Category: Blog

At 5CA, working from home is just business as usual. 95% of our team is based at home so we have been watching the sudden focus on work from home business models, especially for customer service, with some interest.

It sounds kind of obvious, but training and developing your remote workforce is essential to improving their skills and performance.

I saw the situation, and I went for it. 2014 was going to be a decisive year. It was to be the year I got laid off from my well paid corporate job and the year I decided to study Permaculture and reunite with nature again! Along this journey, the desire and need arose to earn money again.

Because 95% of our team works from home and we have been working this way for over 15 years I feel confident that I can help people to understand what it is really like to build a work from home strategy. There are so many ‘experts’ online at present, but who has real knowledge?

With more and more companies providing work-from-home possibilities, and children spending more time at home during school breaks, many tend to fill the time previously spent commuting or at after-school activities on picking up new or old hobbies.

A lot of people are currently being thrust into the murky waters of communicating purely via different apps. It’s dangerous. I’m Australian, and to me, the perfect analogy would be diving head-first into a muddy river on a scorcher of a day.

Many management consultants and business experts are advising executives to move their workforce home with laptops until the crisis is over. What they are not saying is that this is now business as usual – the new normal.

The World Health Organization and almost every national government has encouraged everyone in non-essential roles to stay at home. With millions of people in self-isolation there is a real need to ensure these people have something to do.

Companies across the world are finding their business extremely disrupted at present and it looks like things may get worse before they get better. During this time there has been a strong focus on the need for people to work from home. Business journals are full of tips and tricks on how to keep companies running when nobody is at the office, but the emphasis is always on this situation being temporary.

“I’m on break, it’s my turn to hold him!” This is just one statement many fathers don’t get to say to their significant other as they usually do not have home based job. The first set of stressors that come with being a new parent is the concern of scheduling, finances, and returning to work.

I speak from a limited experience when it comes to working remotely, but one that is all too familiar to many people who work or study in modern urban environments.