Earlier this year, a huge number of people moved to working from home as a temporary measure, to help keep as many people safe and healthy as possible. Many assumed it was going to be a week or two before we got back in to the office but for a lot of us, it will be a while before we can go back to normal and it can be hard to keep up momentum when the finish line isn’t clear. If you need some tips on maintaining a balance while working from, here’s a cheat sheet we created that you can use each day.
A lot of workplaces had been assessing remote work pre-Covid, so it wasn’t a huge adjustment to work from home temporarily. Many companies have been moving towards a flexible way of working, with employees having an option to work remotely, as opposed to having to be in the office every day so had considered the best ways of working when people are dispersed.
Other companies may have had bigger issues to tackle when it comes to working outside of the office. There were, however, companies that had little or no digital infrastructure in place. It’s a lot harder to work when your equipment is in the office and files are on an internal network, so some people just had to wait and see when they could get back in to the office.
Setting up a whole new way of working can be challenging, that’s why we want to make it as easy as possible to create a collaborative way of working for you and your co-workers. Dropbox makes sure that all of our features help to take the extra work out of work - making sure you spend your time focussing on the problems you need to solve, not figuring out how to share files or who has access to documents etc. We’ve created some helpful tips for our Community on how to organize your folders, how to make sure you have access from mobile, making the most of Zoom with your team, or exploring other apps that are integrated with Dropbox to can make your day run a little smoother. There are a host of new distractions at home, so we hope to help to take the distractions out of work.
Whether your workplace was working towards remote working or not, now we are almost 3 months in to a working from home world and almost all offices have adapted in some way but does that mean it’s here to stay?
- There will be people who had worked from home before, who don’t want to do it longterm.
- There will be people who never worked from home before and now might consider it as a real solution.
- Some people who worked from home before may have been fine with an empty household as a peaceful work environment but might be finding the kitchen table a little cramped with kids or roommates sharing their space.
- People may have invested in their home set up. Others are still stuck on less than ideal chairs.
- Some are finding a better work/life balance and others cannot switch off.
The main difference now, is a huge number of people who had never worked from home have experienced it, and made it work or even benefited from it.
Overall, things that were not possible before in some workplaces had to become possible, and now won’t immediately disappear. It is unlikely that every person will return to every office and school - some things can move online and maybe even improve the experience by doing so. Others may find their physical workspace augmented by the additional online support set up over the last few weeks, which we think is very exciting. Either way, working from home has been a longer run than we expected, and that’s the first of many changes.
How have you found working from home? Will you keep it up if possible? Have you found any of our tips and tricks useful?
