COVID-19 #15: Five reasons why working from home shouldn’t work forever.
My darling Pickle and Boo,
It’s coming up to eight months since our lives were rudely interrupted by COVID-19 and we’re now semi-successfully finding our feet in a new version of normality. In truth, the ups and downs of Coronavirus are far from over and the dust is far from settled. Just as we began to enjoy a loosening of restrictions post-lockdown, a whole new set of measures designed to minimise the rapid rise of COVID cases came into force and we’ve just come out of another two-week national lockdown.
That said, I’m beyond relieved that your lives now resemble pre-lockdown normality more than for most. You’re back at school (I’m desperately trying not to tempt fate as I type those words) and, with you both being under 11, you don’t need to socially distance. Phew. For me though, my new working arrangements look set to continue for the foreseeable future which I’m not altogether happy about. For one thing, my work wardrobe has never felt so abandoned.
Home working is not new to me. I’ve opted to do so on a regular basis when I’ve needed to focus or clear a backlog of work. I’ve always been more productive at home than in the office where my days are continually punctuated with distractions that nearly always involve cake. I therefore need no persuasion of the merits of working from home, which is the new status quo for great swathes of us office-based workers. Aside from the obvious (and immediate) one of reducing the transmission of COVID-19, not being required to work on-site will free people from the shackles of long commutes, enable many to relocate to areas of their choosing and perhaps opt for a whole new life away from the hustle, stress and pollutants affiliated with big city living. Perhaps, as a result, those cities can reinvent themselves to serve a reduced population of commuters and maybe, whilst fighting to survive in a struggling economy, companies can stay afloat by terminating extortionate central office rental agreements.
So, given the abundance of well-documented gains derived from this COVID-driven transition from the office to the home, why do I feel so uncomfortable if this is a more permanent trend?
Well, where to start…
#1: Most of what you learn at work isn’t taught
My first proper job was an administrative one — filing, data entry, minute taking etc. I loved that job, not because of the tasks I was required to do, but because of the people I was surrounded by. I was in awe of their knowledge, their talent, and their compassion for the causes that the organisation was working to support. I learnt more from being in the company of those individuals than I ever could through an online course or virtual meetings. From them, I learnt about decision-making, grant-making and the importance of demonstrating impact. I learnt how to formulate communications strategies by over-hearing work chats that had nothing to do with me. I learnt what made a good press story by sitting near the PR team. I learnt how good managers lead by witnessing them in action. To put it simply, I learnt essential lessons that still inform my working life nearly 20 years later through osmosis — just by being in ear shot of some bloody brilliant people.
For someone starting out in their career, not being exposed to colleagues doing different jobs, at differently levels, in different teams would, I believe, seriously hinder their chances of career progression. But, it’s not just something that will affect young aspiring professionals. In my line of work, it’s vital to be around all kinds of people doing all kinds of things. I want to hear how they communicate with each other, what motivates them, what they think about the world. I want to pick up on new trends, hear a variety of ideas, let different views infiltrate those whirring around in my own head.
Literally overnight, so much learning has been robbed from so many of us. We have become limited by our own imaginations and capabilities when we need to be inspired, questioned and made to think differently in order to grow. Not having those opportunities is a loss which can’t necessarily be measured, but will be felt hugely if this home working arrangement continues indefinitely.
#2: Working from home might mean working alone
My career started as an almost-graduate in London where, initially, I felt disorientated and lonely. I had great friends nearby but London was already their home and I needed to make it mine. Looking back, it was work that came to my aid in those early days. It grounded me. Sunday nights weren’t blue for me, they were full of anticipation as I looked forward to being back in the office to work alongside kind, friendly people, in a fun environment where I was using my brain in a company I loved. It distracted me from my own sense of isolation and my office days were my most contented.
My point is, I wouldn’t have reaped the same emotional reward from work had I carried out my administrative role sat holed up in the flat I shared with two people I barely knew. I probably wouldn’t have made the move at all and just stayed at home with my parents whilst working from my teenage bedroom. How much less fulfilling my life would have been is impossible to quantify (not least because it was there where I met and fell in love with your dad.)
More recently, I’ve seen the negative side of working from home unravel. Whilst Daddy has made a real success of establishing his business, even as an inherently introverted man, the effect of working exclusively from home with a complete lack of social interaction has been hard to witness. Now that I’m working from home too, he’s happier because he’s less isolated (though possibly not quite so chuffed about me sharing his secret stash of biscuits).
Loneliness isn’t something to be underestimated. It’s overwhelming and casts a darkness over your waking thoughts that’s very hard to shift. Much is reported on the detrimental effect of loneliness on older people and how it can crush their quality of life, so why would we choose to inflict that curse on the working population too? What worries me is that, right now, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are spending their entire working week entirely alone, who didn’t opt to do so (see #5). And when you add them to the hundreds of thousands more who are too frail, too frightened, or too far from their friends to socialise due to the virus, it’s the hidden pandemic of loneliness that should be another major cause for concern.
#3: Life is about human connection, not virtual connectivity.
The start of lockdown felt like a relentless circus of conference call mania. Zoom call after Skype call after Teams catch up became the order of the day as we all got used to the demands of working from home whilst not allowing any actual work to stall.
It’s pretty incredible how quickly we grew accustomed to communicating through virtual meetings and they certainly made the transition to homeworking more doable. But they’ve also been a big source of stress. It’s not just the quantity of the video calls which has become overwhelming, it’s the fact that so much communication is lost through the virtual ether. When you aren’t in the same room as the people you are speaking to, you can’t read their body language, you can’t subconsciously pick up on what they mean as opposed to what they say. People are somehow kinder in face-to-face meetings because the whole experience is more human.
I’m no fan of a meeting for meeting’s sake but through in-person meetings we build connections with our colleagues. Everyone in the room has to engage with each other rather than pretending to listen whilst replying to emails, completing their online food shop or just checking out the décor of their colleagues’ home-made office. Real-life meetings give attendees the chance to speak naturally without having to check if someone wants to chip in, if their mute button is on and without having to wait for the wifi to kick back in.
By communicating exclusively online, it’s not only harder to build and maintain relationships, it’s easier to be offended or misunderstand what our colleagues mean. We can fester on what someone said or how they reacted in a virtual chat because the formal work conversations aren’t cushioned by the light-hearted in-person chats that would otherwise naturally occur when walking down the corridor or whilst making a cup of tea.
At work, it’s the chats ‘in-passing’ that can be the most influential of all. Now that a hefty chunk of non-verbal and informal communication has been massively curtailed, much knowledge and relationship investment has been lost in the process. Now, it all comes down to a scheduled skype call with a very specific purpose. Being reduced to a box on a screen makes me sad, not least because it is much harder to check in with each other, to sense when someone’s having a bad day or share stories that may be completely insignificant from a work perspective but are instrumental from a human one.
#4: Where’s the sodding off switch?
The line between work and home has evaporated along with any semblance of a social life we once had. This absence of a demarcation between our home lives and our work lives is significant because it means we are no longer even striving for a work/life balance, let alone achieving it. Without the office doors being shut and lights going out, there’s nothing to stop us working all hours, between putting a wash on, emptying the dishwasher and knocking up a roast. While practically, this lifestyle may have some perks, mentally, there’s no down time and, without active thought and action to put work in its corner of our homes and minds, it’s now all-consuming. And its quite frankly, draining.
Work is, literally, everywhere. It’s staring up from that wretched kitchen table that was once a place for family meals, crappy crafts and board games. And piles of yet-to-be-put-away washing are no longer a private matter of disorganisation, they are a potential visual backdrop for a professional Zoom call.
There are MANY more reasons why this long rant could go on. But really, it comes down to this:
#5: Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should
It was a few weeks into lockdown when the email landed from the top dog at work, stating that we wouldn’t be heading back to the office for a while. For between a year and 18 months he estimated. Aside from my rising panic about the banana I had left rotting in the top drawer of my desk, I felt disorientated at the prospect of such a long term plan.
Perhaps naively, that email came as a shock because when I casually walked away from my messy desk one Friday evening in Spring, I didn’t have the foresight to realise how lockdown would unfold. The very next Monday in March, millions of us took to work without leaving the house and we’ve barely moved since. In the process, amidst countless Zoom calls, Skype meetings and Teams chats, we’ve done a sublime job of fulfilling our employment responsibilities whilst being housebound. Not only have we proved homeworking to be plausible, we’ve made it look preferable to the office life we had all taken for granted before COVID reared its ugly head.
But surely the story shouldn’t end there.
Yes — we got the memo to stay at home, and yes — we got the hell on with it, but we didn’t have time to process what a huge ask that was. And I certainly didn’t consider the possibility that such a requirement was an indefinite plan. Our transition to home working wasn’t made through some nationwide consultation. It came off the back of a desperate, rallying call to arms in the face of a global crisis. While NHS heroes and supermarket workers were physically out there, actually putting their lives on the line, to keep us safe and fed, the least we office-workers could do was set up camp from the (admittedly not health and safety approved) comfort of our kitchen tables. We made it look easy because who were we to grumble when 40,000+ people were dying. Staying at home was our contribution to the urgent cause, not to mention a form of self-protection from the virus itself.
It was no biggie because it was meant to be temporary.
The fact that Welsh Government and various companies across different sectors are making active moves to solidify home working as a more permanent arrangement misses a fundamental point. We office workers did our bit from home, as best we could under the circumstances, because we had no choice. And given that choice, I’d like to return to work when it’s safe to do so, at least for part of my working week.
It comes down to the simple fact that I miss going to work. I miss the 40 minute walk there and back when I got to weave some exercise into my hectic daily routine, listen to playlists and process my thoughts in peace. I miss talking through projects in ways that don’t get lost in video call translation. I miss the buzz of a workplace and having a designated lunch-break. I miss learning from and about people simply by being in their close proximity. I miss the comradery, the laughs and catch ups with work mates that illuminated my working week. Most of all, I miss the cake.
Of course I feel fortunate to be working in a safe, spacious home alongside a biscuit-loving husband. I’m not looking for an escape, I’m not lonely. But being employed is not merely about ‘getting a job done’ — it’s about all the things I mention above and so much more. And if there’s one thing the pandemic has taught me, it’s that making decisions to protect and support total strangers is the only way a society can survive and thrive. So I hope, when companies make a call on where they want their employees to ultimately be based, they’ll do so not just on economic and practical considerations, but with the broader needs and wishes of the working population in mind. The future for our working lives should be based on flexible options to enable employees to reap the rewards of working from home without losing the benefits that a safe work environment provides. If nothing else, my wardrobe is banking on it.
