How To Run Your Business From Home During The Coronavirus Pandemic

How To Run Your Business From Home During The Coronavirus Pandemic

The world might have been slow in accepting the idea of remote work a year ago because most establishments liked the idea of staff showing up to the office every day. Well, there was no time to come to terms with the idea as the COVID-19 hit us and suddenly working from home became a great idea. Now, the issue on our hands is how to effectively run our businesses from the forced comfort of our homes.

Running a business from home at this point is a little hard because not just parents but kids have been forced to stay home. If you are a parent, this would pose harder than it is supposed to, as you have homeschooling on your hands coupled with work. Fortunately, there are ways around it, let us look at some of these ways.

Brace yourself:

This promises to be a tough and bumpy ride. There will be days when you do not feel like getting out of bed, there will be days when you feel like it is not worth it. If you have kids, there will be days when your kid will decide to want that attention you vowed you would always give them. This would be a bumpy ride, and hopefully, it would not be a long one. We all want this to end already so that we can go back to life as we knew it.

Pick a place and call it an office:

If you want to scale through working from home, you will have to create an office in your house. You cannot work from every corner of your home, you will get distracted. If you already have a study, that is fine, if you do not, pick a place in your sitting room or bedroom and name it works. Make it look like a mini office, it will give you the familiar feel you need to pull through.

Communicate with your team:

Thanks to technology, there are tons of ways you can have a meeting with your team. Take advantage of these technological inventions to hold meetings with your team. Keeping constant communication with your team ensures that if there are any issues you will be one step ahead of them. And even if you are not, you will have some necessary information on the issue, and you will be able to work in collaboration with your team to fix it.

Work on a balance:

It may have been difficult to balance work and life when you have to go to the office, but it might be a tad harder now. If you are a parent, that means you used to leave the daily activities of your kids in the hands of their educational centers. Now, you have them at home with you, and it is impossible to work with other responsibilities hanging around. The only way you can pull this off is for you to find a balance. One way to do this is to create a timetable that everyone has to follow. This way, you can allocate just as much time as is needed for work.

Dress the part:

If you intend to work, look like you are going to work. Chances are, an impromptu meeting might come up in the middle of work, the last thing you want is your team looking at you in your pajamas. Look as smart as is required for a professional environment. Another thing this does is to reinforce the ’work’ mentality on you. There is a limit to the things you can do when you are in your work outfit.

Fix your attitude:

Forget that there is a pandemic ravaging the world and forcing you to remain inside your house and imagine that you are at work. You are not working at home, you are working from home. Both mentalities are different and will affect your productivity greatly, this is dependent on which of the mentalities you choose to go by. While the former instills comfort and a feeling of, ’I can do this in my own time’, the latter enforces the ‘I have to do this at this time’ feeling. The latter will allow for maximum productivity, having dealt with the laid-backness that comes with the former.

Be organized:

The consciousness that you are at home might lead you to be a bit relaxed in some areas, however, an aspect you should never relax on is organization. If you do not organize yourself, your schedule, and your time, you will end up with a truckload of unfinished projects. Organizing your schedule and your time is very helpful and it will help take a load of the thinking you already have to do. An organized mind thinks better.

Have a contingency plan:

If there is anything this pandemic has taught us, it is that we need to take making plan Bs serious. Now that we have learned this lesson, we have to start making contingency plans. You do not just need a plan B, you need plans to the last alphabet because when one fails, you need to avoid being taken unaware. Have a plan, have a backup plan, then have a plan to back up your backup plan.

Take a breather occasionally:

This is not an easy thing to pull off considering that you were not ready for this, and you had your life in a planned and working order before this happened. So, take a breather occasionally, and always remind yourself that this is working and you are in control. There have been difficulties for a lot of other people toeing this path, if you feel overwhelmed, ask for help. You will get the support you need.

This is one of those things you cannot pretend to know-it-all with, you need support, we all do. Eventually, this will pass, but the world will not remain the same. By the end of it all, we will have learned a vital lesson, that “remote work is work as well”.