Working From Home Time Management Training
Working from home has become the new reality for many people around the world. Whilst the abilty to work effectively has been a revelation to many people, not least senior managers and directors. These senior people always believed that people had to be in an office to be effective. I met one very senior IT manager who was not allowed, by his Director, to work even one day from home. The Director did not think it would be productive.
But whilst the argument over effectiveness is won, the costs on the individual are still being counted. Long working hours, increased stress and burn out are all possible. Our working from home time management training gives you strategies and ideas on how to be effective and have time for a home life. It could help you establish a good work life balance.
The challenges with working from home
The challenges that are experienced by many people when they work from home, rather than the office, include the following:
- Working longer hours during the week and at weekends.
- Not knowing what work to prioritise.
- Harder to have quick conversations, to clarify or ask questions.
- How to say no to additional work, or at least discuss deadlines.
- Easier to be distracted by work interruptions like emails and non work interruptions like WhatsApp and other notifications.
- Working from home with kids, family members or pets in the background.
The list goes on. When we design this training for you we tailor it to the challenges you want us to focus on. And in the workshop we ask participants for their most pressing challenges to make sure we give them ideas that will help them immediately.
Training agenda
The following agenda gives an overview of this training. The details are tailored to suit your needs and examples or scenarios are based on your organisation to make them more relevant to the participants.
Personal Challenges
Following introductions, we begin the session by checking in with each participant and their challenges with working from home. We then use these by providing ideas on how to address them and linking to content later in the workshop.
You are the manager of you
This is a personal development idea we have introduced to people over the past five years. It simply means taking responsibilty for your time and not allowing work to take over you. This might be easy to say, but harder to implement, so we help you by giving you ideas and strategies on how to do this.
Contracting Conversation
A contracting conversation is where two people discuss and agree how they are going to work together. It can be instigated by a manager, a junior, between colleagues, or within a project team. In this case we are introducing the idea as a way for a team member to discuss time management challenges with their manager. We understand that this idea may be a politically sensitive action and may not be suitable for every circumstance, but it is an idea which we have seen really help some people. It works by sorting out expectations of how work is done. It can mean the difference between feeling overwhelmed by work and feeling absolutely fine with work.
The Need for Assertiveness
Organisations, especially law firms, expect their people to behave assertively. This means taking responsibility for negotiating work volume, discussing deadlines and establishing boundaries. Assertiveness means both expressing what you can and cannot do, as well as constructively helping towards getting the work done. So, for example, it’s not just about saying no when you are asked to do more work in an already busy day. It’s about discussing the deadline, priorities and helping to work out how all the work can get done. You might call it constructive assertiveness.
Work / Home Boundaries
We have worked with many people, including lawyers at all levels, who have found working from home really challenging in that work takes over almost all their time. Where once the boundary of work and home life was expressed in the daily commute. This no longer applies. Previoulsy, people started work at anytime between 8.00am and 9.30am after the commute and then finished when they left the office at anytime betweem 5.00pm to 8.00pm. But when working from home they start as soon as they wake up, doing emails on their smartphones and finish routinely, that is when not working on a special deadline, as late as at 11.00pm. The need to establish clear work and home boundaries is essential. The training shows you how to do this.
The To Do List
Using simple time management techniques like the To Do List, is essential for professional time management. This not only gives you more control over your day, it also makes negotiating deadlines more possible. In addition it helps you to agree realistic deadlines and deliver work on time. Our working from home training also includes the Not To Do List!
How to Prioritise
Prioritisation, or deciding which piece of work to do first, is a skill which can be developed. We give you the tools to do this and apply the learning to your actual work load. In this way the training is both useful and practical, as you leave the session with skills to apply straight away.
Structuring the Day
When working in the office the day is naturally structured around the commute, breaks and lunchtine. Then there might be meetings, visits, conferences and so on. Take these all away and the structure of the day disappears. The training gives you ideas on how to reintroduce structure into your day.
Transitioning
Transitioning simply means how you go from work to home mode, when you’re not actually moving very much. When commuting this transition is often automatic. People say to us that they use the commute to plan the day and prepare for work on the way in. And they wind down on the commute home. But when there is no commute, what do you do. Transitioning is really very important and the impact of not doing it can be painful. We give you strategies and ideas on how to tansition successfully when working from home.
Exercise
When we go to work it’s surprising just how much exercise can naturally happen during the day. We might walk to the station and then walk from the station to the office. Walking to meetings or between office spaces. Even simply walking outside for lunch. When we’re working from home this can so easily disappear. Establishing routines for exercise are aboslutely vital for good time management. We explore different ideas like walking to and from work, stand up desks, lunch walks, hourly stretches, morning and evening yoga and more.
The Impact of Personality At Work
The impact of our personality on the way we work is huge. This goes from how we organise our day, to how we write emails and how we interact with others. At ITD we developed the Work Styles Model as a powerful tool which is easy to understand and simple to apply. Participants complete a short questionnaire prior to the training and use the result in the session. We discuss why some people find it harder to be assertive, whilst others find short deadlines really stressful. For each personality based challenge we offer possible solutions.
Biorhythms
Biorhythms describe our energy levels on a typical day. Whilst we cannot always plan our day around our biorhythms, we can be mindful of them and try to organise ourselves with them in mind. We can also try to work with other people’s biorhythms for more effective collaboration.
Action Planning
Our experience with behavioural change has helped us to develop our unique training action planning tool. Participants use this to frame their actions at the end of the workshop, giving them the best chance of implementing these in the workplace.
Duration
The workshop can be delivered as a two or three hour workshop.
Virtual or Live
Our working from home time management training is delivered live or virtually via Zoom.
Pre-Workshop
Participants are requested to consider their challenges in working from home and to complete the ITD Work Styles Model Questionnaire, which should take no more than 3 to 5 minutes.
Post-Workshop
Participants are sent a pdf of the powerpoint used in the training following the workshop. You have the option of using our WhatsApp WorkCoach as follow up to give participants access to the trainer following the training.
Participants
This training is for any level or role who are finding it challenging to work from home. It is also for people more generally who would like to gain strategies and ideas on how to work from home more effectively.
Training Style
The session is run as a workshop with participant engagement and involvement throughout. This is always vital but particularly so in the virtual world, as distractions as so prevalant. Take a look at our training reviews to read feedback on how good we are at this.
Cost of this Training
The cost of this training depends on the number of participants, duration of the training and seniority of the participants. You can read more about our fees here. For a specific quote please contact us using the form below.
Tailored Training
The detailed agenda is tailored to suit your needs. Through discussion we establish the specific needs of the participants on the training, so that we ensure all the content is relevant and useful for them
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