Remote Office Setup Tips and Tricks
By Jacob DeSalvo, Process Improvement & Change Management Intern
March 5, 2021
Due to COVID-19, many of us are thankfully allowed to work remotely for safety purposes during this hectic time. Working from home seems like it would be easier, right? This isn’t the case, and there are many different adaptations that some people have to make to work from home productively, so here are some tips and tricks to being successful at working from home.
One of the first orders of business is to designate a workspace where you can comfortably work from home. For some people, this may be an office room, or just simply working on their laptop in their living room. Wherever it is, you must make sure you are comfortable yet productive, and there are minimal distractions in your workspace. A huge setback to this is those who don’t have a desk or an actual office room, but there are ways around this. One alternative is to work at your kitchen table which can work as a desk. Another would be to create a potential desk with cabinet space. If you have a large enough cabinet space in your living room or somewhere else in your house, you can set your computer on it and pull up a chair. Regardless of where or how you create your workspace, the main component is making it comfortable.
Another strategy for working at home is organization. At the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), we use Trello to organize our tasks and projects we are working on as a team. This can be a beneficial tool to help keep yourself on track, as well as collaborating with your work family to meet deadlines. Another way to implement this in a work from the home environment would be to have a corkboard or a place where you can place sticky notes of upcoming projects and deadlines.
A huge factor in being productive at home is implementing Lean strategies while working from home. It is important to be aware of changes that need to be made if your work from home situation isn’t working to its full potential. Being aware of how successful and productive you can be with possible changes is something that we all face during this time. It is so easy to get caught up in the same routine and get distracted, so it is important to take a step back and analyze what can be done better and what needs to be done to make that a reality.