New Home Experiences
As COVID-19 makes its horrifying return to Thailand and so is the possibility of a new lockdown, we brought to you an interesting insight to our employee’s work from home life during this past summer. (Thai version can be found here)
With the virus outside, home is considered our refuge. This has changed our experience of home. We are now experiencing home in a variety of ways from being our office, a gym, a restaurant, or even a bar. Here, I would like to talk a little bit about two aspects of home experiences: working and recreation, and how they have changed over the COVID outbreak.
Working from home
When I heard the decision that we should be working from home, just to stay safe from the virus, I thought that it should be easy and straightforward for me as I occasionally worked from home in my previous job. Turned out, nope, it is super stressful.
Not having to go through traffic to work is a blessing. Working from home surely saves me time to do other things, but often the other things end up being a few more meetings or a little bit more work. Just like what others have already said, good time management is a must for working from home. The current working from home situation is different from my previous experience. Usually, after I finished a day of working from home, I would go for a walk or buy some groceries. This is not possible in the current situation. It is like I am stuck at home. Even worse, weekends do not feel as special as before.
While my problem was more about not being able to leave my house, my family and friends have a different issue. Their problem was the lack of proper working space. For them, home is considered living space, not one for work. I recalled growing up doing my homework at the family dinner table. Several of my friends still use their dinner tables as their working desk. My sister has turned her bed and sofa into hers. She told me that she once made a video call from her bed because it has the nicest background for the call. Adapting any available spaces for work may be fine for a few days, but we have been working from home for almost three months. Nobody knows when we will be fully back to work like pre COVID-19. This has made many of us rethink how we are going to organize our home to make it suitable not just for living, relaxing, but also for work. IKEA was super crowded when the government loosen the lockdown. I thought to myself, maybe people realized that they need a better working table and chair.
Working from home allows us to get to know our family members a little bit more, particularly, their working side. While funny and eye-opening, being together 24/7 is tough. I live in a small room condo with my husband. Both of us are working from home. Being all alone at home during the lockdown is hard and having a company does help. That being said, when everybody has to work from home, small chaos tends to ensue. We need to learn to leave some distance and adjust/compromise our different break-time, and working hours, so we do not fight. A colleague told me that when he and his parents need to work from home, he uses a similar strategy. He said that they all scatter in different corners of the house, just so they will not bother or annoy each other. This may alter typical Thai culture where everybody usually spends time in a shared space when at home. Again, this leads to reorganizing spaces in a home so that everybody can do their work, and also spend time together for relaxation.
Before we started working from home, I am sure our bosses were a little bit worried about our productivity. As it turned out, it seems that several of us work harder when we are at home, and work from home could easily become a new normal for us. Another thing I see as a challenge that we have to deal with, in addition to home organizing and time management, is getting to know new colleagues. I started working a few months before the COVID-19 outbreak in Thailand. I believe that sharing the office and meeting face-to-face every day allowed me to get familiar with my, then, new colleagues. A friend of mine just changed his job and he shared his concern that spending most of his time working from home hinder him from bonding with his new colleagues. If working from home to become a new normal (which I think it could) the HR team may need to find a way to help new employees bond with their colleagues.
Recreations at home
I found the two months of recreation places, like shopping malls, gyms, parks, and restaurants, being shut down to be quite interesting. People need to find their own ways of recreation at home. The easiest solutions for everybody are Netflix and YouTube, so the companies have to shape the services so that they continue to work. Game consoles, like Nintendo Switch, are also in high demand that the price skyrocketed and went out of stock. Though not all sought for easy options. Several have developed new hobbies and look for other alternatives.
Due to the lockdown, dining at home has become the new normal. COVID-19 is a golden opportunity for food delivery services as evident from how Deliverymen made a lot of money during the outbreak. As a consumer who started using food delivery services only after the rise of COVID-19, it was quite exciting to see a lot of options and great deals. However, living in the suburb, delivering fees are not always friendly and the available options started to feel limited. With more spare time and craving for a variety of food, people turned to the kitchen at home and started cooking. Certain kinds of food are better to eat together anyway, so cooking is/was the only option. As a result, several people have adopted cooking as their new hobby. Air-fryers, shabu pots, and grilling pans have become must-haves in one’s kitchen. Penguin eat shabu realizes this and pushes out a COVID campaign, ordering a shabu set get a shabu pot, which won customers’ heart and went viral. Consider that people should have their cooking equipment and some are still scared of having other people cook, supermarkets should probably add ready-to-cook meals in grocery lines in addition to ready-to-eat meals.
Staying at home for some means not moving much, and many of us notice ourselves gaining a few kilos. However, gyms, parks, and all public exercise space are closed. We have no other choice but to do it at home. For me, I felt like I was left alone in a desert, not sure what to do. FitnessFirst was the champion in this situation. They offer a variety of exercises that we can do at home even without equipment.
Homecourt is an exercise at home application that impresses me. While there are several exercise applications on AppStore, Homecourt is different. Not only it nicely and seamlessly integrated AI to improve human-computer interaction, but the app also considers social and team aspects in sports, which is the reason for many to do sports. The app allows coaches to continue their coaching and friends or teammates to compete against each other. If you have not tried it yet, I highly recommend downloading this to your phone.
In conclusion, the COVID-19 outbreak has constrained our daily life to be within our home. To maintain balance in our lives, both physically and mentally, we need to rethink what home is and how we would like to share it with our family. In this article, I share my thoughts about how I see my home has changed and the ways I and my circle of friends deal with being at home. How has your home experience changed?
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