Establishing your home-based business doesn’t always mean you have to stay at home. Indeed, craft artists, for instance, or independent trainers, often don’t need a workplace. They work with their clients in a variety of locations, either on-site direct at the client’s home or in a dedicated meeting area for their activities. As a result, a lot of home-based businesses are struggling to embrace the self-isolation measures linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a big difference between using your home office as a base for administrative tasks, and working from home 100% of the time. As such, small home-based entrepreneurs are having a hard time adjusting to the situation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a new series of challenges for home-based businesses. Adapting your activities and company processes to embrace full-time remote teams is a difficult task. There will be areas of uncertainty that entrepreneurs need to manage effectively and rapidly during the first weeks of self-isolation. Ultimately, the current health crisis is not only highly stressful for everyone, but it also forces businesses to find immediate remote solutions that can tackle their problems. If you have been postponing the return to work because you are unsure of how your team and yourself will cope in the new situation, chances are that you are worried about one of the following issues:
Can my I.T. tackle the challenge?
Picture the scene. You’re ready to start the day. You’ve brewed fresh coffee. You’re wearing your coziest loungewear, ready for the first video call of the day—except that your laptop doesn’t seem to want to connect to the network. In an office, everything would be resolved with a quick call to the I.T. department. However, when you’ve got no team at hand, you need to consider another option. Outsourced I.T. services can transform your work experience as a remote team. You can ensure you’ve got an expert on call to help you sort out issues in real time. More importantly, you can make sure that issues don’t arise in the first place! It experts maintain your network and I.T. system safe and accessible so that you don’t waste time on tech issues.
How do I keep in touch?
Keeping in touch with your team is essential when everyone is working from home. Ultimately, your co-workers are in the same stressful situation as you. Forced to stay at home and unable to exchange thoughts, ideas, and skills in face-to-face meetings as they would normally do. As a result, your communication needs can be left unanswered if you don’t make the most of the digital tools available. You need to establish new communication techniques, such as running regular video calls to ask for recommendations and share the reasoning behind each task, for instance. Ensuring your team is always au fait of what is going on and why things happen can help them to work effectively and in the same direction, even though people don’t sit together anymore.
Can I maintain productivity?
While it’s easy to stay productive and motivated when you can work together, working from home can change things dramatically. Deadlines have a tendency to disappear when you’re isolated. As such, you need to change your work tracking methods. You can use online tools to create a productivity tracker that keeps you on track day after day. A platform like Trello is an excellent ally to define what methods work for you and figure out the best work schedule. Additionally, you can also use Trello to monitor your achievements. It can be a helpful experience to share with your team. Everybody needs to follow a different routine to make room for everyday life and work.
How do I maintain my work/life routine?
As we’ve just mentioned work life, it’s essential to address time division for remote teams. When you are to stay at home, it is impossible to escape work. You can’t go out in the evening to forget about your day. You can’t schedule gym classes to force you to start and stop early. In other words, you need to stick to a strict work schedule without external support. A lot of home-based workers find it hard during the lockdown to leave work in the home office. Make an effort to change into loungewear or P.J.s at the end of the day and to go to another room to create a physical break with work.
Should we plan friendly catchups?
How is your team doing during the lockdown? People are stressed out about their work and worried about their friends and relatives. Stress can not only affect their work, but it also creates the ideal terrain for depression. While you can’t meet your team for a coffee and a chat, you can plan virtual coffee meetings to help them relieve pressure. You can set up a virtual cafe, in other words, an Internet connection with a webcam and a home-brewed cup of coffee. You can have a relaxed chat and help isolated members of your team feel less alone.
How to manage lockdown depression?
For a lot of people, work life makes up for the most significant social interactions. The remote work situation can lead to feelings of loneliness for people who live alone. For a lot of businesses, it’s an opportunity to build a team culture and bring everyone together for entertainment and fun beyond work projects. Planning quiz nights on Zoom can be a great way of spending an evening together. You can even find online games, such as escape rooms, that are suitable for your team.
Do we all work at the same time?
Ultimately, people who have young children are more likely to be up early. On the other hand, those who live on their own are more likely to stay up late at night. Your team can find it hard to start and finish work at the same time. But they don’t need to share the same work schedule. You only need work schedules to overlap each other by a few hours. As long as people can find some time during the day where everyone is online and can talk, it’s enough to keep everyone in the loop.
In conclusion, managing remote worries effectively can smooth out potential frictions caused by the forced lockdown. It is a time like no other, and therefore, it justifies extraordinary approaches, such as encouraging time flexibility, online gaming together, and inviting everyone to a virtual coffee meeting.
