Working From Home — The Highs and The Lows

By Victor Hanacek on The Stocks

This past week, and indeed since the Ministry of Health raised our Disease Outbreak Response System Condition from Yellow to Orange, the local broadsheet, friends, colleagues and relatives have all started grappling with this new normal of Working From Home, or WFH for short.

Here are some of our thoughts so far, collated in t̶h̶r̶e̶e four easy lists.

The Good

• Save on travel time
• Save money on food and commute
• Mix in household chores and errands
• Less easy for colleagues to kachiao you
• Can enjoy the residence that you are paying hand-foot-and-mouth for

The Bad

• Have to find new places to eat
• Develop new habits
• Don’t get to kaypoh with colleagues
• Use more self-funded electricity ($$$!), otherwise no AC (air-conditioning)
• Less ergonomic at first, until you make the necessary investments— I only realised how big my desk space and monitor are in office when I started working from home. Most of us don’t even have the additional monitor, and we are working off the kitchen table (or in my case, stairs). Those who already have a WFH set-up, for example, avid computer gamers, are set — but they have a different set of problems as below.

The (Ugly) Long-Fixes

These are the things that might be more difficult to change:

• Home might not be a conducive place to work for some (those with kids, or other distractions like video/computer games, for example) — or it might be difficult to find a space to work (for example, you are renting a room and have limited desk space). There is no easy fix for this; perhaps you need to establish boundaries with members of your household also WFH or PFH (Playing From Home). The other option is to find a nearby public space — but that won’t be viable if a strict Home Quarantine is enforced.
• Not having a defined work space and after/before work space might lead to your work-life balance being blurred. You might also miss out on exercise as some people might not even get out of the house once WFH. The solution to this is to give yourself well defined targets, remember to incorporate some exercise, and stick to your calendar/schedule, which is, of course — easier said than done.
• Some might miss the human interaction that going to a workplace bustling with 2 or 100 people brings. Being a cat person, I find this to be an agreeable situation rather than a problem. But for those dog people who crave bluster and bustle, hang in there. We cut down interaction, not zero it.

Imperative Digitisation

I didn’t talk much about tools that can be used for Telecommunicating, and or tools for digitisation. Our team supports remote components, so we were used to using tools such as Zoom, Slack calls, Telegram and various communication apparatus. Being a tech company, all our documentation and 90% of work were inside our computers or on Shared Drives, so there was no lugging of mountains of paper back home from the office — which would have been frankly, a nightmare. We did have to lug our (sometimes, more than one) laptops back home though.

For organisations with very little digitisation, WFH could pose additional challenges in terms of the sharing of documents and even the bringing of documents out of the office space. In a way, COVID-19 has made mobility and digitisation an evolutionary imperative for offices all over the world.

Then, of course, there are the businesses where there is no straightforward work-from-home option. Businesses such as hawker stalls (unless you count delivery from home), and those in the services industry (perhaps consider remote advising). These are the industries hardest hit by the virus outbreak and where some revolutionary changes in the business model can be considered. I wonder if restaurants that have delivery options are less affected. Jiayou!

The Beautiful

Having more face-time with family is the single most important gain I’ve received by working from home. Coming home from work in the evening, sometimes way past my preferred mealtime, I’m usually a little bit winded from the day. Just being able to be around during lunchtime and break-times, not necessarily talking/conversing but just being there with the family; is a huge benefit and blessing.

And I can imagine this to be even more true for colleagues with children. (Just nice for March Holidays, eh?) Whilst children were also listed as a part of making home a less conducive place to work, I believe working parents have huge incentives to manage your time and space at home to get what needs to be done and also be able to spend time with the partner and kids.

To Sum It Up

Most colleagues whose work doesn’t require a high intensity of interaction feel they are more productive at home. Those that require a lot of interaction and checking in with various folks are likely to feel more adversely impacted.

Managers and bosses may be concerned with employees skiving off at home. To that concern, it should be possible to still arrange daily check-ins (we do a daily standup in the morning every working day via conference call) and/or weekly round-ups. Employees who enjoy the WFH arrangement are probably more likely to want to hit their work targets when given this option; the smart ones at least.

So the key is clear structuring of tasks and clarity on objectives. Also, have intentional meetings online to do the catch-ups necessary. And don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time — iterate to improve. That’s the Agile mindset *wink*.

At my workplace, we have several major meetings such as Sprint Review and Sprint Planning where our Delivery Manager requests us to be physically present to facilitate quick, immediate conversation with non-verbal cues because there is too much to unpack and conversation becomes too lossy when done remotely and subject to the mundane remote conferencing issues such as audio-visual tech issues that prevent full-body communication.

So we come into office for these meetings, and WFH the rest of the time as much as possible. Naturally, if it no longer is a call for a reduction but a removal of office interaction, these meetings will also have to be shifted online; and we may have to find other platforms to facilitate the best conversation possible. Online sketch-boarding tools, such as SketchBoard may be considered.

Photo by Ashley Sixto Artidiello on Reshot

In the end there are adjustments to be made, but I’ve certainly learnt to enjoy working from home. Especially the part where I can do laundry at home during lunchtime.