As the global pandemic has spread throughout the world, lots of businesses had to learn, adapt, and implement remote work. For some, it was incredibly challenging as they had no contingency plan in place, but in our company, although a challenging process, we were able to get our workforce online fairly quickly. In this article, Nicole Pinto Bolt, Recruiting and Social Media Strategist at Majorel will be sharing some of the common challenges of remote work and the tips to stay productive and motivated.
Nicole Pinto Bolt – Recruiting and Social Media Strategist at Majorel
Nicole started out as an intern at Majorel back in 2016 and quickly moved up into the role of HR and Social Media Coordinator. In 2017, she was promoted to Social Media Analyst and was allowed to work completely remote in a foreign country (Morocco). She moved back to Los Angeles in late 2018, returning for the most part to the office. In 2019, Nicole was promoted to Recruiting and Social Media Strategist, which is her current role and works completely remotely.
We first asked Nicole what are some of the most common challenges of remote work she has experienced herself or in her team:
- Kids: does sitting down to work look more like answering emails with one hand while preparing lunch for children with the other? Or trying to type while your baby is climbing all over you? Balancing work and parenting could indeed be a daunting and challenging experience.
- Pets: can all pet lovers raise their hand and tell us how many times they have been interrupted by their dog barking or their cat jumping on their laptop or their parrot singing in the background? We feel you!
- Time zones: people living within the same time zone know that they will be working at the same time, but for those working with a global company, it could be a challenge. Working across time zones can sometimes mean staying up late for work or waking up at the break of dawn, which let’s face it is not for everyone.
For some, adapting to work-from-home culture is especially challenging; for some, it goes more smoothly. But the key subject here is not only the challenges of remote work, but also how we handle them. There are numerous recommendations available online that will facilitate your remote work; but they can’t really help unless you know what works best for you. Here, we’ll be sharing 3 simple tips from Nicole that helped her overcome the challenges while working from home and encouraged her to stay healthy, happy, and productive.
- Routine: It makes your day flow smoothly. Set your alarm at the same time every day. Yes, sorry to say that includes weekends and holidays. This helps your body and mind adjust. Prepare your menu for the day or the week, that way you don’t have to be thinking about it in the middle of another call that could’ve been an email, just kidding! But seriously, following a daily routine makes life so much easier especially if you have a family.
- Regular hours: when you’re working from home, it feels like you are working 24/7 and that’s because you are, if you don’t set up your work hours. You could start at 5:00 am and not finish working until 10:00 pm. This is where you need to put boundaries for your mental and physical health. If your work requires you to work some of these hours maybe because of time differences or deadlines, make sure you take real breaks in between or you will burn yourself out.
- Stay connected: working from home surely helps you save money on things like a long commute or daily coffee runs to the Starbucks around the corner, but it can also be very lonely and isolating. The best way to overcome this and stay motivated is to stay connected with your colleagues. Whether that is video conference calls or chats, talking to other people outside of your home will surely help brighten your day!
Learning from the best practices and recommendations could be very helpful, but sometimes what works for others, does not necessarily work for you and vice versa. Therefore, experiment with what makes you most productive, what boosts your motivation, what strengthens your resilience and improves your mental health while working from home and build your own way of handling the challenges.
With that in mind, we share a video with some other useful tips on remote work from our HR managers around the world.
Read more helpful articles with HR tips here.
