These techniques are a type of employee morale boost, and fall into the category of remote team engagement ideas. Following these best practices is a method for leading strong virtual teams. The insistent, throbbing beats from the leaky earbuds of the person sitting beside remote working fatigue you. Colleagues waiting to pounce with questions the moment you look away from your screen. There’s a reason you’ve felt more productive working from home during the pandemic. Here are 5 tips to fend off office distractions and maintain your work from home groove.

working from home fatigue

While colleagues in traditional offices tend to have similar working environments, virtual coworkers can have vastly different home office spaces. Each work from home setup is unique, and the cause of a virtual work slump may be the result of an element of the environment. It’s not just the feeling that work is never really finished that contributes to work-from-home fatigue. A survey by Blue Jeans found that remote workers are actually logging an additional 3.13 hours of work per day.

Ways To Avoid Digital Fatigue And Banish Back-To-Work Burnout

Having recurring dates for activities on the calendar creates a sense of normalcy around the occasion. The recurring nature of the events means that team members do not feel pressured to attend any one outing, yet reminders and RSVP’s create a sense of accountability that encourages employees to attend. With repeated outings, teammates feel more like part of a club than guests at a one-off event. Team building can foster camaraderie among virtual coworkers and chase away the feelings of isolation that often accompany remote work. However, in the midst of work from home funk, many folks struggle to find the motivation to plan a hangout, or to rearrange their schedules to take part in an outing.

Add in a lack of physical activity and social interaction, pains from having wrong equipment, staring at screens, and it is easy to see how remote workers can get fatigued. However, no style of work is the ultimate solution, and with the onset of remote work, the boundaries between one’s professional and personal life are blurred. As a result, 69% of remote workers are experiencing burnout symptoms due to being overworked, having no sense of work life balance, and feeling unsupported. Free from office distractions and interruptions, remote workers tend to be more focused and productive. However, when completing higher quantities of work, employees can also get sick of these duties much faster.

Missing People and Connections

Understanding that many employees don’t have a proper office set-up, you can consider offering support in creating a better remote work environment. As a leader, you have an opportunity to support your team’s physical and mental wellbeing by encouraging a healthy lifestyle. This is partly because work is always close by when your home and office are in the same place. But it’s also a by-product of employees feeling the need to show extra productivity when working from home. In fact, a survey from Monster found that 69% of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms when working from home (up 20% from only a few months earlier).

  • From breaks to work and relaxation hours, you have it all figured out.
  • Setting up a professional workspace can draw a divider between the home space and office space, reinforce boundaries, and improve productivity.
  • When the weather is nice, I sit outside to work for a few hours a day.
  • Work from home fatigue may feel permanent and insurmountable in the moment, however the feeling often passes.
  • Speaking to someone face-to-face is a very different experience to speaking from someone virtually.
  • Nomadic working is rising in popularity and a positive offshoot of this is that there are now more cafes and rentable workspaces available for remote workers.
  • Now, you’re struggling to get through an hour before you need another coffee break and your workday is dragging out past 5 as you don’t get the work done.