Working from home: How your house can help your plight

Over the last few years it has been a gradual process, with an increasing number of people being able to work from home.

Suffice to say, 2020 has accelerated the process significantly. Most companies that could permit home working, have done so, and some have gone as far as making it a permanent thing (even in the post COVID-19 world).

However, working from home isn’t always the pajama party that it may have once been made out to be. On the contrary, it can be difficult, and part of the art is making your home environment more inviting for the task.

Through today’s piece, we will now take a look at three easy steps you can take to make your WFH environment easier.

Make sure your working area is private (or can be turned into private mode)

At first, working from home may have been a novelty. However, you will quickly find out that personal and private life tends to blend into one – and this can be quite depressing.

To mitigate such risks, make sure that your working area is as private as possible. A spare room, or converted office is the obvious suggestion, but naturally this isn’t possible for everyone.

If you fall into the other camp, make sure your space can be retracted on evenings and weekends. You don’t want to be living your non-work life in paperwork and a computer that is designed for office life. Before you know it you will be walking around your home on a Sunday imagining fake Slack notifications.

Flowers can bring life into the WFH environment

A lot of the working from home guides follow a similar path; they talk about suitable office chairs and desks – and rightly so.

We’ll leave the practical advice to said guides and instead focus on something that isn’t often covered – flowers. In truth, it can be any form of accessory, but flowers inject vibrance, color and dare we say it, excitement, into an otherwise mundane office space. Having a bouquet on a shelf can add some liveliness into your working day, which is often necessary now that you are not in the hustle and bustle of a once-normal office.

In terms of specific tips, Avas Flowers gets our vote here. Avas Flowers have been around for a number of years and as this Avas Flowers Pinterest page shows, they offer some really imaginative solutions for home office environments.

Be proud of your Zoom background

Finally, let’s talk about Zoom. In fact, it can be about any video conferencing software of your preference.

We’re not going to get into all of the etiquette discussions that surround Zoom – that’s for another day (and probably, another website).

Instead, it’s about your background. Unless you have opted to put a custom background, there’s a high chance that the background for your calls is going to be your office space of choice. For some, this will be a spare room, for others it might be the living room. It varies.

The point we’re trying to make is that you need to be proud of your background. The last thing you need is to feel embarrassed about what is going on behind you as it will eat away at you on every call. This is why it is crucial to choose your working spot wisely, or at least redecorate a wall to eradicate such feelings.