Work-from-home fatigue and ways to increase your sales reps’ productivity

5 minutes read

The pandemic in the year 2020 has impacted the whole of mankind and businesses around the world. It introduced the new normal of remote work to organizations and employees.

While the idea was welcomed with open arms by many employees, things took a different turn as time passed. Eventually this lead to:

Longer working hours
Disorganized sleeping routines
Lack of balance between personal and professional life
Work-related tiredness
Video call fatigue
and low levels of energy and productivity

Here is how WFH turned into work fatigue for the employees

Interactive office meetings turned into monotonous zoom meetings: Team meetings were interactive and engaging before COVID 19. Everyone could sit along, share their ideas and get instantaneous feedback.
Lack of communication among employees: Employees aren’t able to communicate with each other efficiently. Conversations became limited to only messages and video calls.
Repeated work routine makes it duller for employees: When people work remotely without proper supervision or discussion or assistance from their managers/peers, they are prone to make mistakes. This usually leads to repeating an activity all over again.

Any such repetitive activity will eventually lead to an uninteresting environment. Here are some statistics that prove these points:

A recent study found that 9.8 million working mothers in the U.S. are suffering from work fatigue.
Another analysis shows that around 100% of managers rate themselves as supportive of the people who are under them. And only half of their employees agree with this study.

According to experts, remote work culture is here to stay as a notable portion of employees are expected to work from home in the post-pandemic world as well. So, the sales management has the responsibility to understand and help the workers who are most affected with work fatigue.

How can managers protect their employees from drudgery and create a healthy work culture that can benefit the organization?

Check-in with your subordinates: Employees hesitate to share their mental health issues. To build a healthy work culture, it’s necessary to hear from your employees and try to provide them with fair and appropriate solutions. Good communication can relieve dubiety and anxiety.
Offer flexible working hours: Some organizations expect their employees to work more than their working hours as they believe that they have nowhere to go so they can do more work. In such a work environment how could one not feel pressured and exhausted?

Provide flexible working hours in order to maintain sanity and comfort.

Give adequate breaks - Adequate breaks between work are crucial to give your employees’ brain some rest to recover from exhaustion and ease their mental workload. Managers can maintain a balance by assigning a combination of more critical and less critical work.

While these are some measures that the sales managers need to take to reduce work fatigue, there are some measures that sales reps also need to take:

What can sales employees do to ease their work fatigue?

1. Switch to phone calls instead of video calls

Being continuously on zoom calls causes fatigue. While on zoom call/video call we tend to focus on different things like:

Observing different screens
Thinking about how we look
Wondering if the background is okay

While sales meetings obviously need to be done over a zoom call, internal meetings and discussions can be switched to phone calls. This helps in reducing zoom fatigue significantly.

2. Reduce Multitasking

Are your employees multitaskers? That’s superb! But it’s crucial that you suggest they keep their multi-tasking to a minimum. Because even if they are capable of completing more than two tasks on their own, this consumes a lot of their energy.

This leads to increased lethargy as they have to go back and forth switching between roles to complete multiple tasks.

3. Maintain a Proper Sleep Schedule

Having good, complete sleep is significant for mental well-being. A good 8 hour sleep at night is going to rejuvenate your employees and help in improving their productivity in the day.

So encourage them to maintain a good sleep routine and a healthy lifestyle.

4. Stick to a work routine

The sudden shift to work from home has resulted in a change of routine for a lot of people. It has blurred the line between the personal and professional lives of people.

In a situation like this, it is extremely important to have a routine that lets your employees switch efficiently between their work mode and home mode. The best way to do this is to put the laptops/computers away when they’re done working. Encourage them to spend some time after work doing whatever they’d like to do:

Reading books
Listening to music
Watching a tv show or movie
Practicing a hobby that they may have
Simply spending time with their family and loved ones

These things can help them set boundaries between work and personal life.

5. Understand body’s natural energy and act accordingly

Everybody has got different biological clocks. So, encourage your people to adopt their work according to their timings. For example,

If there are “early to bed and early to raise kind of people”, they could schedule important calls and tasks in the first half of the day, complete them and then retire early in the evening.
If there are “night owls’ ‘, they can start their work at a slow pace in the morning and pick up speed as the day progresses. As they can work late into the night, they will able to finish their tasks

This way when they understand their natural energy and work accordingly, it helps them to maintain sanity

Things are not the same, nor are they returning to normalcy any soon, with time we all will adapt, but till that time we must take care of our mental health and also our physical health. Covid-19 has taught humankind a lot of things and most especially how important it is for one to maintain a balanced work life.