The financial year 2020 has definitely thrown a curveball across the globe. The pandemic is and has affected all possible sectors in the global market. Some are worse hit than others. In times of crisis, keeping calm is the only option because everything is out of control anyway. Most governments have advised businesses to operate from home to break the chain and help the community and the world at large restore order as scientists and the entire health sector spend sleepless nights trying to find a vaccine. For them and for ourselves and as responsible adults, we must gauge and reroute our workflows to ensure minimal hiccups during this transitional phase which is not only a testing time for a major work culture revolution but also an opportunity to combat our obsolete traditional work culture.

Work must continue but how do we do that? How do we work from home, effectively, without compromising on services? We give you a few tips and guidelines on how best to manage this with minimum stress and of course, minimum overheads since a recession is already predicted after the pandemic is over. We will break this down into two broad categories; personal attributes and attitude and work management tools.

Personal attributes and attitude

1. Discipline – We all have 24 hours to utilize in our favour. Timing and discipline go hand in hand. Personal discipline must be intensified because there is no external force that will motivate you to work, other than your strict discipline. Wake up one hour earlier than your schedule just to take care of some personal household chores.
2. Planning – Plan the tasks of your next day or next few days well in advance. It is imperative to break down the workflow into realistic targets and assign deadlines.
3. Focus and dedication – Don’t multi-task unnecessarily. Multi-tasking creates a mirage-like belief that you’re getting everything done but at the end of the day, you’ve not completed any task. Don’t be Jack of many trades. Start a task and finish it before jumping on to other tasks. Limit your reactions to emails and phone calls unless they’re absolutely urgent. Of course, you will respond within the response time promised to clients.
4. Positive attitude – If you’re an employee working remotely, take this as an opportunity to build trust with your employer. If you’re an employer, don’t be a clock watcher. Take this as an opportunity to entrust your employees with responsibility, it will empower them to do better with minimum supervision. After all, a good attitude is the most important personal trait that helps us work as a team.
5. Social media management and phone time – Self-explanatory!

Work management tools

We live in possibly the best times of technological advancements and enhancement. There was never a time better than now. There is an influx of online and cloud-based work management tools, virtual offices and mobile applications specifically designed for those working remotely. The future of work culture is likely to change post the pandemic. Reliance on technology and AI will be adopted, if not already adopted by many businesses. With changing times, it’s always advisable to start off early otherwise the change will be enforced sooner or later. A few tools that will come in very handy, for as long as you have an internet connection is as follows:-

• Trello – This workflow and team management tool has a very effective and easy to use interface. This tool allows the creation of teams and projects, assigning tasks to specific team members, assigning deadlines to each task or project and offers ease of commenting and manoeuvring throughout the application. Reminder emails are sent to your registered work email before tasks fall due for completion and you are free to set the reminder timelines. It operates in real-time hence updates by team members from wherever they are working is received in real-time. What does it cost? It is free, with of course a subscription-based premium version which offers advanced features. Did we mention that it also has a mobile application that is compatible with iOS and android? Try it out at www.trello.com
• Slack – This is advanced workflow management, team management and document management tool. The advanced features this application offers are as follows:-
  • Dropping files for teammates
  • Dropping images for teammates
  • Direct messaging interface
  • Jot down reminders to yourself. This is for everyone who experiences memory lapses more often than usual. And it comes with a mobile application as well. Try it out at www.slack.com. Cost-free.
• Zoom – This is a video and audio communications with an easy cloud platform for chatting and video conferencing. The interface is easy to use, provides a recording option and has a very interactive interface during video or audio communications where all participants can virtually raise their hands to ask a question, request the host to slow down and so on. Of course, you can download it on your mobile as well. Do we see how dependent we are on our phones? These companies definitely do! Cost – Free for now. Hopefully, this remains so given there has been a sharp increase in users during the pandemic.
• Skype – Our old friend here, Skype, is always a man’s (woman’s too) best friend. I need not say more about it.

Some of us may ask ourselves, why do we need to use these apps when we have effective apps like WhatsApp? Let us give you a few benefits of using these apps, and no, we aren’t paid to advertise them.

• Centralized information and chats – We definitely don’t need data and chats all over. These apps keep our communication organized and help us organize ourselves by sending us reminders just in case we oversleep or forget we had to work on something. Working from home comes with some very basic but pesky challenges. If you have little kids running around, the challenge is even greater with the constant urge to jump into their stress-free activities.
• Real-time interaction – We all need the feel of an office. Organized applications give us that feel. The only difference here is that we will not have any physical presence around each other but we can manage each other nevertheless.
• Enhanced professionalism – We all know that we get a bit too friendly when we interact on What’s App and there is a risk of the conversation gravitating towards a completely different topic, especially when colleagues are friends too. And the last thing we want at this point is to discuss the Covid-19 virus endlessly. Or what’s new on Netflix!

We hope this article motivates you to work from home, bearing the circumstances at hand and have fun while doing so.

Please share your thoughts. We’d like to hear what you have to say.