Looking After Your Wellbeing When Working from Home

We are now at a point where we have gained more than enough experience of working from home – to the point where many of us miss the office environment and the benefits it can offer. As we all endure our longest lockdown to date, it is also apparent that we need to maintain our wellbeing at home both mentally and physically.

Both employees and employers share a responsibility to optimise what is possible when working from home full time. We have gathered some tips to help you understand what we can all be doing to protect our health and safety within the home, plus some very useful links around this topic.

• Safety first – understand your company’s Health and Safety policy – it is incumbent on them to ensure that you are safe when working for them, whether that be in an office or at home.
• Light it up – especially during these darker months ensure that your lighting is well suited to the activities you have to perform. It sounds so basic, but if you are constantly glued to your screen analysing large amounts of data or completing demanding visual tasks, it is easy to strain your eyes over time – an adjacent form of repetitive strain injury where you notice nothing day to day, but over time a troublesome strain can occur.
• Air tight? – It’s cold; in fact, it’s freezing lately! But remember the importance of ventilation in your working environment. Leave a window slightly open (but secured) overnight to air the room and when you take breaks leave the window open. As well as fresh air full of oxygen, the temperature will certainly keep you on your toes and help avoid the sluggish effects of over-heating your environment
• Are you sitting comfortably? – By now you may have already experienced the aches and pains of not having used your office chair. The reason for this is likely to be that office chairs are ergonomically designed to support you for long periods of time. Your couch, your bed, your dining room chairs are not. Ask your company if they can courier your work chair to you, always sit at a desk or table and get up every hour as minimum. Check out the link below for top tips around posture at your home/ work station.
• Time to get up! – Isolation and social distancing have obviously made getting out and about a real challenge, but even at home we can do something about this. Get up every hour and move around the house, make time to do a stretching class online, increase by one the number of sit ups or press ups you can do in a day. Perfect, or learn to do, squats, lunges back and forth, calf raises etc. It can be hard to get started, but the rewards for getting into the habit and the improvements you can make to your core strength and your overall wellbeing are worth it.

We started with safety and we finished with health. We should ensure the first, and strive for the latter as we continue to get through our longest lockdown, the good news being that we already have almost eight weeks behind us, which means that we must be closer to the end than we were at the beginning!

Here are some other helpful resources to help you manage and improve your Health and Safety:

• https://www.acas.org.uk/working-from-home/health-safety-and-wellbeing
• https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/flexible-working/remote-working-top-tips
• https://www.hse.gov.uk/toolbox/workers/home.htm
• https://ptforhealth.com/sitting-posture-working-from-home/

If you are a candidate looking for your next temporary or permanent business support role in London, or a client requiring assistance in recruitment please contact our team so we can help you with your search at hello@australasian.co.uk

Take care and we hope to see you soon!