Getting through remote work
From my home office to yours, with hope.
Hello!
First of all, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Liliana, I’m 25 years old (and it seems to me that I’m going to be 26 still at home, although with the plus of being out of confinement), and I’m Office Manager at Ubiwhere (one day I’ll explain to you what this is). Today I’m here to let you know about my experience, which is to be working from home.
I’ll begin by telling you that I never expected to be in this situation. I never expected to live to see this happen. We see horrible things in the movies, and we are often warned about the diverse possibilities of viruses, attacks, catastrophes, and I still don’t quite understand how we managed to keep all of this in mind and still live our normal lives and routines, without panic, without anxieties, without worry, most of the time.
Now, remote work has become a reality for many people, and it is a good thing that I belong to a company where I can do it. I’ll take a minute to give all my praise to all who have not gone home, because they could not do it, to all who continued to follow their normal routine in the face of everything that is happening in the world.
I will share with you the reality of remote work at Ubiwhere, from my point of view, and from the comfort of my home office that has turned into real chaos!
Have you seen the great transformation of Chris Hemsworth in the Avengers circulating on social media? On one side, they have Chris’s photo looking just fine, and on the other, a photo of him much better stocked. Well, we here at Ubiwhere do not have this problem.
If, on the one hand, we spend 8 hours sitting, working hard so that nothing is delayed, on the other hand, we have weekly stretching classes given by our ballet dancer Patrícia Pereira, who puts us all straight and makes us realize that we are getting old because we are no longer able to have the elasticity that we had when we took gym classes in primary! But that’s not all! We also have classes with our friends tabatas* given by our “crossfitter”, Daniela Santos, that leave us not knowing how to walk properly for the next two to three days, but that does not let us missing the gym. Thanks a lot for keeping us in the pre-COVID weight, it hasn’t been an easy task.
There is something very important, which I believe is the biggest problem for companies that work in open space and are now working remotely, which is the lack of people, the lack of contact, the lack of being surrounded by people working and that, in a way, encourage us to do the same, the lack of communication and the constant exchange of ideas.
In order to try to reduce the weight of this lack, we always try to keep the communication channels open, and we use a lot of them! We use Slack to exchange a simple message with someone specific or even with a whole group of people, Hangouts to have a face-to-face meeting, in which we can see the person on the other side, and believe it or not, it makes all the difference, or Discord, and considering that we work in open space, and we are in the constant presence of people with whom we share a room, the discord does precisely that, gives us the possibility of being present.
I speak for myself since I am a big consumer of morning caffeine, and that I would love to come to Ubiwhere and gather people in the kitchen to accompany me doing just that. We don’t have that now, but we have the next best thing: we meet every morning, between fifteen minutes and half an hour, and we stay together, we talk, we laugh, we exchange ideas, and we try to make our presence felt on each other’s day.
One of the things that strike me most about Ubiwhere is our Ubi-Breakfast. I’ll come back to this, let me just tell you first that when I realized what this was and when I realized that I was going to be the one organizing it, I only had one reaction: PANIC. My OCD’s don’t let me stay calm when someone tells me that I have to organize something for a lot of people.
But let me explain. The Ubi-Breakfast is a breakfast happening on the first Monday of each month, in which we all come together in the same space, have a bite on some “Pastéis de Nata”, croissants, etc, we drink our coffee and we make short presentations on what will be important in that month. This is a way to keep us together, using food, which is great for me! When working from home, we don’t even allow ourselves to lose that! Of course, we don’t all get together to have breakfast at Ubiwhere headquarters, but we go to a Hangouts link, take our breakfast and coffee in our improvised office, see the familiar faces and follow the usual plan.
This is not easy, you know? Working from home is not easy. Having a pandemic is not easy. But we are a family, and families stay together. Always.
We’ll be alright.
From my home office to yours, with hope.
Liliana Mendes
