Coronavirus: 10 Tips on Working from Home

Looking After Yourself, Your Colleagues and Your Clients

With COVID-19 quickly spreading around the UK it’s more important than ever for businesses to ensure the safety of their employees. It’s becoming clear that the best way to protect ourselves, our colleagues and our clients is to simply work from home and minimise social contact as much as possible.

At ADEO Group, we’ve always been flexible in our approach to where our staff are working and have made sure that everyone in the company is able to work from home with ease and can continue to deliver projects on time without skipping a beat.

If you’re planning on working from home, check out the ADEO Groupie top tips and let us know if they work for you!

1. Need more screen space? You can extend the display of your apple products with a program called Sidecar which will hook up your laptops/iPads together to present a much larger screen space (this is a great one for graphic/UX design needs or editing.
2. Get dressed. Working from home can present all sorts of bed/sleep/reclining temptations and its usually a lot easier to motivate and stay focused when you’re not in your jammies.
3. Microsoft Teams and Slack are great tools for keeping in contact – we use Teams all the time even when we’re all in the one spot!
4. Trust is imperative. At this moment in time, many businesses are having their hand pushed in terms of giving working from home a real try and we say, trust your team. Let them take responsibility for their work – this could be a whole new way for you to do business.
5. Set up a designated spot for working: the kitchen table, your bedroom desk, the comfy armchair by the radiator – it’s not so important where it is so much as just having a specific space that becomes your work zone.
6. Make sure your communications are clear and concise. That may seem obvious, but when working from home a lot of your correspondence will be written and keeping “word-salads” to a minimum saves time and energy.
7. When you do need to pick up the phone, be wary of back-ground noise – try to find a nice quiet spot where your colleagues and clients can hear you properly.
8. Touch base with your team first thing in the morning so everyone is clear on exactly what they’ll be working on that day, then get on with it.
9. Project management must press on, so some helpful tools to keep everyone in harmony are Basecamp, and Trello – both have easy filesharing, scheduling and reporting allow you to create tasks with people and deadlines assigned to them.
10. Security is very important, and you can make sure your home computer is safe with Avast (free), and VPN’s if your company has this set up (ask your IT staff).