How to Stay Motivated While Working From Home
Adapting to telecommuting goes beyond no commuting, staying with Zoom etiquette, and not having a clear start and end to the day. Working remotely , especially if you’ve never done it before, can also affect your sense of purpose, according to Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski , an organizational psychologist at the Yale School of Management.
As an expert on how people find meaning in their work, Wrzeniewski says the recent shift to telecommuting has weakened our sense of community and structure for some. She talked about this little-known side effect and how to deal with it in a recent article in Yale Insights . Here’s what you need to know.
What does telecommuting have to do with our commitment?
We’ve previously covered some ways to deal with the many structural changes that come with working from home, but Wrzesniewski says there are other, more existential issues to consider:
For many people, work experience is determined by their interdependence with others, and the relationships that develop as a result are important to the meaning and purpose they find in their work. Moreover, the workplace itself, where it is often easier to focus, interact and feel like a full-fledged member of the team, acts as an important contribution to understanding the meaning and purpose that people experience in work.
Wrzezniewski explains that removing these factors from the equation – and in the absence of personal interaction with colleagues, the increased attention to the actual content of the work itself – can lead to the loss of purpose or meaning associated with your work. Here’s how to deal with it.
Find out what you are missing
First, identify what aspects of your pre-pandemic job you’re actually missing out on. According to Wrzesniewski, this means thinking about what is needed will help you focus on work, as well as on your sense of connection with other people and with the work itself. Much of her research has focused on people who work in complete solitude (for example, without connection with an organization or colleagues).
In a 2018 article published in the Administrative Science Quarterly Bulletin , Wrzesniewski and her co-authors, Dr. Gianpiero Petrilleri of INSEAD and Dr. Sue Ashford of the University of Michigan, found that people who worked alone tended to have the same strategies for maintaining their involvement and connection. their work, regardless of occupation. Here are four you can try.
Dedicated workplace
This is advice we have heard a lot over the past few months , but it has proved to be true even before the pandemic. It’s interesting to note, however, that size matters, but not necessarily the way you think: Wrzeniewski says that the seats for the participants were often quite small , which they said helped to focus and focus on their work.
Create (and stick to) a routine
Even if you are not physically moving to another location, create a routine to separate working hours from non-working hours. “It’s likely that the routine of commuting to work has served a purpose for many who are now forced to do telework from home — it helped them prepare for the transition to a different mode and level of concentration that can be lost when there are no boundaries for traverse. “, – explains Vzheshnevsky.
Build connections with others who work remotely
These people do not have to do work similar to yours, but as Wrzeniewski points out, there may be people who remind us of what we feel most valuable in our work – and that we are still capable of doing – along with the fact that we are not alone.
Reconnect with the purpose of your work
Finally, the participants in the 2018 study also made connections with the purpose of their work; in particular, “finding ways to connect to what is important in their work for the world, for them and others,” says Wrzesniewski. “If this connection is not possible or involves the feeling that the work itself does not make much sense,” she adds, “it can be an extremely difficult task for remote workers.”