At the start of the pandemic, most people were forced to work from home. And although the change was difficult at first, people gradually figured out how to manage a work-life balance that has become the normal way of life.
As more people are getting vaccinated, businesses are mandating employees to return to work in physical locations. Many workers are dissatisfied to lose their newfound autonomy. However, you can still convince your boss to continue working remotely.

Continue working from home

Before your meeting, find out from your boss or HR what precautions the company is taking to keep employees safe within the office. 
It can help you decide if it is safe to come into the office.

Do your homework

Track your work for a couple of weeks. Ensure you spend work time on high-priority tasks that make you meet important deadlines.
Use this information to show your boss how productive you are when you work from home and that you prefer to continue doing it.

Track and highlight your productivity

Assure your boss that you will always be available during work hours and ensure your availability will not cause any bottlenecks for the rest of the team. Or approach your workday by splitting it up into different hours, which could benefit the team.

Clearly express that you will always be available during office hours

Let your boss know that you can come into the office for high-priority meetings and team activities. This way, you express your willingness to be flexible and that you are not opposed to in-person visits.

Emphasise that you are flexible

Ensure to approach the conversation with data and facts. Let your boss know how your productivity and work could be affected if you get sick because of in-person interactions. Let your boss know how uncomfortable you feel about returning to the office full time. If you have high-risk family members, let your boss know you are trying to protect them.

Describe how productivity can be affected if you get sick

You can still continue to work from home if you approach the conversation with your boss the right way.

Stashed ideas

6 Ways to Convince Your Boss to Continue Working From Home

The office is not only a place to do work. It is also a place to be observed doing work. A large number of companies whose workforce has gone remote have acquired surveillance software to continue observing their employees work. However, employee monitoring software may not be a good thing for employees who prize their privacy and employers who desire a good relationship with their staff.

Surveillance software for employees

Studies show that being watched reinforces positive social behaviours. For example, if you think you're being watched, you're likely to donate to charity and less likely to steal or litter. However, studies also show that surveillance tends to undermine trust between employees and employers. Employees perceive their working conditions as more stressful. They experience higher levels of job boredom, fatigue, anger, anxiety, and depression.

Surveillance pros and cons

A rise in employee surveillance accelerated during the pandemic. However, we are also more accustomed to being watched. We accept cameras in novel spaces such as doorbell cameras, webcams and smartphones. We accept data tracking on websites and assume that our information is used. Yet, despite the possibility that monitoring is becoming more accepted, people still don't like the nature of surveillance. The solution to maintaining increased productivity and remote work is to trust employees and discard the spyware.

Privacy matters

As remote working has become more common, sales of monitoring technology have boomed. But using surveillance tools carries a cost.

Is it right or productive to watch workers?

Burnout is more than a bad day or a busy week—it’s about ongoing, compounding factors that make your work environment so draining that no amount of positive thinking or good nights’ sleep can pull you out of it.&nbsp;The impacts of burnout are serious, even from a purely financial perspective. According to an influential WHO study, burnout costs us a staggering one trillion dollars in lost productivity every single year. It’s also a major driver of employee turnover; in one survey of senior HR leaders, nearly half shared that burnout was responsible for 20-50% of their annual resignations.

Burnout in the workplace

Reasonable expectations are key to creating a sustainable remote-work culture that brings out the best in everyone, and that starts with clarity.&nbsp;Leaders should draft policies that get rid of all ambiguity around how, when, and where employees are expected to work. That’s how you avoid worker confusion and anxiety, or worse, the ‘always on' culture that’s a recipe for burnout.&nbsp;

Prioritize Clarity 

Employees aren’t machines—they’re real people who have lives, loved ones, and personal responsibilities. That’s why to beat burnout, distributed teams should be led by compassionate, human-centric policies that support employee health and happiness. That could include programs to help working parents manage childcare, or regular check-ins to assess employee satisfaction and workload. These kinds of steps will both reduce employee stress, and help managers proactively stay aware of their teams' needs.

Create A Culture of Empathy

Just because you’re working remotely doesn’t mean your job is flexible. Rigid, overly-controlling policies, such as monitoring employees’ computer activity during office hours, make it harder for people to manage their own needs, taking away autonomy and contributing to workplace stress. While some level of time synchronization is necessary, if leaders can keep an open mind towards what tasks can be completed asynchronously, they’ll find that a little flexibility goes a long way towards creating an agile, responsible remote team that enables everyone to function at their absolute best.

Make Working From Home Flexible

Make video meetings work for you. Rather than feeling tiring, redundant or draining, video should make communication faster, easier, and more fulfilling. <ul><li>Step one - keep it short. 30 minutes is a great sweet spot for video meetings. Don’t bump it up to 60 minutes without a really compelling reason. </li><li>Next, hide your self-view. Constantly seeing your own face is unsettling and distracting.</li><li>You can even take it a step further, and consider audio-only meetings wherever possible. Or, try getting the best of both worlds by saying a quick hello, then agreeing to turn off your cameras when it’s time to get past the chit-chat and down to business. </li></ul>

Beat Video Fatigue

While flexibility is great, it’s crucial that distributed teams don’t feel they’re expected to work all the time. Managers should set defined office hours and stick to them—that means not pinging people after (for example) 5pm unless it’s a true, genuine emergency. If workers see their manager turning off Slack notifications and not replying to email outside of work hours, they’ll understand that on your team, work-life balance is more than just a buzzword.

Set Clear Boundaries

Boundaries are about more than just work hours. You may have less control over your distributed team’s work environment, but there are still ways to help them create a healthy separation between their work and home spaces. These don’t need to be complicated or demanding. Even something as simple as sharing the day’s high and low points on Slack, then signing off together, can really help people mentally clock out.

Support Work and Home Separation

Now that we’re well into our new normal, we have a chance to look at the big picture, and take real, impactful steps to make this distributed way of working healthier, more productive, and more sustainable for everyone. 

6 Ways Companies Can Help Their Employees Overcome Burnout In A Distributed World

Employee engagement includes four elements and can be thought of as the degree to which an employee:<ul><li>Feels committed to an organization</li><li>Identifies with an organization</li><li>Feels satisfied with their job</li><li>Feels energized at work.</li></ul>

Employee Engagement

<ul><li>Connect what employees do to what they care about. Revise your organization’s mission statement to connect with employee values. Show how an employee’s work is related to the organization’s purpose.</li><li>Make the work itself less stressful and more enjoyable. Offer employees the flexibility to try new work tasks so they can discover their intrinsic interests. Grant employees more autonomy. Autonomy is critical to fostering intrinsic motivation. Boost employees’ sense of confidence.</li><li>Create time affluence. Reward employees with time in addition to money. Encourage employees to ​​invest in time-saving purchases. Implement tools that discourage after-hours emails.</li></ul>

The Employee Engagement Checklist

Start by connecting what people do to what they care about.

How Companies Can Improve Employee Engagement Right Now

There are three great advantages to involving your support team – or indeed any team – in decision making:<ul><li>It gives team members a greater sense of ownership, which contributes to feeling motivated and like their work matters.&nbsp;</li><li>It offers fresh business ideas. If only senior leadership is involved in decision-making, it increases the risk of stagnation. Sourcing ideas from your support team means you’re more likely to get a more diverse set of responses.</li><li>Your employees are an incredibly useful resource. Those on your support team (and in other customer-facing roles) will have a unique perspective on customer needs and pain points.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Reasons to involve your team in decision making

This is the idea that when planning or making decisions, people can often spend more time on the small, inconsequential details than on the major issues.
The original example was of a committee working on the plans for a nuclear power plant but getting distracted by which materials to use for the staff bike shed, hence the term “bikeshedding.”

The “law of triviality” or the “bicycle shed effect”

... based on the level of importance, and the level of team involvement:<ul><li>Open to team suggestions decisions: For these, open the question to the team (Slack conversations, surveys, or team meetings) to get feedback and ideas.</li><li>Multiple-choice decisions: Leadership asks for input on a few options via polls in Slack or Google Forms.&nbsp;</li><li>Reversible decisions: In these situations, the team trials the proposed solution gives feedback, and you have the opportunity to address issues or reverse back to the previous state if needed.</li><li> Executive, strategic decisions: These decisions aren’t open for discussion. In cases like these, explaining the “why” behind the decision is key, so communication is our main priority.</li></ul>

Creating the right decision-making framework for your support team

Your support team is an invaluable resource, so you need to ensure they feel heard and listened to. This framework can help.

employeeexperience

Continue working from home

6 Ways to Convince Your Boss to Continue Working From Home

Surveillance software for employees

Is it right or productive to watch workers?