Episode 4: Nine Reasons Remote Work Can Change Your Life

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9 Benefits of Work From Home Jobs

If you have ever wondered whether working from home is really worth it, this episode is for you.

Abbey Ashley has been working remotely since 2010 and leading a fully remote team for years. In this episode, she shares the real life benefits of work from home jobs that most people do not think about until they experience them.

Whether you are considering a remote job, building a side hustle, trying to convince your boss to let you work remotely, or already working from home and looking for confirmation that you made the right move, this episode breaks down the practical, personal, and professional advantages of remote work.

Plus, Abbey shares resources to help you get started if you are looking for legitimate ways to work from home.

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If you are ready to build work that fits your life, this episode will show you why working from home might be one of the best decisions you ever make.

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Transcript

 Hey, hey, you are tuned into Work From Anywhere with the Virtual Savvy, where you learn how to launch and grow your virtual assistant business because you deserve work that fits your life, not the other way around. All right, friend. Let's get started.

 I've been working from home since 2010. Oh my gosh,  that's sixteen years. Wow. I'm old. And over that amount of time, there are so many benefits, some that I didn't even realize that come from having a work from home job. So I'm not sure what led you to this episode. .  Maybe you are currently working from home, you're thinking about starting a work from home job, or maybe you're trying to sell your boss on the benefits of working from home, no matter the reason of why you landed here, i'm certainly glad that you did. I'm gonna tell you my top benefits of work from home jobs and give you some resources on how you can start working from home if maybe you don't already.

If you're new here, . Hello, my name is Abbey Ashley. I'm the founder of the Virtual Savvy, and I talk all things work from home. So if you're interested in learning more about how to work from home maybe as your own boss, then I definitely want you to stick around.

You can subscribe to to be notified every time I release new content. Before I jump into the benefits of work from home jobs. There's one more thing I want you to do. I have a free Facebook community with over a hundred forty thousand individuals who are working from home just like you.

We post freelancing jobs in this community. This is a great place to ask question or just to make some friends from people all over the world who are doing the same thing as you. So why don't you check it out. It's our VA savvy community, and I've dropped the link in the show notes. . All right, let's jump into the things that I started noticing as a major benefits when I started working from home. Benefit number one of working from home is better work life balance. I think it's important to note that I'm not just coming from my standpoint of my years of working from home, but I actually lead a remote team of employees as well. Our business is entirely remote, most of them are moms, and having that work life balance is really, really important to me, but I want my team members to have it as well. A recent study showed that one of the top effects of a poor work life balance are damaged family relationships. In 2022, my family and I went through a really, really difficult time, and I can't tell you how much that difficult season of our lives affected my work.

It really did. In fact, I ended up having to six week sabbatical from my business because my brain space just really wasn't working well. So it's one of those reactive effects, right? If employers are working their people too hard, it's gonna damage their family relationships. And if family relationships are damaged, it's gonna affect their work.

So not only as a boss do I want my team just to have a good work life balance. I also know that facilitating that for them will actually result in better work as well. There's something about being able to work from home in your own environment that you've created and you've chosen that really allows you to be able to work well when you're working and decompress when you're not.

Yes, I have a dedicated space in my house and I feel like that does help me not to feel like I have to be working all the time, but I have found that I and my employees are overall just happier and feel like we can actually disconnect from work even better because we work at home. Benefit number two, and this is a huge one for me, is no more stressful commutes.

I don't know about you, but I used to live in Northern Virginia, which is one of the craziest places in the world. I had no idea traffic could exist like that. In fact, when my husband was working his high-end government job, he would have to drive two hours to work and two hours. Home from work that meant what should be an eight hour workday actually meant 12 hours away from home.

And with a newborn young kids at home that I was taking care of, he barely had any time to see us. So again, that commute, maybe for you would only be 10 or 15 minutes, but for some people it can literally mean. Hours and hours of family time, relaxation time, exercise, just enjoyment, personal enjoyment, and that was a huge, huge reason why I loved the idea of working from home and why I started doing so when I was living in Northern Virginia.

Benefit number three that I have found personally is that I save a lot of money just. Eating at home. Again, as an employer, I want my employees to be happy and healthy. And one of the things that I realized really shifted when I started working from home, one of those work from home benefits that I didn't realize would be a thing is how much less often I ate out.

I was simply at home. I didn't want to get in my car and drive somewhere else. I was in my comfy spot and I could cook something right there, even if I didn't pre-plan a meal, right? And so just that ability caused me to eat healthier and it caused. Me to actually just cook more often at home during a lunch break.

Again, you think about something as simple as saving your employees money as a small business owner, and you think of the repercussions of that. I mean, one of the major fights in marriages is over finances, right? So just by allowing employees to work from home, they're cooking at home, they're saving money.

It's amazing what the trickle effect is. Benefit number four is that I was able to create a works. Space that really matched my working style. We have to admit that not everybody works the same, right? Some people love to sit, some people love to stand. Some people love kind of that low moody lighting, and some people want bright, bright, bright overhead lights, and there's no right or wrong, but whatever way you're able to get the most work done, you literally have the ability to create that environment yourself whenever you're working from home.

I found this to be a major benefit having us. Standing desk has helped not only my body to feel better, but actually has helped me to be more productive and more alert during meetings. It's allowed my focus to be so, so, so much better. So I call this a major benefit to working from home. The number five work from home benefit that I have seen in my own personal life is just this ability to be able to do other.

Tasks while I'm taking short breaks at work. I believe one of the best methods for getting a lot of work done is the Pomodoro technique. You can look it up on your own, but it's essentially the idea that we work best in short sprints, right? And so you set a timer, you work really, really hard, and then you should take a break.

I actually encourage not only the people that I train, but also my employees to do this type of work. Let's work really, really, really hard and then step away, take a break from your desk. It actually increases your productivity. What I've noticed is I used to do this kind of work. I could work really, really hard at something when I was sitting in an office, but then I'd have to get up and take a break.

Well, what would I do? Most of the time I would, you know, maybe grab a snack or grab water, but there wasn't much else to do in an office place. So what I would do is I would go and I would. Distract my employees. I'd go and I would talk to other people and it's insane the amount of work I can get done now as opposed to the amount of work that I used to get done in a traditional office.

It's crazy. And I think part of it is just that ability that I'm actually able to do just things that need to get done right. I will go ahead and start dinner, right? I'll take a 10 minute break and go put something in the crockpot, or I'll take a 10 minute break and I will walk around my neighborhood once, right?

Like there are so many just little things. Starting a load of laundry, right? Like little things I can do in those little, just 10 minute snippets of time that you're already taking. Employees are already taking these throughout the day, so again, it creates less stress in my personal life. If I'm able to do those in those 10 minute breaks at work, then I don't feel like I have a ton of things to do whenever I am.

Done working. Taking those short breaks throughout the day actually leads to more productivity and less stress in my personal life.

The number six benefit. I personally actually take less sick days because I work from home. Hear me out on this one. I'm not suggesting that other people do this necessarily, but I found that there were a lot of times when I didn't feel great, but I still took a sick day because just the thought of going into the office, getting all dressed up, all the things I couldn't do.

Now if I'm not feeling well, but I'm. Not really sick enough to go just take a nap. I will still actually want to work. I will get in my PJ's, I'll get a big blanket around me, maybe even sometimes set up in my bed, get all cozy and work. And it's incredible because I'm actually working more, but I'm enjoying it.

And it's that like environment, right? And I'm allowed to just not be like on all the time, like I can be off and not feel like I have to perform in front of people or get all dressed up and fancy. Like I can just, I can be a little sick, I can be cozy, but I'm still getting some work done and I found my employees do this as well.

Right? Obviously, we still highly encourage people to take sick time. I'm not telling people to work when they're really, really sick, but sometimes you just need a mental health day or sometimes you're not feeling the best, but if you have that burst of energy to work or you have a creative spark. Being able to do that kind of work, even if it's just a small bit, I think is a huge benefit to working from home.

Benefit number seven, less interruptions. I mean, I am telling you, even though I do have Slack and it will ping, ping, ping all day, I was able to turn off those notifications and really, really. Get deep work done. When I worked in an office, we were in a cubicle environment and there literally was no way I could get deep work done without interruptions.

Again, even though I have slack pinging, I can turn all of that off and truly unplug when I'm at home to get some of my best work done. And when I worked in an environment, it didn't matter if I put a huge sign on my cubicle saying I'm in deep work mode. Don't, it didn't matter. There were noises, there were distractions.

Big open environment with like no background music or anything, and you would just hear somebody yelling something from across the entire cubicle, and it just was not conducive to getting really quality work done. Number eight, greater team comradery. All right, hear me out on this one because I. Think that people have this idea that when you start working from home that there's actually less comradery and that can be true 'cause there are huge benefits to being in person.

We do have some local employees at my company and so we will once a month try to, you know, get together to do a filming day or we'll do occasional projects where we are actually working together in person. But it's actually pretty rare. And what I have found is that I actually know my. Employee and know the people that I'm working with more deeply, because I believe that working from home facilitates this environment where we feel more able to be ourselves again.

When I worked in an office, I feel like I had to dress up and everything had to be perfect, where when I work from home, people see my real life, right? Sometimes I wake up and I have on a hoodie, my hair thrown back, and I haven't taken a shower yet, right? I may wear pajamas every single day, and my team sees me that way, and that's.

Fine. Right, and I think that there's something about just this openness. You know, if you have a kid sick at home, maybe they'll be in the back of your screen. Maybe you have a kid coming up and giving you a hug before they go off to school that morning, and you're able just to kind of see people's real life, I believe in a way that actually leads to greater team camaraderie.

All right. The last and final benefit to working from home is. Just the idea that I can actually get some vitamin D. When I was working in an office, I actually acquired a pretty decent Vitamin D deficiency because it didn't matter if I tried to go out and take occasional walks when I was working in an office.

There was no way I was gonna get enough vitamin D to really make a difference. And when I started working from home, literally, sometimes I. Set up on my back patio and have the sun shine on my face. Getting outside is so important for our sleep wake cycle. It improves our mental clarity. It helps our hormone levels.

It helps our bones, right? Like there are so many benefits to getting sunlight and most Americans especially do not get enough sun, and I believe that. Just one of the best benefits to working from home. Now, maybe you work from home and you don't get enough sun. This is your reminder to go take a quick walk, right?

Get outside, let the sun hit your face. For a lot of people, even again, talking about that conducive work environment, maybe you're not able to get outside all the time, but you can position your desk near a window to where that sunlight is getting on your face. I cannot tell you the health benefits of that, and it's something that you don't always get because not everybody gets that corner office with a window whenever you are working in an office.

This is a huge, huge benefit that I think sometimes employers overlook when trying to make the decision whether their employees should work from home or not. All right. That's it  for today. . I hope that you enjoyed it. If you are thinking about working from home, maybe you don't have that opportunity right now, or maybe you're trying, but it's not really working.

Whatever that side hustle you have started isn't working out for you. I would highly suggest you check out my Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant webinar. This is one of the fastest ways to make money working from home, is by starting an online virtual assistant business, and I have a free training that tells you all about it.

You can get the link in the show notes to check it out. Alright, I hope that you have an awesome rest of the day. Go get some sun.

I'll see you in the next episode.
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