Dr. Jeffrey Levine

Work from Home Effectiveness Work from Home effectiveness depends on the adept use of the two forces in the universe, always working against each other: the force of order and the force of chaos. I don’t think this is news to anyone. Let’s say you have a house. The force of order works on it when you maintain it, the force of chaos when things break down, termites come, and all that stuff.   Life implements order on the physical universe. The physical universe implements chaos on life. This is a constant process, yet sometimes we think that we can bring order to a system and it would just stay in order. That is not the case; chaos never gives up. As soon as you put order into an area of your life, chaos enters into the picture: You wash your car, and dust immediately accumulates You finish everything on your to-do list, and more tasks accumulate You build up a strong economy, and a pandemic comes out of nowhere to wipe it out You live, love, build a business, and then die. You clean your kitty’s cat box just in time for her to use it. Remember, the universe is a chaos maker. This is especially the case in regards to Work from Home effectiveness. As you continuously attempt to make your life orderly, the universe continuously attempts to make it chaotic. It is a constant battle. It has been going on since the day of the caveman: order, chaos, order, chaos… Fortunately, for Work from Home Effectiveness, you don’t have to eliminate the chaos (an impossible task, you just have to know how to deal with it. Dealing with the Chaos Work from Home can generate oodles and oodles of chaos. Suppose businesses are to hop on board the Work from Home bandwagon. In that case, they will have to accept the fact that there will be chaos. There is even worse news in regards to work from home effectiveness: It never ends, it never goes away! There is no rest. The second you do rest, chaos starts to creep into the system.   Work from Home amplifies the chaos side of the equation: Distractions from spouses, children, and pets. Social and other media interference Technological failures Physical Chaos such as clutter in the home office or no real office to begin with Loneliness: Work from Home can get lonely allowing negative thoughts and attitudes to creep into your mindset, causing chaos For instance, I have been involved in the Work from Home community for a couple of decades. My doctoral dissertation is on e-mentoring and Work from Home effectiveness. Yet, I still have to deal with the chaos of the cat jumping in front of the computer screen and the disruption to the meeting it causes. I put order into the system by moving the cat, and she adds chaos back into the system by scratching me. I put in order by placing a band-aid on the scratch, and there is the chaos of the cat who then wants to play with the wrapper. When you work from Home, It just never ends! But what if you just accept this fact and continue to put your life in order anyway? What if you allowed the chaos to creep in and then deal with it. Dealing with it may not be straightforward. This requires a plan of action. It requires delineating the tasks and putting regular times in your calendar to deal with the chaos. Different jobs may require different intervals of time to deal with them. For instance, I clean my body daily. I clean my office weekly. Wash my car monthly (Hey, I am in California, we are short on water). There is also putting time and communication in order. It may sound complicated, but working with others makes it much more fun and more manageable. Remember to, you don’t want to order things just for the sake of order. Great projects sometimes add lots of chaos into your life.   Business leaders, if you want to make sure your business is thriving even in the age of WFW, you must structure your business.  What is really important is that you have fun dealing with these two diametrically opposed forces! To that end, stay tuned. I will be leading a Reboot Your Life Challenge to help each other order our lives to increase our productivity (And have fun in the process).  Although it will be geared towards the needs of the Work from Home community, anyone can benefit. It will include organizing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual life while still completing your tasks and reducing distractions, interruptions, technical challenges, and increasing collaboration. Chaos will creep in, but life doesn’t stop! We will learn to maintain the balance in The Force. The Solution It is easier for people to get distracted by internal or external stimuli. Family members make demands, Technology fails, people feel lonely working by themselves all day. People may need to find new ways to organize their time, space, tools, inputs, and outputs in new ways. Work from Home, implemented with alacrity, can cause a new renaissance. By transforming chaos to order, we can make Work from Home effective. That is why I do what I do. Dr. Jeff Levine is a thought leader on work from home effectiveness. His clients call him Dr. Work from Home; he is available for consultations about Work from Home and Organizational Development. To learn more about me, click here  

The Source of Work from Home Resistance The driving factor behind Work from Home Resistance is that Human beings hate change; some would rather die than change. Yes, I know that is a very bold statement but Change implementation tantamount to driving a high-performance Maserati down a city street riddled with potholes and jay-walking pedestrians. There could be severe damage to your expensive car, and worst-case scenario, someone could get killed. This holds when attempting to implement a Work from Home model. Work from Home Resistance is sure to be encountered from several different types of stakeholders. All is not lost; however, a lot of smart people, through the years, have been hard at work figuring out how actually to implement change. I could get into the gory details on the history of change management and talk about all the researchers, but that would be wasting your time. You do not need to know that to implement a Work from Home paradigm. The change model I like is one developed by Dr.John Kotter at the Harvard School of Business. No, this Kotter was not the one who taught the sweat-hogs back in the ’70s. This Kotter developed an eight-step model for implementing change which may be useful in overcoming work from home resistance. These steps are: Increase Urgency. Build a guiding team. Get the vision right. Communicate for Buy-In. Empower Action. Create Short-Term Wins. Don’t Let Up. Make the change stick. (Kotter) I remember working at a company that shall remain nameless. One fine afternoon, all the employees were called into a meeting. The company’s CEO gets up on the rostrum, welcomes everyone, and then spends the next hour telling us all the significant changes. People just fell asleep in the meeting and ate the cupcakes the company had so graciously provided. After the meeting, everyone just went back to doing what they were doing before. The changes were not implemented, productivity went down the toilet, and the last I heard, that CEO was on unemployment.  This CEO failed in not attaining the buy-in of the stakeholders. He thought that he could bark the orders and that the change would occur, but you have to have the stakeholders’ consensus. In the case of Work from Home, the change may not have been by choice. Some love Work from Home; others hate it with a passion! But a worldwide pandemic forced the issue; the choice, despite any work from home resistance, the choice became Work from Home or not work at all.  If this were a remote work situation, you could say there was work from home resistance. Some who Work from Home may find an issue with that. Some may not want to Work from Home. You tell those folk the advantages of Work from Home, and it just goes in one ear and out the other. You try to make Work from Home effective, and they consciously or subconsciously sabotage the situation.   What do you do to solve that situation?   Do you try to force the situation? Well, you could, but that doesn’t work.  What does work? Well, what you could do is allow them to express their concerns, really listen to them, acknowledge them, and then build a consensus. Sounds simple but maybe not as simple as you think – but it is essential. That is why it is crucial to hire someone adept at change management to implement your Work from Home initiative. Another problem to be aware of when implementing a Work from Home paradigm is the Work from Home environment. For the change to succeed, you must implement it into a supportive environment lest all the efforts be for naught as the resistance from that environment would ultimately cause it to fail. An example of this is that if you rehabilitate an addict and then put him or her back into the prior environment, they will revert to taking drugs as that environment is not supportive of a drug-free lifestyle. In an environmental change model, the environment must be made more conducive to change; otherwise, there will not be long-term, lasting results. The problem with this is that in Work from Home, management does not always control the environment. Team members Work from Home, their cats pushing keys deleting entire documents, the kids screaming at each other from the next room, and some two-bit politician on the TV threatening a coup to make the country great again. Not an environment that would not be conducive to implementing the changes needed to make Work from Home effective. However, this barrier is manageable by someone adept in the intricacies of change management and Work from Home. Implementing Work from Home can be like herding cats (like that cliché’ isn’t overused!) The road to change is not always a high-speed freeway. The change agent can encounter resistance from several different types of stakeholders, rendering the change unchangeable. Also, environmental factors can cause the change to be unchangeable. This effort can be quite time-consuming. As a C Suite executive, one must concentrate on revenue, cost-cutting, and risk abatement. Implementing the changes necessary for Work from Home, though, are essential. Solution? Bring in a highly skilled Work from Home Specialist to usher in the change. That person can bring your initiatives to fruition with alacrity. Please contact me for a no-cost consultation. I will listen to you and give you your options without the high-pressure sales pitch; remember, I’m a doctor, not a used car salesman, so give me a call. I promise you value! To learn more about me, and to learn how to overcome work from home resistance in your company,  click here Reference:  Kotter, J. P., & Cohen, D. S. (2006). The heart of change. Boston: Harvard University Press. 

Life’s Surprises and WFH Productivity Anything can happen in life. On January 1 of 2020, I had complete knowledge about what life would be like regarding the workplace. I had written my doctoral dissertation about working from home. I had no idea how appropriate my research would be. Way back in the pre-COVID days, I used to discuss the advantages of Work from Home (WFH) with business leaders to convince them to implement WFH by telling them how great it was. In this COVID reality, however, it is no longer a matter of whether a company should implement WFH but rather how it can be applied for peak effectiveness and profitability. Companies are finding the lower costs associated with WFH beneficial. Studies show that 52% of Americans who WFH due to COVID19 would like to continue even after the pandemic clears up. Therefore companies need to invest in WFH development for their team because it is often cheaper to train and develop systems within than to fire and hire. Despite today’s lightning speed internet and new technology, There are still some challenges to WFH Productivity which I faced while working from home at the start of the century: Difficulty unplugging after work, loneliness, distractions, difficulty communicating, collaborating with colleagues, siblings fighting in the living room over the latest video game, and, of course, spouses who still ask team members to run errands during work time. These challenges eventually reduce productivity and affect the company’s bottom line.  To help businesses face those challenges to WFH Productivity, I developed The Doctor Work from Home system, which will take a WFH workforce that is CHALLENGED by tech, burnout, distractions to AWARENESS of triggers that cause low productivity. The crew will be UNDERTAKING preemptive actions to return to top productivity by developing SYSTEMIZED solutions to improve productivity, transforming the challenges into an EFFECTIVE workplace. How can an organization Rocket WFH Productivity so that it is greater than the brick and mortar workplace? Here are five tips from my CAUSE methodology that can help companies develop more productive WFH employees and teams. The Five Tips for WFH Productivity: Have team members use an iterative time management system such as the Pomodoro Technique to set work up in sprints. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management tool using a timer to break work tasks down into intervals (usually 25 minutes)with breaks in between. The Pomodoro Technique is kind of like a miniaturized, individualized Agile Scrum where team members can determine what they need to get done in a 25-minute Sprint, break, rinse, and repeat. Set work hours and maintain them; when the workday is over, stop working. One of the pitfalls of WFH productivity that I found in my research is team members not knowing when to stop work. At first, this sounds good for an organization, but upon examination, this decreases efficiency because work-life balance suffers, and the team gradually becomes more efficient. Also, there is the situation, like my wife asking me honey-dos or Billy smacking Amy in the face during the middle of the workday. In my research, I was not the only one who had spouses or family members who did this. Keep in mind that these folks would never dream of asking their spouse to run an errand if they worked out of the office. During work time, one does work. Some systems can be set up to monitor a team member’s production. Have ergonomically correct home offices; give your staff an allowance to set these up. If you are an employer, the last thing you want is skyrocketing workers’ comp claims. Some companies will go out to your team member’s home office and install an ergonomically correct workstation at a low price. Make video conferencing and collaboration readily available so people can collaborate and brainstorm: a virtual water cooler. Have virtual mixers to allow the staff to get to know each other, kind of like a virtual cocktail hour. Loneliness can be a pitfall to working at home. When I worked in high-tech, many ideas were born at the foosball table. Several video conferencing and collaboration tools such as S are available in the marketplace to enable a virtual watercooler or foosball table, where team members can collaborate.   WFH Productivity is one thing, sustainability must go along with it, if you are out of compliance, you will not maintain productivity. Work with a qualified HR professional or attorney to ensure your virtual workspace complies with all the multitudes of workplace regulations. Just because employees are working from home doesn’t mean you can ignore workplace regulations. Find someone who knows HR rigs to guide you. You can also enroll in a service such as Legal Shield to provide guidance when needed.  Legal Shield is a great service and I have saved thousands using it, Click here for more info  WFH is here to stay One thing I know for sure, WFH is here to stay. There are so many benefits to WFH for employees, families, businesses, society, and the planet. No two-hour commutes, parents can be home for their children, and cleaner air to breathe without all those cars spewing carbon monoxide into the air. With all those advantages, and following the tips above, a business is bound to be more productive. Remember, it is no longer a matter of whether or not you will implement a WFH workplace but how you will do so and how it can be useful to attain the vision of your organization or project. However, it is one thing to have an academic discussion about WFH Productivity; it is another thing to plan and implement a strategy for successful WFH Productivity. That’s where I come in. Now please excuse me; I promised my wife I would take out the garbage just as soon as I finished writing this article, and I am coming to an end, but just one more thing: If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you and your organization reach peak performance