Working From Home as a Parent
— Some Advice to Work Productively and Parent Happily
Working from home in a long term can be stressful for all of us, especially when you’re parent and have small kids. Therefore we would like to offer you some tips on how to manage your working life during Corona times when you have children you need to take care about.
Remote work can be stressful, especially for parents with small kids. For a healthy work-life balance, we advice discipline coupled with flexibility and privacy enabled by multifunctionality. We will better explain these in the coming sections.
According to FlexJobs only 3,4% Americans were working from home prior to pandemic. However this changed in 2020 and now the percentage of employees who work from home is over 60%. Since it does not look like the pandemic will be over just like that, and because, as a Pew Research report reveals, even after we win over the virus a lot of people (over 90%) want to continue working from home even after pandemic, we figured out that one central issue is the working and parenting at home.
Balancing Parenting and Work
First and perhaps the most important advice is to separate your roles and to practice the differentiation between the „working mode“ and the „parent mode“. This, however, is not helpful if you take the step on your own. Rather, it is crucial to include children in the discussion of this topic, include them in the process.
This way have them understand and appreciate your condition that you need to focus on your work for a large part of the day. Drawing parallels with their priorities and considerations would make it easier to empathize — Just like they do when they are doing some sport or when they are on playground doing something that requires them to focus for longer period of time.
Create and Follow Routines and When Necessary Break Them
One of the things that could be helpful is to create an everyday routine both for yourself and the kids. For example you can make your own schedule that would include the fundamentals, e.g. :
- when you wake up,
- breakfast snack and meal times for you and the kids,
- when you sit behind your computer and for work,
- ideal quite time for the meetings,
- pause and play time
It is important to maintain functional schedule and follow it step by step to get the best results and preserve balanced environment in your home and to maintain good relationship between your role of being a parent and your role of an employee. Here are several of our favorite online scheduling tools:
- When I Work (https://wheniwork.com/)
- Workaxle (https://workaxle.com/)
- Sage HR (https://www.sage.com/)
- Rotageek (https://www.rotageek.com/)
Many schools have switched to either an online or a blended learning. When making the schedule, therefore, it might most likely to be possible to arrange your work around the times that they are most likely to be busy too.
Furthermore, at instances when your family and work roles overlap, do not be shy to find solutions that could appropriate each other — e.g. join that routine Wednesday- Leads & Backup meeting from a cozy corner of the neighborhood playground. If you are worried that this would signal some unprofessionality, you are very much wrong— on the contrary, this shows strength, adaptability and responsibility.
Finally, in your routines, try to negotiate common interests and prizes with the kids, e.g. game or film nights, visit to the ice-cream or toy store. This way a productive day can become a mutual challenge and the success a mutually shared feeling. Communicating and spending time with children is crucial for their growth. You can also use the relative flexibility that working from home gives you to give spare more attention on the emotional and physical growth of your children.
Create a Work-Friendly Environment
If you want to be productive you should not just learn how to change roles between parent-employee but also how to successfully maximize your productivity. This can be done by creating environment that is work-friendly, this means that you will remove anything that may distract you from your work and you will be able to focus on what you need to do.
It is key to work in an environment that has minimal potentially distracting external triggers. This could achieved by taking measures that differentiate the tools, space and room. Starting with the tools, it is beneficial to have a separate PC or user profile and a dedicated pair of work-table and chair for work, for the duration of working hours at the very least. If possible, having a separate floor, room or e.g. a section of the living room, which would only be dedicated to work during a specific time of the day is also important. Finally, these tools and spaces should ideally not be used for purposes other than work.
We, Boss at Home, are in your company with this transition that we’re all going through. We are gathering and sharing insights from both professionals in the field and academia to support this journey.
Follow us on Instagram for regular updates, and much more!
