If you’d asked me this time last year whether I thought it would be a good thing for us to be able to work from home more, I would have said yes. No doubt about it.
But as the weeks pass and office blocks worldwide remain empty, the experience has caused me to think again.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful, especially for the technology. Can you imagine what lockdown would have been like without 2020 technology?
Go back 15 years and we would be listening to the modem’s siren song as it cranked through data at a stunningly slow pace. There would be no Netflix bingeing, no WhatsApp, no home videoconferencing.
Creative proxies for being together have emerged to allow us to meet, work and play virtually. But remote working is not the same as being face to face for myriad well-rehearsed business reasons.
So, what have we learned and how can we refine our ways of working to improve the balance between human needs and corporate expectations?
Working from home shows us more about each other. We get a sneaky peek into each other’s homes, ‘meet’ each other’s children and see each other’s cats streak across keyboards with no respect for who might be on-screen.
We have had to become less formal – but that is not the same as being more familiar with one another or knowing each other better, and seeing these details can be confusing.
If anything, we need to guard against the online disinhibition effect, where we become overly relaxed with each other.
This can be benign, causing shy people to find communication easier. But it can also be more toxic. Empathy diminishes when we operate virtually. We can be ruder and meaner because it’s easier to forget we are dealing with real people.
There is therefore greater capacity for rift and misunderstanding, which we need to pay close attention to and resolve so teams can run effectively.
Meeting via videoconferencing often means getting straight into business with little time for the gentle chat that happens on the way to the meeting room.
Assuming we retain a bigger element of working from home as restrictions ease, it will be useful to build in small conversational breaks with colleagues to network and connect – as well as work together.
It is also more tiring to work remotely, particularly via videoconferencing. This is because our brains are working overtime to compensate for lack of in-person data.
Loss of micro-expression (the tiny muscle movements that help us read subtle emotional changes), vocal tone (often distorted by conference calling) and the shame that comes from talking over colleagues due to video lag all contribute to us feeling zoomed out and overloaded.
Taking a twenty-minute gap between meetings allows our systems to calm down again. It also gives us time to think and revise plans based on new information gained.
The average working day has extended by two to three hours during the pandemic.
A simple reason for this is because the average office commute has plummeted to below one minute as people travel from their beds to their kitchen tables. Without a commute, we simply log on and get working. But losing the physical commute has its disadvantages. And thinking time has been subsumed by doing time.
Many of my clients are benefitting from using their commute time to exercise and to create a start and stop to their working day.
This is particularly important when the sacred boundary of home and work has been destroyed by lockdown.
There was a time when calling someone at home started with “I’m sorry to disturb you”. That nicety seems to have gone as we increasingly see home and work as interchangeable. Book-ending the day with exercise helps us to reinforce the distinction and signal the change to ourselves, along with packing away our desks and closing down the working day.
Transferring incomplete tasks to tomorrow’s diary enables us to say “that’s it” and allows us to ‘go home’.
According to Eric Berne, we have six main psychological hungers: stimulus hunger (not getting bored), recognition hunger (feeling like we belong), time structure hunger (knowing what we are doing with our time), contact hunger (physical touch), incident hunger (a nice bit of gossip) and sexual hunger. Being together at work meets many of these.
Hopefully, if you’re in a job you enjoy, it will be fulfilling your stimulus hunger. Gossip around the water cooler feeds our incident hunger.
Our calendars and meetings provide the time structure. Even contact hunger is met with the ubiquitous handshake. Being part of a team obviously fulfils recognition hunger.
And, of course, around 15% of us met our significant other at work, thereby furthering the survival of the species.
Taking away the physical office can feel like psychological starvation. There is no water cooler, no handshake. Teams are remote and faceless.
And it’s a bit harder to casually ask Chris from accounts if they want to pop out for a drink after work when you’re working from home.
All we have left is stimulus hunger and time structure hunger. So, we look for proxies. We scroll Instagram and Facebook to meet our incident hunger (and sadly lose efficiency, dragging out the working day). We eat more to meet our contact hunger, producing the brain chemicals with junk food that we would obtain more healthily from physical touch. And we work longer hours and attend more meetings to feel that sense of belonging and meet our recognition hunger.
None of this is wrong or bad. It just might be that if we think about what we need, we can find something better.
Taking away the physical office can feel like psychological starvation
How much more effective could you be in a day if you planned to speak with a friend at lunchtime? If you manage people, maybe your team would benefit from more team social time on a Friday morning where the details of work are secondary to playing a game together for 10 minutes. Use your time structure hunger to prioritise your downtime as much as your work time. It’s got to be OK to stop working.
Contact hunger is the tough one, especially where food is used as the proxy. A good place to start is simply to notice what we are eating and make a better choice. Imagine upgrading your low-grade snack to a super-fancy brand to be savoured as a reward for a job well done.
But there are other alternatives to food. Many children have begun carrying their teddy bears with them to hug. While we can’t necessarily show up to a meeting with our boss with our childhood bears, we can increase our awareness of the textures we are wearing or the fabrics in our homes. Softer, more comforting textures can be a good proxy for Big Ted.
For some, going back to the office will feel overwhelming, particularly if your office is large. Working in our home space with fewer people around day to day is a world away from working in a 100- or even 1,000-person shared space, particularly if that office is open plan.
So, think as we plan to meet again about your needs. What have you gained from working from home? If you need space to think on a regular basis, plan to give it to yourself by perhaps working from home one day a week or booking a quiet room for an hour a day.
If you struggle with being distracted by your incident hunger, give yourself a coffee break once a day with co-workers, where you can catch up on all the gossip without it breaking into your concentration.
As for contact hunger and the return of the handshake, that may well have to wait until we can be closer than one or two metres apart. But whether we continue to work remotely or return to our offices, we can be more effective, more efficient and, dare I say, happier if we make choices that let us be human beings rather than human doings.
Amanda Bradley FCT is an executive coach at Liberty EQ
This article was taken from the August/September 2020 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership