Who Is Working From Home?
You or the family?
While we all do have a laugh or two at the jokes and All Work From Home memes flooding our WhatsApp and social media feeds. The truth is that these are universally relatable because they’re mostly true.
Here, for example this one:
I laughed at this one. And then I wondered if I had actually found it funny, or was it just the sense of relief at the validation of collective helplessness we all are experiencing in replicating our office lives inside our homes.
One least talked about aspect of business continuation plans through the COVID-19 outbreak is the amount of toll families as a whole have to undergo in this new world of Work From Home scenarios.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong advocate of Work From Home scheme and have worked more from home than office in my whole career. The point I am making here is slightly of a different nature.
I am talking about the situation where the entire household shifts to a WORK-FROM-HOME routine: with parents bringing their 9–5 offices loaded with their meetings and sessions to their home; when kids have their school work pouring through their screens. The entire structure of family is transformed into an elaborate office where we are all supposed to act as colleagues — minding our own business and making sure that others don’t trespass into our areas physical and otherwise. The house changes from home to office, where we see stressed individuals, frustrated by the challenges of a life transformed overnight, trying to believe that they still have some semblance of control over a routine that is fast growing into a circus field. The domestic help services are discontinued, the hired helps are down to zero, the access to physical facilities of outdoors recreation are off limits … and while you juggle with all of that shift, you now have to make sure that children study as if when they’re with you it is the school time, and parents are tended for as if you’re at home with them, and partners are attended as if the ground is still the familiar domestic one. This is a recipe of disaster.
Not everyone has a 6-bedrooms mansion where one office, or classroom, can be set up in every vacant room for every working/studying family member.
Not everyone has the luxury of keeping at work when there is no support to take care of other dependent family members.
Not everyone can be at a 10am meeting call while managing child’s attendance at the virtual classroom.
Not everyone can be emotionally as strong to fit in and enforce a 9–5 structure in the four walls of a home while co-living with multiple individuals of varying emotional and physical needs.
The point is that we can not recreate offices at home. We can build offices at home — offices that work according to our own dynamics. We can not recreate the offices we had, at our homes. Unless that you’re willing to sabotage your home to keep your office routine from suffering. Or unless that you’re privileged to have people at home who can take care of your chunk of responsibilities. Yes, you can work, yes you can be still a productive employee, yes you can still work on products and create magnificent codes and manage remote teams, but no … you can not lock down your families into a make believe situation that the home meant to be their sacred unit of bonding is now only an extended part of the corporate you’re employed at.
Last week I had shared about setting up professional guidelines for teams making Work-From-Home transition. Once again, it is the HRs and team leads who have to come forward and take a lead in strategizing this shift of culture. You can not have productive employees unless you are empathetic to their lives as persons. This is an unprecedented time, and it asks for more empathy than anything else.
What is it that you can do to address the fears your employees are facing?
Help in addressing that, and find the most productive workforce you can imagine. People are at a state of war in their heads. With mounting pressures and growing uncertainties, the first goal is to save the humans, and the second one to secure your profit margins. Once you start fudging with this priority, it is downhill from there. Humans feeling poorly rarely ever make good contributors at work any way.
How can you enable your employees to be their most productive self?
Figure out ways in which they can create their best work. All of us are new to this. The kids, the old parents, the spouses … all are new to this. Let them have room. Allow a margin to lapse. Be human, and expect to deal with humans. This is the only way to keep alive, both as individuals as well as businesses.
When setting work demands, do not make yourself as the yardstick. Be mindful of your privileges.
This is not an easy time and this shift of work culture is not going to be an an easy wave. Make sure you ride it gently. Otherwise, you may find yourself as the reason your employees burn out faster than you were prepared to handle. Professional productivity standards are not built on the pyre of personal life.
