Since the coronavirus sent us home to work, our daily work clothes have changed from jeans, shirts, t-shirts, sweatpants and pajamas. we have gradually gotten used to this life and even started to like it, but on the other hand, there are days when we miss the workplace.

Before the coronavirus, many companies were hesitant to allow people to work from home. "Working from home" rhymed with "skipping work". Working from home involved surfing the Internet, posting, playing Candy Crush, scrolling through Instagram, updating LinkedIn resumes, leaving gaps between conference calls, saying, "I'm still waiting for Barış to get the email to me so I can work on it!" This was the image of working from home in many people's minds.

What if I told you that working from home is actually very different, that working from home makes you 13% more productive, makes you feel more satisfied with your job and makes you half as likely to quit your job?

These are the results of a 2015 Stanford study of a very large Chinese travel company, CTrip1. The researchers randomly divided 249 call center employees in Shanghai into 2 groups. For 9 months, half of the employees continued to work as usual at their desks at work. The other half were told to work from home 4 days a week. They only came to the office one day a week. The researchers then measured everything from the number of calls these employees made, to their job satisfaction, to the number of breaks they took, to the number of days they were on sick leave.

Conclusion: Working from home can make people more productive. But beware, before you consider closing your office altogether, this study has an important caveat.Leaving aside country and culture, these workers had very specific measures of productivity, such as phone calls per minute and time spent on the phone. For people working in customer service, sales, design, etc., working from home may be less challenging because they have very specific measures of productivity, such as the number of calls made, the amount of products or services sold, the number of pages or projects designed. Other employees, on the other hand, may have to collaborate much more with other colleagues and deal with face-to-face conference meetings all day while working from home. For them, working from home can be much more challenging. Because working from home requires accountability, better work habits and a general competence to get things done when there are distractions everywhere at home.

1 -Identify the top 3 project tasks you need to completeeachday, excluding meetings

2-Promiseyourself and that person to completethesetasks and present the results to your manager or colleague.

3-Check your tasksafter completion for follow-up purposes.

This is the productivity side of working from home. But there is another side of working from home that is commonly ignored. That is the human side.

Here I would like to share with you a story that I find tragically funny.It is a story of 3 people who find themselves stranded on an uncharted desert island. Over the years these 3 people have learned how to work together seamlessly to survive and one day they find a bottle with a genie in it. The genie grants each person a wish. The first one wants to go back home and poof, it's gone. The second wishes to be reunited with his family and poof. The third person looks around the empty island and says to the genie, "You know, I miss my friends very much. I wish they would come back. "he says.

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This is what the story of the workers in the Stanford study looks like: after 9 months of working from home, the study ends. Workers are told that they can continue working from home 4 days a week if they want, or they can go back and work in the office for all five days. More than half of these workers say they would like to go back and work in the office. They report feeling very "lonely" at home.

There is always a human side to working from home that needs to be recognized. You can use the very effective tools offered by the Success Programme to strengthen your communication and productivity muscles when working from home, but you may still feel that something is missing. The human side of things...

To overcome this, it can help to give each other a shoulder to lean on in meetings instead of keeping your distance, to take an interest in what each other is doing, or to follow up with that person after a part of a project is finished. That way people don't feel like they are doing something by themselves. But this is something that needs to be addressed on the human side, something that each of us has to think about personally and deal with in our own individual way. If you are still feeling tired after 5 days at home, the human side of things might be where you want to look.

Please share with us the difficulties you have experienced in working from home and what you have done to overcome them with the form below and let's discuss them together.

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