Remote work is more common now that it used to be as more and more people prefer to work from home nowadays. It’s widely known that remote workers tend to be productive. Not to mention they lead a healthy life and handle their work-life balance well. They often take fewer sick leaves, have the ability to stay motivated and stay in the job for a long time. Hence employers prefer to send their employees away from office with a laptop and a list of tasks to do. Just like how remote work has its perks, remote work challenges also exist in many forms.
Five Remote work challenges:
1.Difficulty managing your time and distractions:
When you are working from home you’re no longer distracted by your colleagues and their talks. Yet you are prone to dealing with other kinds of interruptions. As such that you are more distracted by family, kids, house chores and social media platforms. Not to mention how distractions can make you lazy and here comes procrastinating into play. Hence you can barely manage your schedule. Distractions can turn remote working into chaos with lower productivity and progress at work. With no one managing your time but yourself, you tend to fall into the trap of distraction.
2.Overworking is one of remote work challenges:
It’s hard to draw the boundaries between work and rest as you don’t commute anymore or leave the office. As when both your work and personal life are under the same roof, you find it hard to detach yourself. Due to the fact that ending the work day in remote environment isn’t the same as stepping away from your desk and exiting the office, remote workers tend to overwork. Hence you might forget to exercise or go out enough. In addition to that, you have a difficulty unwinding after the work day is over and that leads to lower productivity with no break hours. Therefore, working from home can sometimes give you the impression that you never really leave work.
If you want to learn how to manage your stress while working remotely, here we show you 5 ways how to deal with stress.
3.Team miscommunication and social isolation:
Despite of the use of online platforms to interact with the team members, still remote work suffers from low communication among members and the existence of team conflicts. There’s no full picture of what’s happening like in the office as such face to face meetings, lunches, coffee-breaks and spontaneous events. Hence team members tend to misunderstand each other’s intentions and fall into the trap of conflict.
On the other side, this helps social isolation to arise, as remote work makes you feel like standing outside the circle. As communicating and maintaining connections make you feel like you are part of the team. While working from home and being stuck in the same place the whole day make you feel like you’re left out. You want to know more about social isolation in remote work? Click here
4.Technology problems:
One of the worst remote work challenges is the technology problems. As such the technology within the office is fast and advanced while at home the internet signal isn’t reliable and sometimes your computer breaks. Having a fast and stable internet connection at home is very difficult and that hinders your productivity and progress. Some companies even fail to deliver company laptops to their employees, along with the unreliable internet connection at home, this creates a big challenge to overcome.
5.Inability to stay motivated:
Some people have more natural motivation natural motivation than others. However no matter your level of motivation, remote work makes it difficult for you to stay motivated. Since that the remote workers don’t have other people overlooking their work or managing their time, they tend to have difficulty sticking to their tasks and being motivated. This comes down to the fact that they are unsupervised. Along with having no pressure from leaders or team members, they might not get things done. Hence staying in the comfort of your home makes it harder to stay motivated than when you are around your colleagues.
There are challenges that most remote workers face in their daily lives. By going through the article above, you will be informed of the most common challenges.