We Are All Stressed Working From Home
A message to the anxious and the melancholy…
There are two different extremes I see both in my colleagues and with people in general in our new work from home situation.
The Anxious: Stop Freaking Out
Some of us are over-anxious because we’ve either not worked from home much in our career or we’ve still not adjusted to this new way of working.
We work too hard.
We worry about who’s watching.
Maybe we want to work because it’s comfortable and it forces us to focus on something besides the horrible situation of the pandemic. Maybe we’re stressed by any number of a million different things. Whether you’re an extrovert feeling trapped in a cage or an introvert drained from all the feels or both — you have to stop, try to relax, and find a new pace. Center yourself by doing more of your old routine. Pack your lunch. Actually get dressed. And look for ways to find some normalcy. Connect with people. Go out of your way to create opportunities for connection. Schedule a 1:1 with your peers. Call an old friend in the evening. Check in on your family.
When you’re feeling anxious or just bouncing from one thing to the next, try to catch yourself. Take a deep breath. Get up from your desk. Go for a walk at lunch. Look for the positive in things around you. Remember what you are thankful for. And stop trying to prove you’re working by being online for twelve hours. It’s OK to not get back to people over Slack, Teams or email immediately. Start acting like it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Trust that your boss trusts you and just simply do your job. Prioritize, relax and do what you can each day. Then log off when the day is done and walk away. Remember, everyone is going through this right now and there’s a lot of understanding companies that will give you some slack to not be performing at or above where you were at the start of 2020.
The Melancholy: Stop Freaking Out
The other reaction a lot of people have is also understandable. There’s a lot to be overwhelmed about. Every day blurs into the next and we feel like we’ve lost all motivation. We sleep in longer. We do less. We snack. We snark. There’s so much suffering around us and we can’t do anything about it. This is normal for so many people.
This leads to some behaviors that look lazy or apathetic. As servant leaders, we need to look out for these people on our teams. Help pick them up. Just ask simple questions like, “How are you doing?” and be there to help however you can, even if it’s just an empathetic ear.
We can recognize when our friends are in this place by just noticing things like maybe they don’t turn on their video feed often. Maybe they seem overly sensitive to anyone seeing their home, kids, or pets.
Everyone processes the stress of this pandemic differently. So we need to stay connected better and more frequently more than ever. Some people are so in tune with others’ emotions, they absorb the energy and that can bring them down into dark places. Some are just frustrated and ready for it to be over, so their patience runs very thin.
It’s impossible to tell someone else how to feel, so just look for the behaviors to recognize how people are dealing with life’s new stresses and work with them and your team to carefully reset your working agreements to accommodate different schedules and do your best to be flexible.
There’s some great advice that says you never know what major life struggles the people around you are going through, so be kind and be empathetic and assume positive intent. Well, during this time, there’s at least one huge struggle we all have in common and that advice was never more appropriate.
Stay safe and be well everyone!
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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