How to Survive and Thrive While Working From Home
With the novel Coronavirus striking the nations globally, social distancing norms have been implemented all over the world. Companies have paved the way for work from home structure to keep their business running while following the social distancing guidelines.
Working from home and being isolated from our colleagues is still an alien concept for those of us accustomed to the comforts of the office environment.
Three in five U.S. workers who have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic would prefer to continue to work remotely until public health restrictions lift. In contrast, 41% would prefer to return to their workplace or office to work, as they did before the crisis.
The transition is likely to be slow, uneven, and forethought as companies address the state of fear of employees, workers, and primarily the prospects of a second and possibly even more deadly wave of the Coronavirus.
Despite a comfortable workspace, everybody cannot master working from home. Without a traditional work environment, it can be difficult for some people to stay focused.
The word “collaboration” comes from Latin and translates to working together. In most instances, collaboration involves more than two people. One manner in which companies lose productivity is by restricting essential communications to a limited pool of people. Thus employees must communicate fluently via multiple sources like email, chat, phone calls, slide decks, etc. One can expect communication to be asynchronous, which means that individuals need to give articulated and direct messages to the team with time. Being able to organize and form your thoughts and questions on chat tools like Slack can make a significant difference from a successful five-minute interaction to an hour-long thread.
Devoid of face-to-face communication, it can be challenging for some employees to stay motivated and sap creativity. People who would anticipate socializing with their colleagues might find it difficult to adjust to the virtual workspace. The unavailability of desk lunches and cafeteria breaks can lead to a sense of loneliness and distress. The work breaks aren’t just limited to food breaks; they are also a means of networking and lobbying. Outgoing employees who depend on in-person communication and tacitly lookout for others for perusal and networking can face difficult times while working remotely.
On the other hand, employees who are intrinsically motivated and have a strong sense of purpose can meet or exceed the work expectations even though no one is looking over their shoulder all day. They have remarkable communication skills and emotional intelligence to give productive outputs while they are working from home.
In an attempt to cut costs and balance their budgets, companies are adopting telecommunication measures on a large scale as travel of all kinds is halted. Many experts believe that business trips will be a thing of the past. Work travels will be replaced by video conferencing as the traditional business trips will not be considered necessary in the future anymore.
Bill Gates, who has spent as much time and money studying and preparing for pandemics as anyone, says that business travel will never be the same.
There are a few things, like business trips, that I doubt will ever go back,” he said. It’s a measure of necessity and risk, Gates said.
“In the case of high school, I think the social activity — you know, making friends, hanging out — that you get by being there physically, that’s irreplaceable,” he said.
But business trips? Not so much. “There will still be business trips,” he said, “but, you know, less.
While most interactions would be virtual, it is easy to miss out on social cues like body language or tone of voice. Employees should be able to apprehend the other person’s concern or mood, then letting it hinder their communication with that person.
During this challenging time, juggling between work and personal commitments can be exhausting as well. Employees should be empathetic and thoughtful in how they engage with their colleagues. It is crucial to give space and respect the fact that our colleagues may need to take time off from work or propose an adjusted work schedule. It is thus important to set boundaries between personal life and work. It is a common tendency to over-connect while working remotely; hence it is also important to step away and disconnect from work at home. In this way, the employees can maintain a healthy work-life balance and a stress-free frame of mind.
With no social activities taking up people’s time, most of them are switching to remote entertainment. Thus, virtual networking and learning is the next logical step to be productive during this lockdown. People are utilizing their free capacity by investing time in professional development and learning new skills that can help them to advance their skills and career prospects.
Underlining this, LinkedIn has reported an enormous increase in its usage and demand for its LinkedIn Learning professional development courses.
As per LinkedIn:
“As our social and professional norms shift, people are turning to learn to help them get through. In the first week of April, people watched 1.7M hours of learning content on LinkedIn Learning vs. 560K hours in the first week of January — a 3X increase in time spent learning.”
Sites like GitHub have also given a heads up in these trying times. Students, as well as professionals, have been increasingly using the open-source platform for efficient project and time management. GitHub stated that its analysis shows that developers have been resilient to the change wrought by COVID-19, with activity holding consistent or increasing through the crisis on the open-source platform.
“Organizations that can adapt processes, procedures, and embrace new ways of working as quickly as their development teams will be resilient and successful,” GitHub said.
IBM, which has begun calling back workers in several locations in China and South Korea, has developed global standards for returning to the office. These include bringing back those who need access to on-site equipment or labs primarily, regulating arrival times so that elevators don’t become overcrowded, eliminating buffets, and shared services in places like cafeterias to ease social distancing concerns.
Yet, despite more in-person interaction among colleagues in the future, handshakes are on their way out. White House health advisor Anthony Fauci recently advised that handshaking needs to stop even when the pandemic ends.
Lakshmi Rengarajan, a workplace connection consultant of WeWork, says gestures that can convey friendliness and respect from a distance, such as a nod or a smile, could become the new social norm.
“Maybe it’s the rise of eye contact or listening,” she says.
Instead, Poland suggests tilting or bowing your head to greet another person as people did many decades ago can be some alternatives.
“When men greeted other people, they raised tor tipped their hat,” he says.
By and large, the highlight is, for an employee to be effective in his job, it shouldn’t matter if they are working remotely or in a traditional workplace. The entire experience and engagement should be seamless. How they work in an open office should be similar to being remote. Shaping your systems, processes, and work around this tenet helps build a better work culture.
“I don’t think the open office is dead, but we may have additional barriers for comfort,” said Brent Capron, design director of interiors for the architecture firm Perkins & Will.
Depending on how the next few months play out, we face multiple possible futures — each bringing essential changes to public life and politics that will last far longer than the pandemic itself.
