If you often work from home away from the office or are self-employed from home, here are some tips about working from home that you should know.
1. Have a Home Office
It is really important that you have a permanent work space dedicated to your work as you would have in a company. It is not very effective for you to sit on the sofa doing your work with so many distractions to turn on the TV or even have a quick nap! You need to be in the right mindset to work so that when you enter your office at home, you know you are at work.
2. Is Your Business Suitable For Working From Home?
You need to think about the feasibility of working from home. It might be that all you need is an office space, for example if you are an accountant and you don’t have any clients that come to you. However if you own a car rental company, do you really have the parking spaces to keep many vehicles around the property or if you own a small dentist practice, is the area too busy to have large amounts of visitors daily.
3. Do You Need a Separate Business Number?
If your work requires you to be in your office for most of the day, it may be beneficial for you have a separate work number so you can separate this from any personal calls, you don’t want to be stuck on the phone to your mother-in-law when you have important work to be getting on with because you answered the phone thinking it could be a potential business call!
4. Think Health and Safety
You need to think about the environment you are or will be in when working from home. All offices have strict health and safety rules but if you’re self employed you won’t have anyone telling you about repetitive strain injury from constant use of a mouse! So you need to think about these issues yourself and assess how safe your home is to work full time in, it may be that you need to adjust a few things.
5. Check That Working From Home is Approved
If it’s not just you sitting in an office and you have visitors regularly entering the property or you keep a lot of equipment in the property, you should check with your house insurance holder if this is permitted as you may need to adjust the policy to cover these things. You should consider these aspects of home working such as the mortgage or with your landlord if you’re a tenant.
