Photos By: Stock Images

According to research from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and labor market analysts Emsi Burning Glass, 25% of job listings in December 2021 mentioned hybrid or flexible working, as Sky News reports. This is a sharp increase from the 19% figure before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The term ‘hybrid working’ basically means spending some of the work week in a traditional, in-person setting and the rest working from home. Meanwhile, ‘flexible working’ lets workers shake up exactly when they work – and includes job shares and working irregular hours.

With the insurance giant Zurich having called on the UK Government to make all vacancies at large companies available on a part-time, job-share and flexible basis, it looks like the days of traditional 9-5 work hours could be numbered. However, is your home office quite ready for the change yet?

Find Somewhere that Feels Separate to the Rest of your Home 

If you’ve already been working from home for a while, then working from the kitchen table or your living room’s sofa might have sufficed so far. However, to maximize your productivity, you need more than ‘good enough’ – you need a workspace that doesn’t feel too much like home.

T3’s Jamie Carter advises that you find “somewhere with a door that can be closed”, adding that “anywhere upstairs in a house, or in the corner of a bedroom, will help you keep that separation”.

Your loft is one candidate you might have so far overlooked – especially if it is currently cluttered with junk. However, through utilizing something like the award-winning loft boarding service from Instaloft, you can make your loft more than usable as a home office.

Use Ergonomic Seating 

No, this isn’t necessarily just a matter of buying an office chair with the word ‘ergonomic’ in the product name – though, potentially, this move could significantly help. It can also be a big upgrade on simply working from the sofa, which is a recipe for ruining your neck and back.

Instead, get a desk (or at least something similar), put it in your designated office space and make sure your workstation provides you with enough legroom and the correct desk height. You want a situation where, when you sit down at this workstation, your eyes are level with the computer screen.

Make Sure your Home Office has Enough Light

You could have easily underestimated how pivotal your home office’s lighting can be to your productivity. Warm light, such as that from a roasting fireplace, promotes relaxation, while cold light – for example, daylight – improves productivity and alertness, as The Balance Small Business indicates.

If you do allow daylight to stream abundantly into your home office, you could even further enhance its organic feel by keeping a plant or two on display inside the room. As research has revealed, having plants in an office can make you not only more productive but also happier as a whole when working.

You could enjoy the experience so much that working from home quickly feels – if you will excuse the pun – second nature.

Photos By: Unsplash

Many of us are currently working from home, especially since the pandemic started. This means that you may need an office in your home where you can concentrate and do your work. A home office should be a quiet space where you can not only do your work, but be as productive as you can in the process. Here are some ways to decorate your home office to ensure that you can get all of your work done at home!

Choose a Good Location

If you have the option to choose where you would like to set up your home office, make sure to choose an area in your home where you feel positive and full of energy. A room that receives a lot of sunlight throughout the day would make a positive impact on your work ethic. Make sure you feel comfortable in the space, and that you have the proper heating and cooling to keep your office at a comfortable temperature so that you can complete your work.

Stay Organized

Keeping your home office organized is one of the most important things you can do to ensure that you stay on schedule and productive. You can organize your things either with horizontal shelving or also with vertical shelving to save space in your office. But don’t make your organizing boring either – one of the best ways to organize your things is with style. On shelving bring some color to your office with bold accessories. How about an oversized office book with a pretty bold vase on top for a nice burst of color? Sounds good to me!

Add a Comfortable Sofa to Your Home

If you are lucky enough to have a large home office, consider adding a beautiful comfy sofa so that you can kick back and relax at times and also invite family and friends to hang out. A comfortable sofa makes the perfect spot to take a break, take a call, browse on Jooble or even catch up on some reading. To keep the energy and positivity going in your office, choose a sofa in a bold color that will bring in some color to your space. Then add some throw pillows to accessorize and show your personality!

Decorate Your Office with Plants

Bring the outdoors in your office by decorating your space with indoor plants. Some of our favorite plants to put in home offices are succulents, fishbone cactus, blue star fern, alocasia plant, ficus altissma, and just about any hanging spide and snake plants. This is also a great way to purify the air in your office, and bring in some fresh oxygen. Choose your plant pots wisely, and make sure the colors go well with the rest of your decor.

Add Some Glamor to Your Office

To add some glitz and glam your office, incorporate gold and silver accent pieces to your office. A beautiful gold or silver lamp, metallic drawer pulls, a nice metallic wire organizing basket, and more are perfect ways to add a little bit of sophistication to your office. Get creative, and make sure to stick to only one color of metallic, mixing metallics usually doesn’t work and ends up looking tacky. Whatever you decide to do, have fun with it because your home office should be a space where you can feel comfortable, alive, and get your creative juices flowing!

Photos By: Unsplash

Positive environments not only help to boost the morale of workers, but they also help increase efficiency as well. Therefore, taking the time to promote wellness has multiple benefits. How can you go about creating a positive work environment? While it might be a little tricky at first, you can have a great office atmosphere in no time with a few tips. Here are several ways to go about creating a positive work environment.

Give it a Deep Clean

When you arrive to work, you want to be working in a clean space. Especially with the pandemic, you don’t want to worry about your health while working. For that reason, you might want to consider hiring a commercial cleaning service for your office.

These cleaning services generally have a very flexible schedule and will come when it works best for you. Cleaning services are located worldwide as well, from New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina. If you are living in North Carolina and looking for commercial cleaning in Charlotte, NC, has plenty that will fit your needs. When choosing a cleaning service, communicate with them beforehand and see what they will provide you. A good cleaning service will be able to work with you and deliver a top-notch cleaning. The first step towards a positive work environment is to ensure the office itself is clean and in good condition.

Change The Lighting

The lighting itself is another reason why the office morale is a little low. Having those same white fluorescent lights everywhere can be very dull and bland. While it might not be realistic to use any other type of lamp, instead, look to see if you can incorporate natural lighting into the office. If you can utilize sunlight and windows, it can do wonders for the morale and environment. If any lightbulbs are beginning to die, those should be changed as well. Giving the lighting a change is another way to improve the work environment.

Upgrade The Break Room

While you want your employees to work and be efficient, you have to give them some time off to relax. Break rooms are often overlooked by management and CEOs as they don’t want their employees to spend a lot of time there. If you want your workers to be happy, however, you should look to place a few amenities in there to help them enjoy themselves. Things such as a better coffee maker, some magazines, and even a few small office games can do wonders. Managers often worry about doing this with a break room because they feel it will cause a distraction; however, workers generally can refresh themselves and return to work much more focused. Giving the break room an update is a great way to show your employees you care.

Communicate With Your Employees

One of the biggest reasons why morale in the office is low is that workers feel like they don’t make a difference in the company. They show up to work, do whatever they need to do, and go home. Taking the time to speak to employees can do wonders for creating a positive work environment. Conversations don’t have to belong or anything specific either. You are taking the time to get to know them and talking to them. A little shows that you are interested in them and their lives. Along with that, you can use this communication to get feedback about how you are doing your job.
Ask your employees if there is anything you should change around the office or anything you can do to help. Building a relationship with your employees and communicating with them is a great way to show that they have a voice and matter.

Change Out the Office Chairs

How old are the office chairs that your employees are sitting in? When was the last time they were changed? As most people in the office spend a large portion of their day sitting down, you will want to provide them with adequate comfort. As mentioned above, taking the time to upgrade their chairs shows that you care about them and their work. Not only that, but better office chairs are linked to healthier and more efficient workers. The chairs might cost a bit of money from your company budget, but in the end, it definitely might be worth the investment.

Get Rid of Output-Based Rewards

Many companies have rewards or incentives if workers can reach a certain output. While this sounds great on paper from an efficiency standpoint, these programs can be damaging to the workplace environment. Having workers compete for rewards can create animosity and anger between employees. Instead of using output-based rewards, incentivize things like health and wellness. Reward people who take the time to do an excellent job at work and take care of themselves and work safely. While there might be a slight drop in efficiency, it will help show workers you support them rather than the bottom line.

Support Employee Initiatives

Often, employees will begin to create initiatives or small groups to make a change in the office. If you want to help improve morale, inspire them to continue what they are doing and support it.
Find out what resources they need to achieve what they are after and make it a point to get it for them. Giving your employees a voice and making small changes within the company will have massive effects on the work environment.

These are all ways in which you can go about creating a positive workplace environment. It will take some time to change the office’s mood, but with enough persistence and hard work, your office will be a much better and positive place. How do you plan on improving morale in the workplace?

Photos By: Unsplash

Introduction

A tidy workplace is a productive one. It is human nature to work efficiently in harmony where the conditions are optimal. But, how do we make the workplace conditions flawless? If this boosts your curiosity levels, stick around as we are here with some best solutions to answer this question.

Closed Cubicles

Closed cubicles or offices are one of the major contributing factors which increase the productivity levels of a business or a company. These cubicles come under the category of a productive workspace. It is a fact that we humans do not tend to work best when we are under pressure or constant surveillance. Same is with the office space. In the early days, when there was no concept of office cubicles, people worked on the same kinds of desks they studied in their schools. They had the same classroom row and column system with their supervisor hovering over them, just like the teachers in schools. This method was widely used in offices as they could not think of any other better option until they did. When employees are being looked at regularly while doing work, they feel a sense of being judged by their supervisor every moment. This makes them nervous, and they start to work under pressure. It eventually leads their work resulting in a satisfactory amount of productivity. To counter this situation, people came up with the idea of a cubicle. A cubicle provides a feeling of privacy, ownership, freedom, and cosiness. All these three factors result in a worker providing their best in the workplace. These kinds of methods are usually best for companies that provide their services while writing resumes on a professional level, such as ResumeThatWorks.

Create Opportunities For Movement

Hours and hours of working can make you a little lethargic and obese in the long run. That is precisely why body movement in your workspace is necessary. The first step in creating your movement schedule is to decide when to take breaks. Should you set a timer? Should you take a break after a certain amount of work? Or should you take a break whenever you want? In my opinion, none of these should be applied in your work environment as they can be unprofessional and risky. Let us take an example of the office you work in. You decide to take a break because you are just not in the mood or are too tired to work as you are sleep deprived of last night. You are roaming around the office to lighten up while chatting with your colleagues about random things. Your boss notices this and judges you as an unprofessional person. This could send a terrible impression affecting your job. In order to avoid this situation, and to maintain your break schedule, try taking a break after you have done an abundant amount of work. After your break, start with a new and fresh perspective. Creating a productive office layout will help you with your movement. Search for a stand-to-sit desk in your office because these kinds of desks let you work both ways, standing and sitting. With the help of these desks, you wouldn’t have to roam around the office to straighten up or stretch as you can complete your work while standing with the desk too. This would save your time and energy both while increasing the productivity levels simultaneously.

Make Space For Collaboration

Efficient office space must comprise space for collaboration. A business or company has the factor of teamwork behind its success and prosperity. Although, every company has the element of teamwork, don’t they? The problem doesn’t necessarily lie with an unsuccessful company’s employees. The problem lies in how you make the people collaborate in a workspace as a team. The first thing you need to do is search for a spacious room which isn’t frequently used in the office. Name the place as the conference room and send out a memo that it will be only used for team collaboration. Design the room in such a manner that it attracts your employees and makes them comfortable. Usage of soft coloured tone paints is recommended as it gives off an ambitious vibe. Put tables and chairs for people with back problems. Bean bags are also suggested if your team is full of young employees as it gives them a comfortable environment. Although installing a place reserved only for team management can be a little expensive in terms of money and resources. However, they can still afford the expenses by gathering more capital. This can be done if the owners start to write essays for money, as this kind of service pays off handsomely while relinquishing a small amount of resources.

The Psychology of Color

Colour has a significant impact on creating an environment, whether it’s comforting or discomforting and depressing or joyful. In order to create an efficient office space where employees are comfortable to work, one must make use of bright colours for attraction. Different colours have a different effect on the human psyche. Utilization of multi-colours is highly recommended in the office work designs as it affects the worker’s mentality on a subconscious level. A combination of green and blue colour implies a sense of calmness and relaxation, making it an ideal place to work.

Windows and Lighting

The lighting effect comes under the category of optimal productivity causes. Install as many windows as you can. Natural sunlight helps the workers stay fresh and maintain their tempo of working. The plants in your office are there to reduce workers anxiety and stress levels. So, lack of sunlight might malnutrition your plant eventually leading it to die. Also, installing windows on the walls can help you keep track of the time. For example, being too busy with your work can make you forget your date night.

Don’t Use Workspace For Storage

A cluttered workspace is a menace. Try to put the least amount of things on your a work desk as an untidy workplace can distract you from thinking straight for your work. This could result in wasting your mental energy. If you are a student and don’t have a lot of time for college assignments, you can use Perfectessay – quality help at affordable prices. 

Conclusion

Creating a productive office space is harder than it looks as every person has their unique definition of comfort. Still, if you are thinking of starting a company or a business, be sure to follow these tips mentioned above for generation of higher revenues and profits.

Revamping your old workspace into a cozy retreat doesn’t have to take a lot of work or money. We’re here to show you how you can turn your home office into a guest room quickly and affordably. Take a look!

1. Get a Murphy Bed

For some, every square inch of their house is necessary. This means turning a home office space into a room that will be only used a few times a year might not be possible. However, if you still need to get work done and host guests every now and then, you can do so with a Murphy bed. A Murphy bed conveniently folds into the wall when it’s not in use, and can be pulled out when your guests arrive. You may have to move a thing or two, but it allows you to keep your desk and other essential work items in the room when no visitors are around. A win-win!

2. Purchase a Real Bed

Now, if you’re ready to say goodbye to your workspace for good, you’re going to need to start with a bed. The bed is the epicenter of the room, and if you want your guests to have a relaxing stay, you need to make a great impression with a comfortable mattress. A cooling memory foam mattress is an excellent choice for a guest bedroom as it’ll cradle your guests at night and keep them nice and cool. You don’t want your guests to wake up with heavy bags under their eyes. With a memory foam mattress that regulates their body temperature, you can rest assured that they’ll wake up on the right side of the bed every morning of their stay.

3. Create a Space to Relax

Along with a comfortable place to sleep, you’re also going to want to create a space where your guests can relax. Sure, they’re going to love spending time with you and your family while they’re staying with you, but everyone loves some peace and quiet. Dedicate a corner of your guest bedroom where your visitors can relax and unwind. This can be done by purchasing two armchairs, an end table, and a decorative lamp. Then, you can place some of your favorite books on the table or even create an in-home library with built-in shelves. If your guest room has enough space, you may want to consider placing a love seat by the window or keeping part of your home office intact by leaving the desk. A workstation may come in handy if your guests have some work to do or an important paper to write.

4. Add Entertainment

To create a welcoming guest room, you’ll want to add some entertainment features, as well. If you anticipate children using your guest room, store some fun games like Monopoly, Sorry, or Chutes and Ladders in a closet or desk. If you’re expecting older guests, such as teens or adults, mount a smart TV on the wall and make sure all the popular streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ are installed. This way, they’ll be able to watch a show or two before bed or when they wake up to start the day. After all, you want your friends and family to feel like they’re on vacation when they visit, so by giving them a place to forget about the real world for the weekend will be truly appreciated.

5. Add Extra Amenities

To complete your guest bedroom, throw in some extra amenities to make their stay truly unforgettable. Make sure the drawers are empty and the closet has some extra hangers so they can unpack their suitcase. Then, create a section that has extra linens, towels, and maybe even a plush robe. Other amenities include:

• Alarm clock
• Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and toothpaste
• Hairdryer
• Tissues
• Iron and ironing board
• Paper and pens
• Extra set of house keys
• A snack box
• Maps and info on things to do in your area
• WiFi

Key Takeaways

Converting your home office into a warm and inviting guest bedroom can be done with a few simple changes. First and foremost, you’re going to need a comfortable bed, whether a murphy mattress that opens up the room or a memory foam mattress, or maybe even bunk beds to place the kids. Paired with comfortable seating to relax and a place to stay entertained, your guests will be begging to visit your home every weekend!

Photo: Court Atkins Group

Time management is a skill that takes practice and, well, time to learn. However, time management has been quite elusive for work-at-home moms to master because life is constantly changing and there are too many distractions. When you finally manage to tackle that one big time wasting habit, something else always pops up. But before you get discouraged, here are some quick tips on how you can master time management, become more productive as a work-at-home mum and still maintain your great shape and sanity.

Start the Day with a to-do List

No matter where you work, I believe this is a great way to start your day. However, as a work-at-home mum, you need this the most due to the countless distractions and informal setting of your home office. The first thing you should do when you wake up is to physically write down the things you plan to do that day on a piece of paper. Sticky notes can come in handy because you can stick them somewhere you can see them all the time.

It’s also important to attach some timelines on each task so you can easily priority without having to pause and think of what should be done next. A to-do list will solve that problem while living you with a satisfying feeling that comes with crossing accomplished tasks off the list.

Photo: Alex Maguire Photography

Don’t Turn on the TV

The general rule of working at home is to turn off the TV. Just like emails and social media, a TV can be a major distraction. If you like catching up with morning news or your favorite morning show, that’s ok but once you’re finished, start working. Splitting your attention between two screens will just make your work even more challenging.

If you work better with some background noise on, then you should probably stick to some soft music or whatever works for you. I personally get distracted when I listen to music with lyrics when I am working, so I prefer some instrumentals, but hey, that’s me.

Embrace Routine but be Creative

Having a certain routine of how things are done in your home is a great way of making everyone’s day right. The most common routine is the school morning routine, but you can also use a routine keep other parts of your day on track with tasks like naptime, dinner, bedtime, homework, after school, etc. Import the same routine culture into your homework schedule choosing to always make phone calls, check emails, check social media and do other tasks at specific times.

It’s important to note that both adults and kids can get attached too much to routines. Which is why you should be flexible. As your kids grow, routines will change; naps will disappear, child care schedules will change, kids will perform chores more efficiently and so on. So be ready to change your routines where necessary as you go along.

Photo: David Boyle Architect

Keep Fitness on Your to-do List

Keeping fit is one of the biggest challenges for pretty much anyone operating from a home office. Naturally, work from home arrangement is associated with sedentary lifestyles where exercise and movement are limited by design. Most people forget that exercise is not only meant for aesthetic but also for health purposes.

Daily stress can affect your productivity and overall mood, and reduce your energy. Exercise is a productivity hack to stay in shape which will improve your memory, sleep, encourage an optimistic outlook, alleviate anxiety, and reduce stress. The ability to stay healthy and think properly and positively impacts how you manage time. Set aside a day or two per week for the gym and about 30-45 minutes for some simple daily in-house aerobic workouts.

Set up a Perfect Workplace

Setting up a perfect spot for work in your home is one the best ways to not only manage time but also boost your productivity. Update your office space with sleek furniture and fresh flowers to give you motivation and creativity while working. Designing the perfect office doesn’t mean you have to break the bank. There are tons of easy DIY tutorials online that combine creativity and functionality to make your space work. It could be a separate room, a section of your home library or a perfect spot in your living area where there is minimum traffic and other distractions. Keeping distractions off your working area can save you up to a total of 3 hours a day –what can you do in three hours? So if you’re used to working from the bed, get out of the bed as the first step and try to find, a the very least, a spot that has lots of sunshine and limited noise.

Conclusion

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of all the time management practices and adjustments you will need, neither are they hard-and-fast rules. Simply think of them as time management and productivity hacks to stay in shape and do more as a stay at home mum. The most important thing is that you start each day with a to-do-list, establish a routine, set aside a home working office/space, exercise/workout regularly and keep distractions to the very minimum.