There are many people working from home now, even those of us who would never have imagined working from home before. From the customer service manager who now has to manage customer queries from their home office, to the IT technician that has to try and work around the challenges that distance working has created. But among these employees are the new parents who would have been returning to work after a period of maternity or paternity leave. The new way of working can be completely alien to those of us who haven’t experienced it before. If having a new baby isn’t stressful enough, adapting to a new way of working is going to add its extra challenges too.
Here are a few tips on how to make it work and reduce the overall potential stresses you may face.
Routine
Even though office christmas parties look set to be a virtual affair this year, we can communicate, and use technology in a way that means we’ll stay connected through the business. It’s healthy, so allowing time and space for that on a regular basis is important.
When you have a new baby, your routine is often regarded as one of the most important things to get right. However, this is true when you are working from home as well. If you are working from home and you know exactly what your routine is, then you can help yourself, and accept help from others, when you know where you will be and what you will be doing at certain points in the day. Before long, your baby will fall into the right patterns, and it won’t be such a rush when you are trying to get out of the house or arrange for a babysitter to collect them.
Either way, it can be helpful for everybody to know where they stand, and when everybody is aware of the expectations it can be much less stressful. Working from home successfully usually means staying in touch with others within your business, and factoring time into your routine for social interactions with these people is healthy, so allowing time and space for that on a regular basis is important.
Organisation
Being organised is always a wonderful idea of whether you are working from home as a parent or not. Being organised means that you know exactly where things are and you don’t waste time looking around for things that you need. It also means that you are able to organise your time much more effectively and you don’t need to worry too much about logging into the wrong meetings, or potentially finding a problem with your schedule because you have miscommunicated something.
There are plenty of resources online that will help you understand what you are doing and how to do it in an organised way. Plenty of people have struggled with this before now, and come up with effective plans.
Learn
Learning to adapt to a new situation, and learning new ways around the challenges that you may face, our essential ways to move forward. Of course, we don’t like change all the time, and it can be difficult to work out what to do, and new ways of working. But a little effort, a little research, and educating yourself, are going to set you off on the right track, ensure that you are doing your best for your new baby, and also give you the confidence to know that you are putting in the effort and that you know what you are doing.
