Do Your Relationships Affect Your Productivity in The New Normal?

Family eating using smartphones

If anyone has told you that mixing your professional and personal life is a bad idea, probably, the person didn’t tell you lies. However, you may not have any other option due to the new normal. 

The new normal has foisted changes you must adopt; social distancing, working from home, constantly washing your hands, and wearing face masks, have become the norm.

Some of these changes must affect your relationship, you or your partner may even become stressed up due to conflicts, which at the end of the day will affect your productivity while working from home. According to Statista, 81% of employees in the U.S. said that stress from their job affected their relationship with friends or family from 2015 to 2017.

While your relationship matters, your productivity also goes a long way to determine your standard of living, which is very vital. Balancing both your relationship and productivity is one area where you have to recourse to counseling.

Incidentally, technological advancements have made it relatively easier for you to reach out to counselors. With online counseling, you don’t have to go through all the difficulties and stress associated with meeting up with appointments with your counselor.  

You must apply the following measures to ensure that your productivity is on the right course.

Transparency

Transparency is the foundation of any relationship; whether it’s with your spouse, friend, or relative, you cannot just do without trust. Once your relationship is built on lies and deception, you have created a situation of distrust and that will constantly haunt you and affect your level of productivity at the workplace. 

The situation becomes a bit more difficult if you are playing a leadership role at your place of work. There will be telltale signs in what you do and this will negatively impact your confidence. 

To inspire confidence in your leadership ability, you need to earn the trust of your team as the first step to enhancing productivity. If your partner does not trust you, it will be extremely difficult to earn the trust of your employees, who are not that closely related to you. 

Your productivity and the brand will suffer at the end of the day. Your inability to create an atmosphere of trust around you and the impact it’s having on your general well-being may lead to a psychological breakdown.

To arrest the situation before it completely gets out of hand, you may require the services of a counselor. However, technology has enabled that you can access these services from the comfort of your home or even from your office.

Your online counselor can be at your reach in real-time. An ordinary click is enough to do the magic.   

Readily accept criticism

Your partner wants the best for you and might even resort to nagging to achieve this. This may occasionally hurt you but, there is the need for constant feedback.  Positive or negative ratings will go a long way in increasing your productivity. Rather than get upset when you are criticized, appreciate that your partner is honest enough to tell you where you are wrong to your face. 

If you can’t handle criticism from your partner, there is no way you will be able to do so from an outsider. Instead of seeing it as a sign of weakness, your employees or colleagues at work will understand it as an attribute of strength. 

They feel at home and more comfortable with you. Your employees will readily share ideas that can promote the brand. 

The best and brightest leaders are willing to accept their shortcomings. If you accept criticism in your stride, you don’t only earn the trust of your partner but also improve your leadership ability at work.

Effective communication

Who understands you? How expressive are you? Do you bottle up your problems and expect people to see through you? Are you an introvert?

Do you belong to the group of people who find it difficult to open up? Your partner is there for you. Your online counselor is also there for you. 

A lot of people do not find it easy to open up to outsiders, notwithstanding even if the person in question is a therapist? Your inability to freely communicate is dangerous, it can lead to complications in your overall output. 

Indeed, people may not swallow all you say “line, hook, and sinker” even where you have the facts, however, the problem may be in how you express yourself. If you have complex problems, you may find it extremely difficult to relate to your employees. 

The stress you have to endure will affect your productivity and this is the angle where your online counselor comes in to play.

According to Regain, however, you need to understand that even though online counselors are licensed and credentialed therapists, who have been certified by their state’s board to provide therapy and counseling, and while the services may have similar benefits, online counseling is not able to substitute traditional face-to-face therapy in every case. 

When your case becomes complicated, your online counselor won’t be able to make an official diagnosis, fulfill any court order, or prescribe medication 

Talk less, listen more

If you have not noticed, it’s not easy to listen attentively to people. We tend to talk more, believing that our ideas are the best in the world. While great talkers are high, great listeners are few and not easy to come by. 

If you form the habit of listening to your partner, you find it easier to listen to your employees or colleagues at work. What you gain from doing this is, is increased productivity. 

Just the same way you find it difficult to express yourself sometimes, your partner or employee may also encounter the same problem from time to time. Any time you give them the required audience, you have gained a powerful alley.


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