The New Normal and The Struggles of Working from Home

We’re all too familiar with the new normal and the struggles of working from home that comes with it.

The pandemic has forced businesses to implement work-from-home setups to protect their workforce from getting infected with Covid-19. DOLE even recommended to adopt the aforementioned working arrangement in May 2020.

The “remote work” is a very new term and arrangement for us Filipinos. It is not a surprise that we’ll have struggles and pain points while working from home. In this article we will tackle some of the struggles of working from home.

Working in a home environment set-up, you will not be able to see your teammates face-to-face, so there will be a lot of meetings and virtual discussions.

There’s going to be a lot of times where there will be unexpected noises in your audio while you are in a meeting, the clucking noises of chickens in the background, the sounds of on-going constructions nearby and that dreaded jackhammer.

Those noises are a headache when you have ongoing meetings. We have found a solution for you to cancel out some of the noises in your background. You can also do your research and find the best solution for you to address this issue.

Because we are out of the office and are in our home environment, there will be a lot of distractions in our environment.

From children running around and crying in the background, the cooking noises when it’s almost time for lunch, the unexpected conversations with your housemates.

Our homes can have messy environments, so we recommend having a virtual background or blur your background to avoid unnecessary distractions while you are in meetings.

The Philippines is not known for its internet connectivity, in fact we are one of the lowest ranking countries in South East Asia in terms of internet speed.

Have you experienced losing internet connectivity while in a very important meeting? You are not alone. We have all experienced that meeting wherein we suddenly lost internet connectivity while in the middle of it. It is one of the most common struggles of working from home.

One of the things you can do to address this is to contact your internet provider and upgrade your internet speed.

Not being able to physically interact with your teammates makes it difficult to collaborate. In the work-from-home setup all collaborations are virtual which makes it hard.

Especially with the struggles mentioned above, it makes it extremely difficult to collaborate and there will be blurred lines of communication in between when you talk with your teammates.

One solution for teammate collaboration is inculcating Trello as one way of ensuring that each of your teammates collaborate and interact with each other when doing a project together. It is free software!

With all the struggles aforementioned it can be difficult to fulfill your daily tasks. There might be sudden emergencies while you’re at home, you might have to leave your laptop to take care of household chores.

There will be a lot of hurdles that you would need to face to complete your daily tasks in the remote working environment. We are all aware of those daily struggles of working remotely.

We talk about how you can address all of those issues and build a high-performance team despite the work-from-home set-up on our recent webinar here.

Follow us on all of our social media pages @SproutHRTech to be updated with new webinars!

Be familiar with our products and how it can help you and your organization here.

Cheers!