Sensée’s recently published ebook ‘How’s Your Work-Life Balance?’ explores twenty tried and tested tips to help homeworkers get a better work-life balance.
This is an important subject as over 90% of contact centre workers were working from home during lockdown (Source: Gartner) and Sensée’s own research found that 86% of companies that used home working during the pandemic were considering it as a long-term strategy.
The ebook was primarily created for Sensée’s own homeworkers, but is now freely available.
Sensée’s homeworkers have always chosen to work-from-home (WFH) – so their situation is different to most office-based workers affected by the pandemic. However, a lot has changed since 2019. Many workers forced to WFH during the pandemic may soon be asking their employers for more flexible work schedules. And most employers are now in the process of defining how they will manage the slow return to normality that is becoming possible because of the vaccination rollout.
Everyone has different reasons for wanting to work from home. There is no typical homeworker but one reason is repeated more often than others when homeworkers are asked to explain their preference for avoiding the office: work-life balance.
If your life involves caring for children, caring for elderly relatives, living with a disability, or living in a remote location then the idea of a long commute to an office followed by eight to ten hours in an office, followed once again by a commute home isn’t a positive vision of how work should be. We all have responsibilities away from our job, but too many people are often forced to make difficult choices about how to prioritise these activities.
Many people actively seek home working opportunities because they want to balance these responsibilities with their work. They want to remain employed and to gain the sense of achievement and fulfilment we all get from working, but not at the expense of everything else in their life.
Recent research by Citrix found that 90% of Millennials and Generation Z – meaning everyone under the age of about 40 – do not want to return to full-time work based in an office. Younger workers are demanding flexibility even if they are not 100% working from home. The overwhelming number of workers demanding greater flexibility shows that a greater acceptance of working from home will be one of the major changes caused by the pandemic.
The ebook advises on setting agendas in advance, getting into a daily work routine, and reducing your distractions. It is full of tips that can help homeworkers to gain more control over their working life so it can be more easily balanced with their other responsibilities. This will be a new reality of working life in the 2020s even for those workers that occasionally need to visit their office.
Read the new Sensée ebook ‘How’s Your Work-Life Balance’ by clicking here.