How To Be A Better At-Home Worker

By Simon Chou

July 24th, 2020

Whether employees work from home or in-office, there is more to ideal workers than just completing tasks as-instructed.

Table of Contents

Job Market Trends Every Work From Home Employee Should Know About

Today, the job market favors personnel who are confident, reliable, and highly-effective communicators [1]. Demand for these soft skills — sometimes called “core skills” by job search experts — now outranks every other hiring requirement. This makes core skills a critical component of job search, application, hiring, and ongoing performative successes, especially for entry-level and remote jobs.

Consequently, the best strategies for work from home success focus on creating a remote-first or remote-friendly work environment, routine, and protocols. In doing so, people holding remote jobs can both leverage and further develop the core skills that make them most valuable to an employer.

Secrets For Being A Better At-Home Worker

Successful work from home activity requires and builds employee reliability, confidence, and communication skills. These core skills are apparent at every juncture in any remote job — including while creating an ideal work environment, setting and sticking to healthy work from home routines, and building and maintaining the most beneficial communication and connection structure for both performance and morale. Specifically, work from home employees who wish to continuously improve in their remote job performance know:

1. A Good Foundation For Work From Home Success

The first step for anyone aiming to improve their remote job performance is straightforward: ensure that the work from home environment meets the basic functional needs of the job.
This includes having access to necessary technology, stable and secure internet connectivity, privacy, and the ability to mitigate on-the-job distractions.

2. The Best Work From Home Routine Has Boundaries

Much of the best advice for success in remote jobs involves boundary-setting. That is because creating expectations for other people present in the household as well as coworkers and supervisors — which includes working set hours, keeping a meeting/appointment schedule, taking scheduled breaks — makes work from home employees more confident and reliable.

3. Disconnection Is The Biggest Threat To Work From Home Success

A sense of disconnection from the firm is the driving force behind disengagement from objectives, loss of confidence in both the self and the organization, and the decision to start the job search for alternate positions. This makes collaboration, candid/consistent communication, and face- and air-time during meetings critical. In the absence of these elements, work from home employees run the risk of becoming siloed, which damages well-being and can diminish engagement with and personal commitment to both everyday tasks and ongoing projects.

Tips For Monitoring Work From Home Success

The fact of the matter is: people who work from home are, on average, 47% more productive than in-office staff. Additionally, research shows that personnel assigned to (well-designed
and well-supported) remote jobs take shorter breaks during the workday, request less time off, and need fewer sick days than in-person job holders.

Work from home success is indicated by more than just quantitative performance metrics. Research shows that working in a (well-designed and well-supported) remote job dramatically lowers employee turnover. This suggests that the most successful work from home personnel should also report feeling:

Confident in their ability to perform all job functions in a work from home context;
Consistently secure in their work-life balance; and
Engaged with, valuable to, and cared about/supported by the firm as well as their colleagues and supervisors.

Work from home employees who do not consistently feel confident, secure, and supported in the remote jobs — regardless of other measurable performative successes — will struggle to sustain high-level performance and will be unable to foster growth in relevant core skills. Nevertheless, this trajectory can be reversed by modifying the work from home environment, boundaries, and communicative structures.

Related Posts: Careers Where You Can Work From Home

About the Author

Simon Chou is the Vice President of Operations and Growth at BCjobs.ca. Over the course of his career, he carved a niche in brand development, marketing strategy, and online presence for startups. Prior to joining BCJobs.ca, Simon was an advisor for several global blockchain projects including Litecoin, NEM, and Ripple. In the past, he also worked with Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare space through SM Digital—a global marketing agency.