Like the rest of us, Sara De Gieter, a professor in work psychology, has been working from home for more than two weeks now. We asked her for some tips to better deal with the consequences of the corona crisis now that we’re suddenly all working from home.
As a researcher, Sara De Gieter specialises in well-being at work, work-family interaction and the well-being of employees. This research focus makes her the perfect expert to offer some tips that can help you maintain a degree of work-life balance during these exceptional times.
Sara De Gieter’s tips:
- Try to create a physical barrier between work and your personal life.
Work from your study if you have one. Or be creative and try to for instance convert that storage space into a temporary study. This will make it easier for you to concentrate and will help create a mental barrier between work and personal time.
- Try to introduce time limits between work and other areas of your life.
Adopt a fixed daily schedule that takes into account the needs of your partner, children or the other persons living with you. Schedule time for working, for collective breaks and for helping your children with their homework for instance. In this way, the day schedule will be clear to everyone and you won’t have to constantly try to combine different roles.
- Set clear rules with your supervisor and colleagues around everyone’s availability, the tasks at hand and preferred ways of communication.
Which tasks should be prioritised? What can realistically be achieved? During which hours of the day should everyone be reachable? Also indicate when you’ll be difficult to reach. You may want to agree to call each other for urgent matters and to email when a quick response isn’t needed. Also regularly make time for friendly chats with colleagues so that everyone continues to feel they’re part of a team – a collective virtual coffee break can do wonders.
- Create a ritual to mark the transition from work to personal time at the end of your workday.
Especially when working from home, it may be hard to fully check out from work. You can more easily mark the transition by retreating with a book for 15 minutes or going for a short walk at the end of the day. Also try to maintain good digital hygiene – resist the temptation to log back into your work email or to message colleagues about work-related matters in the evenings.
- Don’t be too hard on yourself.
These are extraordinary circumstances and you’ll find it easier to concentrate, to complete tasks, to strike a healthy work-life balance on some days than others. But you are not alone in this; everyone is having to adjust to this situation. So be gentle with yourself.
How well have you heeded your own advice?
“I’m currently stuck at home with two primary school-aged children. We don’t have a separate study, so I’m working from our living room where our children often also are. Our research group has decided to start taking a collective coffee break at 10 o’clock every morning with the Zoom videoconferencing app. This informal, friendly chat helps us to continue feeling connected as a group. Funnily enough, I’ve seen more of some of my colleagues the past few weeks than I normally do when we’re all working from the office.”