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Working from home full-time for some during these trying times of COVID-19 has throw a wrench into the concept of work-life balance. And, while some of us are slowly returning to the office, others have continued to work from home.

Wheter you have an arrangement with your manager to telecommute a couple days a week or if you are working from home full-time, here are 3 tips for taking care of your eyes from an article written by Sarah D. Young

  1. Adjust your environment: Sit about two feet away from your computer screen to reduce eyestrain. Position the screen so that your eyes are looking slightly downward, not straight ahead or up. Adjust the screen brightness and contrast until it feels comfortable, and consider using a larger font if you’re working hard to see letters. 
  2. Take regular eye breaks: Seldomridge advises following the “20-20-20” rule, by looking 20 feet away from the screen every 20 minutes for 20 seconds. Alternatively, you can close your eyes for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. 
  3. Use artificial tears: Because staring at screens reduces blinking and increases dryness, the use of eye drops (“artificial tears”) can help keep your eyes moist and alleviate dry eye discomfort. Seldomridge said a humidifier can also help add moisture to the air and help prevent eye dryness. 

Bottomline: These tips can help reduce eye strain when we are forced to look at screens all day. Some experts suggest that we create technology-free zones in certain areas of ours homes, like the bedroom or bathroom. Just imagine spending the entire day working on the computer, getting in bed and scrolling through social media?  We should instead, truly unplug by reading a book or spend some quality time with family members without our phones.

About ATS
ATS offers a broad portfolio of time and attendance solutions that streamlines the collection, calculation, and reporting of employee hours for workforce management and eliminates the manual tasks of payroll preparation, increasing efficiency and reducing errors in corporate payroll departments.

Thousands of organizations across North, Central and South America and Europe- including more than half of the Fortune 500 – use ATS TimeWork OnDemand, Workforce Planning, Employee Scheduling HR and payroll solutions to manage their workforce.

In addition, ATS provides modular analytic solutions that includes; workforce planning, benefits management, employee self-service, business intelligence, human resources, payroll, and advanced analytics based on a robust cloud computing platform for information and data needs. It also offers design, rapid deployment, support services, software updates, and enhancements; and consulting and training services.

To learn more, call: 866.294.2467 and to download a demo go to our website.

The advent of employees working from home has been a challenge for companies and employees alike. Over the last 15 years, many fortune 500 companies have strongly encouraged their sales representatives to work from their homes. Of course, working from home is not suited to everyone.

Some companies will agree to their employees working from home if there are checks and balances in place. For example, an agreement between the company and the employee may require that the employee log in and out at the start and end of their shift and record projects they are working on.

Here are some advantages and disadvantages to this arrangement:

Advantages:

Time with the kids – A parent with small children will get time to spend with them and help in their development. There many successful businesses who have adopted the idea of employees working from home with great results. Some examples include: mom bloggers, many of whom balance blogging and recommending company products and also taking care of little kids, sales reps of major pharmaceutical conglomerates and technology companies to name a few.

Travel time –When working from home, you don’t have to contend with traffic or gridlock. Also the damage to the environment with all these cars on the road is insurmountable. Millions of people commute to work each day, spending numerous hours on the road, all of which has an adverse effect on their health.

Flexibility – You can choose which tasks need to be accomplished based on its deadline. Someone who is disciplined can get more done while working at home with no distractions from colleagues.

Disadvantages:

Personal chores – It takes someone with a great amount of discipline to work from home and ignore tasks such as; doing laundry, going out for a two hour coffee break with a friend, grocery shopping or watching their favourite soap operas for a few hours.

Human interaction – The lack of human interaction will be hard for some employees to get use to. The daily ritual of meeting at each other’s office cubicle to discuss who got booted off the latest reality TV series can be a stress relief for some people. Trying to replicate these activities through a teleconference with co-workers is next to impossible when working from home.

Temptation IslandThere are a range of other distractions for anyone who is working from home. If expectations are not set between the employer and the employee it’s easy for the employee to slack off. Productivity can suffer since there is no pressure to start work at a certain time or dress a certain way.

To read more about our business automation telecommuting tools, go to our website. You can follow us on Twitter or sign up to participate to in our monthly webinars. The next one is schedule for January 2012.