Working from home can be a dream for many people who wish to achieve a better work-life balance. When you’re a remote worker, you can skip all the traffic and commuting hours and just start your work in your pajamas. And for parents, working from home gives them a chance to still be close to their kids while working full-time.

However, a work-life balance may still be hard to attain if your ‘desk’ doubles as your laundry folding station or your chair frequently leaves you with back pains and posture problems. Studies show that 51% of remote workers work from their living/dining areas and 24.6% from their bedrooms, resulting in 61.2% of them suffering from musculoskeletal discomfort.

Thus, if you want to thrive professionally as a remote employee, you need a dedicated home office. What are these office furniture essentials? Below is a list that could help you.  

Proper Office Desk

Sure, you can have your living room table or dining table as a substitute for a real office desk. But most of the time, these surfaces are prone to clutter and distraction. While you’re having client meetings, your spouse could be doing kitchen chores on the side, or your kids could be playing in the living room. So, investing in a proper office desk can ensure you’re free from any disturbance.  

For those with limited space (e.g., living in apartments), you may opt for a corner office desk. This will make it easier for you to use the often-wasted corner areas while still having some ample workspace. Meanwhile, for those with more room, L-shaped desks offer separate zones for computer work and paperwork.

Other factors you must consider when choosing your office desk are the storage options, height, and material durability. To avoid any returns later, it’s best to measure your current available space before desk shopping.

Once you have a clearer idea of the kind of desk you need, you can visit your preferred Melbourne office furniture store. You may also browse online stores and visit their “explore our selection” pages to know more about the different ergonomic office desks designed for home offices of all sizes.

An Ergonomic Chair

After choosing a desk, your next target should be finding an ergonomic chair. While a dining chair might work for an hour, it won’t hug your spine through back-to-back Zoom calls.  

Recent research shows this isn’t just about comfort anymore but about your health. A survey found that about 59% of remote workers reported experiencing pain issues like backaches, joint problems, or headaches in the past year. That’s slightly higher than their office-bound colleagues (54%). Work-from-homers even reported more digestive problems (37% versus 34%), probably from all that hunching over laptops at the kitchen table.

To avoid all these potential health issues, look for ergonomic office chairs with adjustable height, backrests, and armrests to accommodate your body’s specific needs. Your feet should rest flat on the ground, and your knees should be bent at right angles. Plus, ensure the chair adequately supports your lower back’s natural curve.

Practical Storage

Setting up your home office doesn’t stop after you’ve bought your office desk and chair. You also need to invest in proper storage solutions, so you know where to keep all your paperwork and other office supplies. After all, you wouldn’t want your desk to be occupied with piles of paper, right?

Filing cabinets on wheels are often the best storage options, as you can roll them away when not needed. But for those trying to save space, wall-mounted shelving allows you to maximize your vertical office space. Floating shelves are also good choices for areas with challenging layouts.  

Proper Lighting

Natural light is the best lighting your home office can ever have. However, since Melbourne sometimes has unpredictable weather patterns, natural light can be unreliable. That is why it’s best to invest in proper lighting to prevent eye strain and maintain your energy levels throughout the workday.

A warm, adjustable desk lamp can help you during late-night deadlines, while overhead fixtures brighten the entire space. Meanwhile, you might need to avoid those harsh fluorescent bulbs as they can cause headaches and eye fatigue over extended periods of work. If your room lacks windows, mimic daylight with cool-toned LEDs and opt for the ones with dimming capabilities to adjust brightness levels throughout the day.

Comfort Elements

Finally, it’s time to complete your home office setup with your personal comfort elements. One of the lesser-known perks of working from home is being able to design your home office freely. Your home office doesn’t have to look and feel like a corporate cubicle. Designing your workspace into an enjoyable environment can help you stay focused and productive during long workdays.

One of the best comfort elements you can add is plants. Indoor plants are known for their ability to help increase one’s productivity. Studies show that employees with plants added to their interior space are 12% more productive and attentive.

You can also add a good-quality rug, a framed print from your favorite artist, or a cute pen holder. Just make sure to avoid overcrowding when decorating your home office.

Key Takeaway

With these office furniture essentials in place, you can create a productive home office environment that works perfectly for Melbourne’s unique lifestyle and climate. And while you have this list as your guide, you should still listen to your body’s needs. So go ahead and start building an office that inspires you even when deadlines loom. After all, the best work happens when you feel at home.

Is your company’s true potential being optimally utilized?

Think twice before you disregard this question. Maybe the consistency of your team’s output hasn’t changed so you think all is well. But what about the quality?

Without reliable tools like remote employee monitoring software and techniques to help you maintain employee focus, an unfocused remote workforce producing low-quality output can quietly erode your business’s foundation.

This may go unnoticed until it manifests as significant setbacks. And even then, you may not be able to pinpoint their roots and true extent.

This article lays out the main reasons behind poor employee focus. It also provides actionable strategies to help you reclaim remote employee concentration and prevent your organization from falling short of its true capabilities.

The Consequences of Poor Employee Focus

A drop in employee focus can have deep and drastic effects on the company’s reputation, bottom line, but also the employees themselves:

• Financial Implications: According to Gallup’s study, one unfocused employee can cause their company to lose as much as 18% of their annual salary.

• Well-Being Deterioration: Results of a poll by Crucial Learning show that 73% of employees lack energy and struggle to find the motivation to complete their tasks.

• Low-Quality Work: Crucial Learning poll also tells us that 72.6% of surveyed people report worrying about their tasks and the amount of work. This anxiety can easily lead to forgetfulness, mistakes, and low-quality output.

• Lack of Energy: Lack of physical and mental energy reduces remote workers’ efficiency. The mentioned Crucial Learning poll reports that 71.7% of respondents felt they worked slower when struggling with focus.

• Feeling Overwhelmed: 73.2% of people told Crucial Learning that they feel they have too much to do. This pressure of a large looming workload can impair a person’s ability to think clearly and reduce their decision-making and problem-solving capacities.

To make things worse, the mentioned Gallup’s study also found that 67% of global employees lack engagement with their work.

Can you afford to risk it and just suppose your company is “probably an exception”?

The Common Roots of Poor Focus

Poor employee focus can be caused by environmental factors, but it can also have its source in employees’ personal habits – especially in a remote environment. 

Let’s take a look at the most common sources:

• Surroundings: Remote workers don’t have to deal with office chatter, but there are household members, noises, and other distractions that they need to deal with.

• Digital Distractions: The most powerful digital focus killers are personal devices. Without immediate supervision, the mere sight of their phone can distract your remote workers from their tasks.

• Information Overwhelm: Human working memory can process only a limited amount of data. When it gets overloaded, we lose focus. Your remote workers are more likely to face this problem as they are plugged into an incredible number of data sources.

• Poor Sleeping Habits: Insufficient sleep affects your cognitive functions, slows down your thought process, and reduces concentration. Chronic lack of sleep can even affect your employees’ memory.

• Insufficient Movement: Physical inactivity has a twofold negative effect on a person’s focus. Firstly, their muscles are likely to become tense and they will experience that distracting neck and back tightness. Secondly, their brains might not get enough nutrients and oxygen to work properly.

• Unhealthy Eating: An unhealthy or restrictive diet can severely affect your ability to focus. Without proper nourishment, you can face poor focus, memory loss, and fatigue.

How to Help Remote Workers Improve Their Focus

Here are seven ways you can help your employees gain better focus and productivity:

1. Implement an Employee Monitoring Software

Employee monitoring software is one of the essential tools to help you improve your remote employee focus.

A scalable monitoring system provides real-time monitoring data, such as apps, websites, and other resources used. It also records the amount of time each task takes, as well as idle time per day. This data gives you an overall picture of each of your employees’ focus fluctuations.

But this is just the beginning. The more powerful among these tools offer individual productivity levels, as well as early burnout predictions. All these parameters are calculated automatically, based on the level of your employees’ focus. Without these automatic reports, you would have piles of data without any actionable insights.

Instead, you can rely on the right kind of software and get detailed info about the engagement level of each of your employees and:

• Help them fight surrounding distractions and reinforce their accountability by sharing this data with them.
• Spot inefficiencies and potential digital distractions characteristic of each employee and team.
• Provide tailored support to anyone who is struggling with information overload and similar issues.

2. Advise Creating a Distraction-Free Workspace

To help your remote employees reach and maintain better focus during work hours, remind them to:

• Eliminate digital distractions: Encourage them to silence all work-related notifications as well as private devices when they need to focus. You can even suggest they remove their phones from their field of vision.

• Create a clean and clutter-free workspace: Advise your remote workers to choose a plain corner for their workspace and to keep it clean. The more clutter they are surrounded with, the harder it will be to focus.

3. Recommend Setting up a Rhythm

Support your remote employees in finding the best rhythm for themselves. This will enable them to fight environmental and digital distractions throughout the day more easily.

Here are several proven time-management methods that remote employees around the globe find effective:

• “Eat That Frog”: This is the idea that Brian Tracy presented in his book by the same title. It involves deciding on your priorities for the day and doing the most important and demanding task first thing in the morning.

• Time Blocking: Suggest your workers schedule several blocks throughout the day for different tasks that demand deep focus. Encourage them to silence their notifications so that they can concentrate better.

• Pomodoro: This technique incorporates a 25-minute focus period followed by a five-minute break. Advise that all distractions are eliminated during the focus periods.

4. Encourage Taking Regular Breaks

Although focus requires uninterrupted work, staying on one task for prolonged periods can be counterproductive. When you notice your employees are stuck on a task, suggest they take a break.

Some research has shown that prolonged exposure to one stimulus can reduce the concentration. This is when only a short period of switching focus to a different task can help fight this information overload and regain your full concentration.

5. Advocate Against Multitasking

Tolerating or, even worse, expecting your remote employees to multitask may be one of your worst mistakes.

Rapid task switching requires a lot of refocusing, which ends up consuming more time than focused work on one task would. This is why it’s much wiser to advise your employees to always work on one task at a time.

The Eisenhower Matrix can help them efficiently manage all work-related distractions coming in via digital channels. manage distractions. This is a simple chart that will allow them to jot down all incoming tasks for later and immediately sort them into one of four groups:

• Urgent and important
• Important but non-urgent
• Urgent but not important
• Non-urgent and not important

6. Suggest Practicing Mindfulness

For many remote workers, mindfulness is one of the best ways to start a workday. It consists of closing your eyes, breathing deeply, and focusing on your breath and your surroundings for a couple of minutes. This way, you get back to the present moment and realign your focus just before you get to your first task. The same technique can help throughout the day with fighting distractions from the surroundings.

You can also try incorporating classical music or nature sounds into your deep focus periods.

7. Promote Healthy Habits

Unhealthy habits can significantly affect your employees’ ability to focus. This is why you might want to consider having awareness days about the importance of:

• Healthy Sleep: Sleeping reduces the stress hormones that negatively affect our brains. Advise your employees to get at least seven hours of sleep each night.

• Regular Exercise: Explain that even light exercise can boost your blood flow and help your brain get all the nutrients. This improves memory and cognitive function.

• Eating Well: Recommend eating nuts, seeds, oily fish, and leafy greens instead. This will give them all the necessary nutrients to keep their brain responsive and their focus sharp.

Drops in focus and productivity can happen to any team, and your remote team is not an exception. The key is having enough info about their daily habits and activities to easily pinpoint the problem and provide a customized solution. Rely on the tools and techniques we suggested, and you will resolve any focus issues and boost your organization’s productivity in no time!

No one can be productive 24/7, but you can and should improve your productivity. This will help you put less effort into achieving your goals, complete tasks faster, and feel better mentally. We are going to share the best productive tips with you.

What is productivity, and why is it needed?

Productivity is the number of completed tasks, served clients, manufactured goods, solved problems, or completed academic assignments in a certain time. Let’s say a carpenter makes three chairs in one working day – this is good productivity and efficiency. If productivity drops, the carpenter makes only two chairs per day. This can affect not only the carpenter’s work but also their well-being.

The same goes for students. If there comes a point when they start completing fewer assignments than they should, it is obvious that their productivity has dropped. In such cases, some tools can come to the rescue. For example, you can use a reference finder while writing your paper or a tool that generates texts, but only to speed up the research process and not to submit a generated essay. You’d better write it yourself.

When people become less productive, they may reproach themselves and procrastinate, which worsens their emotional state. Productivity needs to be improved in order to work more effectively, feel better emotionally, and enhance the quality of life.

Productive people:

• Are not distracted by extraneous processes: social networks or unimportant matters
• Know how to properly distribute the workload and time: do not take on more tasks than they can do
• Know how and when to take short and long breaks that will help them stay focused
• Know how to manage their emotional state
• Use time management techniques to become a more effective person
• Know how to distribute tasks in order to achieve results within the required time frame.

How to increase productivity: secrets of efficient work

Many people, in order to achieve their goals and do more tasks, forget about rest and do everything at once. In fact, this helps in the short term: today, you took on everything at once, worked without a break, and managed to do a lot. If you do this every day, the effect will last for a couple of days, and then you will not want to work at all. Here are tips on how to increase productivity without harming yourself.

1. Concentrate on One Task at a Time

Multitasking interferes with productivity since attentiveness decreases when performing several tasks. Our brain is not able to efficiently process several goals at once. Therefore, you should not write a report and talk to a client at the same time: completing tasks will be pointless anyway. It is better to do things sequentially.

Social networks and messengers can often interfere with concentrating on tasks. Chatting with friends, news, blogger posts, and everything else distracts people from work. To cope with the flow of extraneous information and focus your thoughts on tasks, you can use a corporate messenger.

There is nothing in such an application that can distract. Using a corporate messenger will help you concentrate on your tasks, get everything done, and maintain productivity due to the lack of distractions.

2. Use Productivity Apps

Todoist is rightfully considered one of the best apps for personal productivity and collaboration. The platform provides a solid set of functions for managing individual tasks and entire projects. With its help, you can speed up and simplify things execution, organize to-do lists, and implement other solutions to improve work productivity.

Notion is not only a well-known project management and collaboration platform but also an effective tool for personal productivity. It has an impressive set of features for creating and managing notes, coordinating project details, tracking task progress, and much more. The service is suitable for work, study, personal projects, and business.

1Password is one of the best productivity apps for personal use. This service is known as a convenient and reliable password manager with a large set of features. The platform has an intuitive interface, powerful encryption technologies, and many integrations with third-party systems. It is optimal for both personal and corporate use.

3. Use Programs for Data Synchronization

Many users today work on several devices: a desktop computer, a laptop, and a mobile phone. In this regard, all tasks need to be synchronized in order to have access to current versions of documents and projects.

One possible solution is to manually copy updated files to all devices regularly. This daily routine task is not always convenient; it is faster and more reliable to use a data synch program or online service.

FreeFileSync is a free, open-source, cross-platform program that is used to synchronize files.With FreeFileSync, you can create and manage backup copies of files. The program checks for differences between the source and target folders in order to transfer only the necessary amount of data. Thus, after checking and comparing the differences, synchronization is carried out in both folders at once.

GoodSync is cross-platform software for Windows, Linux, and macOS. You can also have it on Android and iOS, for synchronizing and backing up files. There are licenses for personal and commercial use.

SyncToy is a free app from Microsoft that lets you quickly and easily sync two folders, even if they’re on different computers, sharing them in real time. The tool has several sync options for any purpose.

4. Use Data Analytics Tools

Databox simplifies business analytics for growing companies. The tool centralizes data, allowing you to monitor current statistics of success in your company, make informed decisions, and improve productivity.

DashThis streamlines digital marketing reporting by providing the most essential features without cluttering the interface. The app features an intuitive and attractive dashboard tool that saves time on data aggregation and allows you to focus on decision-making.

Grafana is the leading technology for dashboards and visualizations. Over 3,000 customers use it, including large companies such as Bloomberg, Citigroup, Salesforce, Dell Technologies, and TomTom.

Follow our tips, and you will become more productive.