Work At Home Situations And The Impact Of Working From Home On Family Relationships
The Work From Home situation confers very many benefits to the home worker, not least of which is the ability to integrate your working life with your domestic arrangements. For example you can arrange your working sessions so that you can accommodate the school run or be on hand to assist family members with trips to the dentists.
However careful though needs to be given to how your ever presence within the home will affect your normal day to day relationships with other family members. Remember that for the majority offamilies, there is a natural partingof ways normally at breakfast times. This is when the family divides, with those in full time employmentheading off to the office, the children making their way to school and others, normally mother and baby, remaining at home. There is a natural order to this with each individual within the family group able to take a break from the family interaction and follow his or her independent path for a significant part of the day.
So when one or more family members decides to pursue a work from home career then the goings of separate ways are lost and this can cause unexpected rifts between family members who now find themselves living with each other for the entire working day in addition to the normal mornings, evenings and night times. It’s not that partners become incompatible, or the family becomes dysfunctional. Rather it is that working from home has denied family members their separate, independent paths. What can also be missing is the stimulus of meeting work colleaguesor clients.
For these reasons it becomes important for anyone Working from Home to take on board these potential obstacles and try to introduce new house rules which will allow the essential isolation between partners and family members which is alluded to above.
Rule number 1 – create your own work from home environment. take sole possession of a room in the house and make it your own, private designated workspace. Let this be your retreat as well as working environment and ensure that you strictly control access by other family members . Put up a “private no entry” sign if you have to so that you can escape into your workspace in much the way you could if you worked in an office away from your home.
Rule number 2 – define your own working hours. Just because you work from home does not mean that you are a slave tofamily members at all times. Be clear that you and your workspace are off limits during these working hours. If this sounds like a sacrifice of one of the benefits of working from home then just remember, it’s the control of your hours that is the benefit, not the complete loss of those hours in favour of domestic duties.
Rule number 3 – take exercise breaks. When organising your daily routine be sure to include escape time, when you leave the house and get some fresh air. This activity will put you off limits to other family members and will help you to maintain that separate working existence. These breaks can of course have a practical purpose, such as a journey to the bank with your daily banking.
Using these rules you can re establish the natural delineations which exist between the separate parts of your life, your working life and your home life. This kind of disciple really can be the difference between success and failure in setting up a satisfactory work from home opportunity.
Domestic Red Wine Flight | February 2011