5 Work Lessons I’m Using at Home During Quarantine

The Coronavirus quarantine has really turned back the clock for many young adults, myself included. Grown children are finding themselves back under their parents’ roof for the first time in years, and with that comes new and tricky scenarios, circumstances, and dynamics to navigate.

When the quarantine hit, my parents had just loaded a moving truck with all their belongings to go across the country to a downsized vacation home in Las Vegas. My brother and I had come in to help move in for a bit before returning to our real lives. Now, we have no idea when normalcy will return; my brother, being in college, has fully moved into his new bedroom in Vegas and I’ve been surviving on the four outfits I brought with me.

Of course, there are benefits of quarantine; it’s been amazing being back at home and spending time with family (when will quarantine end!?). I think we all know this quarantine comes with its struggles, let’s be honest. For our family, though sunny Las Vegas is a beautiful place to be stuck, it is also a much smaller home that was never meant for all of us to live long-term.

For myself, as a grown adult who had moved out of my parents home 7 years ago, there have been my own share of new experiences and challenges to overcome. After talking to some of my friends on the now infamous Zoom calls, I realized that my experience was maybe more relatable than I thought. I’m sure many of you young adults reading this can relate *wink wink*.

Surprisingly, what has been coming in really handy have been the important lessons learned at work the past few years. After graduating, I remember reading article after article telling me about the valuable lessons learned in the workplace or how to use lessons learned in life at work. Oh how the tables have turned… and now I can bring back home some of these professional lessons learned to use with my parents!

Read below for a couple of my key takeaways.

Disclaimer: Any and all anecdotes come from a place of love! Love ya mom and dad.

1. Give Effective Feedback

One of the first experiences you encounter in a professional working environment are one on ones with your manager and the cycle of feedback from your manager, people you work with, a mentor, etc. In today’s day and age, no one is disputing the importance of feedback. When administered properly, it’s a necessary component for growth and improvement. This becomes all the more important as a new grad, I quickly realized. Coming in as a Product Manager with no product management experience to speak of, a large part of being effective in my day to day responsibilities was listening to the explicit and implicit feedback I got from my coworkers.

At home while social distancing, it’s easy to feel like you’re going back in time. Your parents are most likely encountering this situation for the first time in their parenting lives: a grown child who has moved out of the house coming back home for a never ending period of time. An interesting article by Harvard University psychology professor Jill Hooley says it is a challenge for parents who have adjusted to life at home without children as well as for the young adults who are not living in their own, independent spaces for the time being. When your parents have reverted to their high school parenting tactics, you can feel like you’ve lost years of your life in all the wrong ways.

When you were 16 years old, it was hard to give your parents feedback on what they were doing well and what wasn’t working. But now, at 26, as free agents, it’s a skill that we’ve developed at work and should bring home. Everyone can benefit from actionable and constructive feedback from time to time.

The subject areas where feedback may be needed are vastly different from work, of course. I doubt you’re giving your coworker feedback on how to hang clothes from the laundry machine after all.

2. Set Expectations, Roles, and Responsibilities

Effectively setting employee expectations is a critical part of successfully leading and managing a team, as well as developing a culture of accountability. While working as a PM, one of the most important tasks for me is to define what each individual in my work stream is accountable for to make sure there are no assumptions or miscommunications down the line when it might be too late to course correct.

Being at home with your parents could benefit from the same due diligence. As young adults come home and live with their parents again, it’s understandable that different living styles may clash and conflict. Having lived with roommates or alone for several years now, we’ve developed our own habits and methods that work for us.

The same goes for your parents — they have their own way of doing things that’s been working for them, and may have even modified their methodology after the kids moved out.

Since it’s your parents’ home, it’s understandable that they may want things done their way. They also may be counting on you to help out now that there’s extra help around the house. Instead of getting frustrated at the friction or hoping they just don’t revert back into high school parenting mode, taking the initiative to set clear guidelines and expectations can take the guesswork out of the picture.

For example, understanding how your mom likes the dishwasher to be loaded and whether or not she’s expecting someone else to do that job can reduce friction at the end of a long day. We’re all trying to get through house chores, work responsibilities, social lives, and more and the least we can do is make sure miscommunications and assumptions don’t lead to unnecessary arguments.

3. Diversity and Inclusion

At Microsoft, we have an OKR (Objective and Key Result) that is specifically towards diversity and inclusion. What this means is in addition to the work we’re doing towards our business goals, we also make sure to cultivate work attitudes and values by having initiatives that accrue to culture at Microsoft, in whichever way we feel passionate. Some of my coworkers have started employee groups for Women in Product to connect and learn from industry leaders, others have created Organizational Effectiveness groups to help improve cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Bear with me here, but there is an important lesson to be learned with regards to diversity and inclusion at home. You’ve moved out of the house for several years and come up with your own lifestyle, diet, habits, etc. that work for you. Countless of my friends have told me how difficult it is for them to come home and continue those habits, because making them mesh into your parents’ lifestyle can be wrought with friction.

To be honest, I relate. I recently decided to get on a low carb diet since it’s quarantine and everyone is doing the #ChloeTingSummerShredChallenge right? Well in addition to killing my body courtesy of Chloe Ting, I decided to switch up my diet as well so I could get the results I wanted. Going home made that low carb diet pretty much impossible. Coming from an Indian household, our diet is composed of pretty much every item I eliminated: lentils, potatoes, naan, rice — you name it and I’m probably trying to avoid it.

For the first few days, it was a constant back and forth argument, but eventually I was able to get across to my parents. My lifestyle choices are independent of theirs and they need to be inclusive to my dietary needs, especially since I’m not impacting their diet in any way.

Folks often think about gender, race, and disability when referring to diversity and inclusion. One of the most important things I’ve learned with my team at Microsoft, however, is that inclusion goes much further than that. Every person has their own quirks, lifestyle, or situation whether they are visible or invisible to us. By practicing a more open mindset, I have been able to forge stronger relationships at work, and I’d like to think this is one of the factors that has made me successful in my career thus far. It can be really hard to bring this mentality back home, especially to your parents, but it is a critical component of them respecting you as an equal and allowing you to maintain some of your independence.

4. Celebrate Wins

If anyone ever asks me about my manager, the first words out of my mouth are always “He’s the best”. And he really is. My manager is super cool and plays along with my quirky personality. He also always has my back, whether that’s finding me opportunities to showcase my work or just making sure I know I’m a valued and appreciated member of the team. While I often stress the importance of hard work internally, his validation and natural support makes it worth it.

The strategy I learned from my boss can be applied at home too! As a child, it’s easy to take some things for granted, especially since there’s a clear delineation between parents and children. Your capabilities are only so much at that young of an age, and your parents take care of many responsibilities that you don’t even think about. Now that we’ve grown up, the playing field is a little more even.

Being able to see and recognize the differences living with your parents now versus a decade ago can go a long way. At work, regardless of age or other variables, everyone is considered an equal. Likewise, at home now, if you want to be treated as an equal then treat your parents as equals. Show appreciation and celebrate the small things! Delivering positive feedback for the right things shows them how mature you are and helps them feel less aggravated and more loved during this crazy time.

5. Keep Sight of the Big Picture

Being at home is a lot like working on a project. You work on a project with the same people for a really long time, and while you all are working on a unified long-term goal, it’s inevitable to become jaded, burnt out, and frustrated. Your work “baby” is something you hold near and dear to your heart but as the time passes it’s only natural to lose some patience. Sometimes it’s hard to see the light at the end of a seemingly infinite tunnel.

That’s sort of how it is with family too; you spend so much time together that it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Everyone is navigating an unfamiliar space, trying to handle their own emotions around quarantine with their day-to-day responsibilities that haven’t disappeared.

One of the lessons learned from working in a team is how important maintaining big picture thinking is — many consider it to be a necessary quality for a leader and one of the most important lessons you can learn in your career. There’s a story that I read about big picture thinking that goes something like this…

One day a traveller came across 3 stonecutters working in a quarry. Each was busy cutting a block of stone.

Interested to find out what they were working on, he asked the first stonecutter what he was doing. The stonecutter responds: “I am cutting a stone!”

Still clueless, the traveller turned to the second stonecutter and asked him what he was doing. The stonecutter explains: “I am cutting this block of stone to make sure that it’s square, and its dimensions are uniform, so that it will fit exactly in its place in a wall”.

Though he got more detail, the traveller was still unclear and turned to the third stonecutter. He seemed to be the happiest of the three stonecutters and when asked what he was doing replied: “I am building a cathedral”.

Because the third builder was able to keep the bigger picture in mind, he was happy and motivated towards his task at hand.

The same lesson can be applied to all of us young adults who are at home; yes, it can be trying at times, but being able to spend time with your parents and reconnect with them in new ways can be a blessing in disguise. Finding these silver linings to keep yourself sane can serve as a healthy reminder of why you’re there after all.

All in all, this quarantine situation is crazy and comes with its share of ups and downs. At the end of the day, every family is dealing with their own personal situation and coping in a unique way. I only hope that this article serves as a lighthearted way for young adults to connect over their quarantine struggles while offering an opportunity to reflect on the values learned from work.

For me, I can say that I am blessed to be in a situation where I can be home with my parents and have parents who want their kids to be home. Being together during this time is a reflection of the unconditional love a parent has for their children. While I can’t wait to be back to my “normal” life, I can say that I am happy and grateful to have had this time at home.

— Sravya Vishnubhatla, Founder & CEO

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