Working from a home office
A home office provides a place to concentrate, communicate with clients and keep work separate from household life. A dedicated room, a smaller fixed workspace or a shared office can meet different needs.
Space and household boundaries
A quiet, private workspace should be off limits to interruptions, ideally in a separate room with a door that closes. Leaving that room can mark the end of the working day and create separation from home life. A professional setup in a small part of the house can also provide a consistent place to return to, even when the writer sometimes takes the laptop elsewhere.
Family and friends need to respect the workspace and recognise that the writer is unavailable while working there. Laundry and pets are household distractions to set aside during work. A practitioner whose desk occupied shared living space and would later move into a bedroom found that neither met the need for concentration away from interruptions. Overworking is another risk at home, so breaks need deliberate protection.
The choice of setting includes whether to work alone, with a co-located group or with a virtual group, and whether to use the house, rented office space or another dedicated space. Renting locally can also create opportunities to meet other business owners.
Client contact from home
Clients need confidence that home-based work will be done well and on time; a long-established home worker recommended availability during normal business hours and ensuring clients do not feel they are interrupting personal life. The advice addressed stereotypes of home workers as lazy or unable to find a conventional job.
Practical presentation habits include dressing for client meetings as though coming from an office, calling the workspace “my office” rather than “home”, and standing for important calls to improve focus and delivery. Family members should answer the business phone only if they can do so consistently in a businesslike manner, and background household noise should be eliminated.
A separate business line or mobile can reinforce the boundary between business and family life. A 2011 practitioner's setup advice included a professional answering service and recorded message, a dedicated line without call waiting, forwarding to a mobile or frequent message checks when away, and telephone arrangements suited to distant clients and their time zones. Internet connectivity and teleconference arrangements also need to work reliably in the house. If the home office cannot host a suitable client meeting, alternatives include the client's office, a coffee shop or lunch, with the freelance paying the bill.
Furniture and equipment budget
Basic setup choices include the computer and software, backup system, broadband, mobile phone and any extra line, printer/copier/scanner, reference materials and furniture. Equipment and software should be the best the practice can afford without taking on excessive debt. Budgeting needs to cover upgrades and consumables such as ink, paper and stationery as well as initial purchases.
An affordable ergonomic desk and chair matter because the writer spends substantial time in the workspace. In a survey of medical communicators working at home during the 2020 pandemic, 170 respondents recommended a larger screen or two screens, sixty stressed a suitable office chair rather than the sofa, and many favoured a cable connection to the router rather than Wi-Fi. Some reported back problems after their initial setups. Although 87.7% believed themselves appropriately equipped, only 15.2% had completed a formal workspace health-and-safety assessment. The suggested assessment covered the following elements.
- A back-friendly chair.
- Good lighting.
- Stable internet.
- Temperature control.
- Toilet and hand-washing facilities.
- Secure data storage.
A coworking alternative
Working at home can reduce interruptions from colleagues and office routines, but it also removes casual encounters that exchange ideas and information. Coworking spaces provide shared offices for freelances and small businesses, often with flexible hourly, daily or monthly packages that can be combined with days at home. Collaboration distinguishes many hubs from conventional rented offices: events, mentoring and shared projects can be part of the offering.
A 2016 account from a self-employed professionals' association presented coworking as an alternative to isolation at home. Its reported benefits included client meeting rooms, business addresses and mail forwarding, and access to professionals with different skills and perspectives. Hub users valued encouragement to try unfamiliar activities, a critical second opinion and advice through an email group; exchanging ideas was optional and could sometimes lead to projects.