Tips for Supporting your Staff Whilst Working from Home

It’s important to support staff to get their work done and maintain their mental well-being whilst they are working from home. Hopefully these 12 points will help them.

1. Get dressed! It’s important to follow your normal working routine as far as possible. Encourage your staff to get dressed, make the bed and get on with their day. If you’re making video calls part of the normal working day, this can act as an additional motivator to ditch the dressing gown!
   
   
2. Substitute the commute! If they normally commute to work, encourage them use this time they to get active instead! They can go for a walk or check out YouTube for some easy home workouts – no equipment needed! Again, the daily practice of video calling can help here – you can have them all report in on what activity they’ve done. No judgement – if they’ve done chair yoga or run 5k, it’s all an achievement!
   
   
3. Set clear work hours. If they work a specific pattern, try and get them to stick to it whilst working from home. Or at the very least, create time slots where they take regular breaks, and a clearly defined finishing time.
   
   
4. Work space. If they have a home office, great! However, most people will be working from the kitchen/dining room table or the sofa. Discourage them from working in their bedroom as there is then no definition between their relaxing space and their work space. Wherever possible encourage them to define the space and to close the door/clear it up at the end of the work day.
   
   
5. Mind the back – Yoga balls are perfect for supportive seating! They support great posture and are flexible enough to fit into any home working situation. They are fun and get you off the dining room chair and make you feel like you’re doing something healthy, even though you’re actually just sitting!
   
   They can be online from as little as £7 on Amazon you can send these to all of your team members to let them know you are thinking about their health and safety at this time! https://amzn.to/3a8NcjB
   
   What about PE with Joe? For those that have kids at home, why not get moving as a family with Joe Wicks every morning at 09:00 on his YouTube channel – the Body Coach.
   
   
6. Check in with Teams! It’s important to retain a sense of continuity and comradeship so have a daily check in via video chat if possible, so that people continue to feel connected. This practice can be invaluable in making sure that people don’t feel isolated and alone.
   
   
7. Virtual lunch and sanity check: buy your people lunch on Fridays and have them all connect via video chat – this way you can make sure they are all maintaining their grip on reality and not going stir crazy.
   
   
8. Encourage your team to stand up! If sitting is causing physical problems like back ache, get them to change it up by using the ironing board as a standing desk!
   
   
9. Make sure they take a proper lunch break! It’s easy for the lines between work and home to blur when you’re working from the dining room. Encourage your people to close the laptop and make some proper food or get outside in the garden for some Vitamin D.
   
   
10. Encourage people to reach out to each other for a chat – it’s easy to start feeling like you’re on a hamster wheel and cut off from the world!
    
    
11. Reach out – to each member of your team to let them know that they can call you anytime, and to make sure that they are coping with the change in work practice.
    
    
12. Keep the lines of communication open – make sure that your people know what’s going on with the business and how you are planning to work through the challenge. Make sure that you advise them of any changes that may impact their daily lives in good time, and that the communication is a two-way street.