How to Do Effective WFH (Work From Home)

After the Covid-19 pandemic and coronavirus is endemic in the entire world, the trend of work from home suddenly burst. Lots of people start quarantine cities and countries while promoting, inviting and suggesting citizens to change activities outside the home to inside. And the employees are instructed to move their activities from the workplace in the office or company to their homes.

And because Indonesia is also against this coronavirus endemic, many offices, companies, universities, and even schools temporarily restrict its activities and even close it. Particularly in the DKI Jakarta area, work from this house has begun on March 16, 2020 until a spesified date.

How to do effective work from home?

This is not easy, especially for office workers who always work together in teams, it is very challenging to start work from home effectively, efficiently, and produce quality result. But on the other hand, currently, doing work from home is the best alternative to avoid the spread of the COVID-19 virus. But the notes must be taken, for the work  that needs to meet other people, be invited, or travel outside the city is really a kind of work that can not done in home effectively.

In this millennial era, working from home is quite common, partly for those who work on consulting, analysis, and individual business. While for newbies, working from home may be considered as sleeping from home or watching TV while lying down and consequently any work cant be effectively done. While actually, on the other hand, working from home might saves time. For instance, residents of Jakarta in a day can save 3-5 hours to support work from home for commuting substition, time that can be used to do other more useful work.

How do you work at home that can be efficient and produces high-quality output? Here are tips for doing work from home.

1. Not all work can be done from home alone, professions such as traffic police, doctors, or hospital administration for example, so working from home cannot be done. But if similar professions, consultants, HR managers, writers, architects, etc., then working from home will be very interesting to do. More types of ASN (government official) jobs, such as analysts, administration, or researchers, can be done at home.
2. The minimum requirements for doing work from home is a laptop or PC and a good internet network. A mobile phone with 2 GB RAM capacity and an internet data package that is sufficient enough to work from this home. Now, with enough cellular phones and data packages, you can communicate well with any party in the world.
3. Besides,  special spot must be prepared for work itself in the house. Use a comfortable workplace to work for long hours without interrupting other householders, find the best angle at home for effective work with minimal interference.
4. Determine your working hours, the most appropriate is to adjust with colleagues and business in other places, so that interaction can be done online effectively. Meanwhile, since working from home has a very flexible time, set yourself at any time to start work and stop, including the time to rest
5. Setting priorities for work and creating your work schedule is another key to success for working from home. When starting to work from home, the priority is it must be completed as agreed in the office.
6. All meetings, discussions, or meetings are supposed to be held online. Currently, many applications can be used to conduct meetings, even for online presentations. Discuss with colleagues with chat through the application WhatsApp, telegram, or etc. While for video conference, you can use a special application to Zoom, Webex, Go to Meetings, or Skype for Business.
7. Set daily goals and agendas to do what work, what kind of person do you want to need, and what results you want to achieve for each meeting. This is important to avoid sudden laziness, good television shows, and so on. Targets and deadlines are used as triggers in doing work at home.
8. To avoid burnout, physical activity as a distraction is recommended. Fixing the garden for 1 hour or cleaning the house before returning to the laptop will be opened and healthy, including for always
9. For other work agendas that cannot be done by WFH, but it is critical must be done outside. You can arrange and set the time and agenda that once you out of the house, can do 3-4 important meetings or agendas at the same time/dayWorking from home is something that can be very interesting, challenging, and exciting, so we must be able to manage everything by ourselves. Even working from home can reduce pollution significantly, congestion, prevent climate change, and make a better quality of life.

And if all this is done properly and planned, the work performance will increase far compared to office time as usual. Again this is a matter of learning and changing habits.Changing habits become more efficient, greener, and more result-oriented rather than process.

Indonesia JCM Secretariat

March 20th 2020