Work from home Fatigue is the new challenge for most of the employees who are forced to work from their respective homes due to the pandemic. With hardly any social interactions, back to back meetings and unrealistic expectations from their managers, employees are slowly experiencing the perils of working from home.
Employees are facing fatigue for two primary reasons. Top of the list is most of them are not able to shift from their personal to professional lives and vice versa. Secondly, most employees feel that they are actually working more than before. The fallouts of WFH fatigue is more or less the same as employee burnout. Some of the top challenges employees are facing right now due to WFH fatigue are
1.Lack of focus
2.Mental & Physical Exhaustion
3. Feeling of being overwhelmed
4.Disconnect from their teams
These unresolved issues are having an erosion in employee’s creativity and directly affecting their productivity.
Watch this informative video where Psychiatrist Dr. Sue Varma joins “CBS This Morning” to discuss burnout signs and causes.
Sachin reached out to me a couple of weeks back and was going through the exact same challenges mentioned above. Sachin has a large team spread over India and Bangalore, being the head office for his organisation he was always interacting with at least a dozen people from across the verticals. Now it has been 6 months since he has even stepped into this office and is finding it extremely difficult to stay motivated and in turn motivate his direct reportees of about a dozen line managers. During my interaction with Sachin he did mention that it was extremely critical for the line managers to be on top of the game especially during this quarter and he could feel that they were lacking the drive which they did have before.
This is when I suggested a Mental Conditioning workshop for Sachin and his line managers to ensure that they work towards being self-motivated. Two powerful techniques were taught by me to Sachin and his team members which helped them to break through their patterns.
Deep Breathing Exercise:
Sachin and his team were taught how to practice deep breathing (yes, majority of people who are stressed do not practice deep breathing). Each one of them were taught the 4-8-4 method of breathing. Here one breathes in deeply for 4 seconds, hold the breath for 8 seconds and breathes out for 4 seconds. This cycle is repeated for 20-25 times which can be done in less than 5 minutes.
During this activity, Sachin and his team members were told to focus on their breath and feel all the negative energy and thoughts discharge from their bodies. Doing this particular technique a couple of times during the day did become a game changer with respect to their Energy Management.
Visualization Technique:
Powerful visualisation is one of the most effective techniques used by top athletes and executives to get to their goals. Visualisation is nothing but seeing things vividly in the mind’s eye. The more vividly one see the images in the mind’s eye, the easier it will be for the mind to develop neural pathways for the body to follow. There is enough research which does prove how some of the most successful people use the power of visualization to get to their goals.
My previous blog can be referred to get a deeper understanding of the Visualization Technique
Sachin and his team members were trained to powerfully visualise their daily outcome vividly in their mind’s eye. I walked them through to see themselves focused, productive and energised like before and driving their teams accordingly.
Once Sachin and his team implemented these two specific techniques to work on their focus, energy and emotion management then it was just a matter of time before they did get back to working like before.
This interesting video by Harvard Business Review does give some tips on how you can work from home better and be more productive.
Self-motivation is a learnt trait and just like any other habit one can become extremely good at this by just working on conditioning one’s mind for just a couple of minutes a day using the above-mentioned techniques. Even 10-15 minutes a day is good enough for an individual to condition his/her mind to work with absolute focus, energy and to be result oriented.
One of the most effective ways in which you can battle Work From Home Fatigue is to work on replenishing your energy level – both physical as well as emotional energy.
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Energy Management
Also, if you do feel that your team does require some work on this specific area then We have been doing Group Intervention successfully to various organizations completely virtually.