Bringing Your Work Home…But Should You Keep It There?

The age of "remote" working has, supposedly, come and gone. Increasingly, employers are of the opinion that there are concrete benefits of having their employees together, playing ideas off one another and putting their heads together. However, leaving aside the still unanswered question of whether this belief is accurate, the fact remains that most entrepreneurs start out working from their home. It's worth addressing then, the question of how. How do you turn your living space into your work space?

Working from Home

The biggest advantages of working from home should be fairly obvious, but there is a problem that comes from having your home and office spaces coincide which can take some people by surprise, despite the fact that it's actually pretty self-evident. When your working life and home life intersect, it can become difficult to keep them separated, and this will never be more obvious than when you first start working out of your house. This can cut either way; you may find it challenging to get round to actually doing any work, with the many distractions that your home (probably) has. Conversely, you may find that your work invades your private life, and you're unable to ever truly relax. Obviously, these are both bad.

Getting the Balance Right

The solution is pretty simple- keep your office and your home separate. Just because they're in the same building doesn't mean that it's not possible- or advisable- to draw a dividing line between the two. The first step is clearly to set aside a room dedicated to work. Your office should just be that- an office. The more aspects of your personal life you introduce to your working area, the more difficult it will be to keep the two from overlapping. In order to make this possible you'll need to make sure you have "work" versions of all the things you'll need. Most obviously this will mean a different computer to the one you use for leisure, but it's a good idea to extend it to more subtle things, like furniture.

The other thing to mention is that your two main goals here are:

a) to give you somewhere you can be as productive and successful as possible without distractions
b) to allow you to do all this while maintaining a professional attitude and appearance.

A great way to meet both of those requirements is to set up a Virtual Office. A Virtual Office is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin; a facility for having all the benefits of an office (such as call answering, mail forwarding, access to meeting rooms etc) without having to pay for continuous use of a property. In essence, it's a fully stocked professional office on a Pay As You Go basis.

Do you have to?

Whilst remote working may be seen as a dream, flexibility in terms of office space is an area of real importance to many companies. Most companies’ need an area in which they can entertain clients, not having an office for this can put you on the back foot. This means that just working remotely could have a detrimental effect on your client relations (unless they love sitting in Starbucks).

Why not look to rent rather than purchase commercial premises? A purchase can burden you with an office you hardly use, whilst flexible, short term contracts allows you to have flexibility in where and how you work.

Shared offices could also prove to be an ideal solution for smaller companies. Whilst you may work from home most of the time, renting out an office for a day a week could allow you the chance to get all of your meetings done in a professional space.

Remember, whilst remote working does sound idyllic, it’s the flexibility that it offers which is its real strength, rather than just an opportunity to work from your sofa. Flexibility means that you get the best of both worlds so make sure that you accommodate both.