COVID-19 has brought unprecedented changes to both social and work life in recent months. The restrictions placed on social life in many countries around the world mean that working from home is the only way for many companies and employees to maintain operations.

In this new situation, many industries and companies got for the first time in contact with the topic of Home Office and decentralized working. But there are also industries in which working from home is already in place a log time ago. Thanks to new, digital technologies, working from home is possible.

The benefits working from home

Even if Covid-19 has accelerated this trend of teleworking, the topic of remote work has been in the conversation for many years. Specially in recent years more companies where offering remote working options for their employees. But why this trend of remote working? Mostly, companies offer remote working options because of their benefits, here are some of the benefits working from home can have in your organization.

Better Work-Life Balance

One of the biggest benefits of remote working is the improve of Work-Life Balance in your employees. Teleworking usually allows employees some kind of flexibility in their working hours, that means your employees will have a better way to fit work with other activities.

Whether it’s going to the Gym early in the morning or pick up kids from school, remote working will improve Work-Life Balance in a mayor way.

Less stress and time saving commuting

Most people don’t live next to the workplace, that means commuting every day. Maybe your workplace is just 15 min away (this means 30 min commuting time every day) or maybe 1 hour (2h commuting time every day). Anyways, if you have the option to work from home you are already saving time. With remote working you can save several hours a week, time you can use for more important things than driving or sit in a train.

Many people don’t realize, but commuting to work every day is also stressful. Because we are traveling during rush hours, either driving or taking the subway can be stressful. Everyone wants to get somewhere as fast as possible, this makes the subway to be full and creates traffic jam. If you work from home all this stress is just gone.

Be more independent

One of the main benefits of remote work is the possibility to work independently of your location. For employees this is a great option if they want to work from another country or on the countryside. For companies, having a job offer that can be fulfilled remotely, increases dramatically the number of applications and therefore increases the chances of finding the right person four your company.

Increase Productivity and Performance

Everybody working in an office knows how loud usually is, home many times you get interrupted or how many long and unimportant meeting happen on a daily basis. Working remotely, all these issues are non existing.

Working from home comes usually to fewer interruptions, quieter work environment and also less and more efficient meetings. All this increases the productivity and performance of your employees in a mayor way.

Tips to make remote working possible

Whether your whole team or part of your team is working remotely, you might have some challenges. After all, working remotely is not the same as everyone is in the office. Here you can find some tips so teleworking is a smooth process in your company:

Keep the communication

When your employees are working from home, you should ensure your employees are getting all important information and that communication keeps flowing. Therefore, try to communicate with your employees as much as you would if you were in an office. Otherwise, if the communication with your employees or between employees is not running smoothly, this can lead to misunderstandings and mistakes.

Schedule your meetings

One way to ensure everyone is on the same page are fix meetings. It can be once a day or once a week, but a fix meeting where everyone explains briefly in what are they working is a very good way for everyone to know what’s going on.

Keep the team spirit

Since you and your team are working from home, you don’t see each other all that much and it can be difficult to keep the team spirit alive. Even if it seems difficult to keep up your team spirit, there are way to do some team building activities remotely. Here are some ideas:

Schedule a weekly meeting where everyone can meet in a zoom meeting to have a coffee and talk about something else than work.

Organize an online poker game night.

Play a drawing and guessing game with your team. We can recommend Skribbl.

Evaluate if teleworking can be implemented in your company

Even if remote work usually brings benefits to your company, it can be that remote working is not a good option in your company. Maybe most of your employees requiere to be at the workplace to work, maybe you work processes are not digital enough to be able to work properly from home or your company culture is not ready for such a big change. Therefore, before implementing remote work, evaluate if the benefits outweight the downside.

Time Tracking in Home Office

Wether you have to record working times legally or your company uses a time tracking tool to have an overview of your work. This has to continue even if your whole team is working remotelly. Choosing the right time tracking tool is key, make sure your tool has different options to record work and project times.