees and working from home gains mainstream acceptance.
At Ray Access, we’ve embraced working from home since the beginning. While the principals used to meet in person every week, all the work gets done at home. Even when we added writers, we didn’t need a central office. In fact, our writers are separated by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.
Your company’s needs may differ from our needs, but it’s time to really consider whether you need an office, especially if you’re not producing a physical object. Web developers, web designers, project managers, content producers and SEO firms can all work from home. For now and into the future.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
