How Do You Separate Work From Home?
Separating work from home has proven to be a rather arduous task. Most people today do not know where to draw the line between their professional and their personal lives. Then we should ask the question, “How do you separate work from home?”
You can separate work from home by creating effective routines for your “work to home transition”, isolating your home’s working area from your living area, and even clearly and strictly communicating your working hours to your colleagues.
Leveraging some of these techniques will put you in a good position to strike a healthy work-life balance. This greatly contributes to your overall productivity and minimizes the chances of burnout and fatigue.
The trick here is to acknowledge that your job is what you do and should not who you are and how you live.
This post aims to provide a clear insight on how you can effectively ensure that your professional and personal lives are “worlds apart”. The goal here is to enable you to always produce high-quality work for your employer.
Another aim is to create adequate personal space to handle equally important aspects of your personal life. If these two different areas of your life collide, you will be in a lot of unnecessary trouble.
Whichever way you look at it, separating your personal and professional lives offers you many benefits. By driving a “necessary wedge” between these two critical aspects of your life, the boundary in a way ensures you live your life to the fullest. You can seamlessly transition in and out of either divide.
Therefore, no one side can claim to be on the “shorter end” of the spoon when it comes to the attention that you are supposed to offer them. Your family members, your boss, and colleagues will be contented. This will also leave you with a buzzing feeling of fulfillment.
5 Practical Tips You Can Apply To Separate Work from Home
1.Come up With Routines for the Work to Home Transition
A great example of a workable routine is putting your phone away whenever you finish your work. This allows you to disconnect from your professional life so that you can “wear another hat”.
If you are a father, mother, husband, or wife, you can be able to perform your roles and duties. The people that require your attention are therefore able to be satisfied.
2.You Can Disable Push Email Notifications on Your Devices
You can deliberately disconnect from your email after you leave the office. Moments with family should not be interrupted by email notifications that constantly set off noises as they appear on your phone screen.
Most people find it very hard to ignore these pop-up notifications, leading to distractions from family time. You can always try to respond to these messages the following day. By disabling them, you can be present to what and who you’re with.
3.Communicate Your Working Hours to Your Colleagues
When you inform your colleagues of how your typical working day looks like, they can understand your activities more. For example, let them know that your preference is not to respond to work emails, calls, and messages past the set working hours.
In light of this fact, your colleagues will respect your need for space and not blow up your phone and email inbox with issues about work matters.
4.Segregate your working area from your living area and space at home.
At home, let your personal space look like your personal space and not an extension of your office’s workstation or your home’s working area. Try not to mix your personal space and your working space.
For example, it is highly discouraged to work while you are lying comfortably in your bed. You should strictly use your bed to rest after a hard day’s work and not “workstation 2.0”!
Keep away from working at the couch that you normally coil yourself up into binge on your favorite series. If you have to attend to some work matters, strictly stick to the room that you use as your home office.
5.Create Separate User Accounts, Email Accounts, and even Browsers on your computer for personal use and work-related use
This technique allows you to only respond to personal email messages and texts and only keep in touch with your life’s aspects while at home.
User accounts, email accounts, and personal browsers aim to only provide you with the appropriate information related to things such as your hobbies and messages from your family and friends.
Failure to do this will put you in a position where your job and your office issues constantly bombard you.
The Advantages of Separating Work From Home (The “Why”)
1.It Reduces Burnout
When you set clear boundaries between your home and work, you steer clear of burnout from work. This work burnout is characterized by extreme mental and physical exhaustion. It can leave you feeling extremely depleted and uninspired to handle even the most basic tasks.
When you are at home, zone out of the “work mode” and rest adequately. When you are at work, leave everything related to your home and personal issues behind. Set that aspect of your life and focus on handling your work.
2.Increased Productivity and Efficiency At Work
When you are at home, resting adequately can leave you feeling very refreshed the next day when you are at work.
You will realize that you are more motivated, more alert, and in great shape to discharge your duties with great zeal through this. You can meet all your deadlines in good time and produce work of high quality.
3.Improved Health And Overall Wellbeing
By effectively drawing up a boundary between your work and home, it means you can create more time for your leisure activities.
In your leisure time, you can rest, hit the gym, go swimming, go jogging and engage in other non-work-related activities that are sure to keep your mind refreshed and your body to be in great physical shape.
4.Less Stress In Your Personal Life
A good balance of your professional life and personal life results in reduced stress in your personal life. This is because you have managed to separate and keep your work life very far from your home.
You can wear a different hat whenever you get home from work. As a wife, you have to take care of your home and husband. As a mother, you need to cook for and take care of your kids. As a husband or father, you have to dedicate ample time to your wife and kids.
Failure to manage these two aspects of your life well creates conflicts. These can give you a great deal of stress. These high levels of stress can also cause many strained relationships in your personal life.
5.There is Reduced Turnover Rate At The Workplace
Failure to strike a good equilibrium between your work and home can leave you prone to massive burnouts. As we have already established, job burnouts leave you unable to perform your duties and producing work of undesirable standards.
This is because of reduced motivation which is the greatest contributor to employee turnover at the workplace. When staff start to feel that they are no longer contributing their best to the company growth, they normally decide to quit and try another job.
But by creating an atmosphere where you can balance out your work and personal life, you indirectly contribute to your company’s reduced turnover rates.
How Companies Can Help Their Employees Achieve A Healthy Work-Life Balance And Separate Work From Home?
1.Setting Up Boundaries with Clients
This is very important towards creating adequate personal space for your staff. Some clients just do not know when to stop. Therefore, failure to communicate the official office operating hours can lead to a situation where the clients constantly bombard your staff with a lot of calls, texts, and emails.
This eats into their time that they would have otherwise spent with their kids and spouses. Communicating the set working hours is vital. This will discourage the clients from bugging your employees during non-working hours.
Setting up clear boundaries with the company’s clients will greatly benefit your staff’s work-life balance efforts.
2.Restriction of Employee Hours
As an employer, you need to set specific hours during which your staff must complete certain duties. It is very common to find many employers today, totally wear down their employees with a lot of work that normally spills into their free time.
We have all seen or even been in a situation where your boss overworks you. These loads of work will have you staying put in the office way past the set working hours. This will only result in burnout and cause reduced productivity.
3.Creating flexibility for working parents
Nothing can wear down an employee as trying to balance the demands at home and those at their workplace. Parents are the number one victims here.
Simultaneously raising and taking care of kids and handling the duties at the office can be extremely taxing. As an employer, create a flexible working policy for your staff. This may allow those with very young kids to work fewer hours at the office and the remaining hours at home.
You can also allow them a day off, for instance, to attend to their kids and come back to the office refreshed and full of motivation to perform.
4.Regular Review of Workloads
An employer should also review each employee’s workload often. This is an excellent way to make sure that they do not suffer from burnouts that negatively impact their productivity. Huge workloads mean that should the employees would be needed to take some work home with them.
Also, they will be required to stay in the office way longer than the required working hours, all in a bid to finish up their work and meet the set deadlines.
5.Offering Insurance Covers for Their Families
One of the biggest reasons that cause dangerous levels of stress in an employee’s life is having to worry about their loved ones’ health. By coming up with insurance coverage plans for their staff’s kin, a company can address this problem.
Whenever an employee’s spouse, kid, or parent falls sick or is in urgent need of medical assistance, the insurance cover comes into play. This enables the employee’s mind to be at ease in the psychological side of things and goes a long way in assisting him or her to save a lot of cash that would otherwise seriously affect their finances due to huge hospital bills.
6.Creating More Company Outings and Team-Bonding Sessions
Employers ought to leverage the atmosphere that company outings and functions can provide. These are reasonable times that you can use to enable your employees to stay motivated, refreshed, and in a good place to build long-lasting working relationships with their colleagues.
From staff’s birthday parties to cocktail parties and even team-bonding sessions, these activities go a long way in creating an “out of office” feel that enables employees their other aspects of life (their non-working lives).
7.Support Telecommuting
Telecommuting should not just be seen as a means of minimizing the strain on a company’s resources. When used effectively, it can guarantee a healthy work-life balance for your employees.
Allowing your employees to work remotely gives them a sense of control to dictate how and when they work as long as the set targets for productivity and all the required deadlines are met. Your employees can develop their schedule and use their methodologies as long as they can be equally productive as they would have been while working from the company’s premises.
In conclusion, separating work from home is a double-edged sword. You should try to keep away your issues from interfering with your work and vice versa.
Follow the great tips mentioned above to separate your work and home life effectively. When you successfully do this and achieve a healthy work-life balance and lead a life devoid of unnecessary stress!
