Work From Home — Are You Ready For This Cultural Shift?
Djurdjica Boskovic
(Originally published as a post at a social media platform on March 18, 2020)
Given the way things are, I think now is high time we start discussing the protocols of working from home for the uninitiated. One aspect of remote working, in a culture such as ours, is going to be very hard for the female employees, especially:
Communication.
Draw the lines.
In a Work From Home situation, it gets very easy to:
- get distracted in either direction: to forget that you’re at work; to forget that work has a beginning and an end point
- not know how to define the work and not-work part of remote communication with colleagues. Harassment stories birth here.
If yours is a business exploring the remote working setup for the first time, please make sure that your HR department draws out guidelines, not only about online presence but also about the communication protocols — especially for the diverse teams.
Ambiguity never favors the innocent.
For a population that generally can not differentiate between their facebook and LinkedIn communications, it is very likely that online communication slips away from the company channels to other media. Blurred lines of online availability can further complicate the situation. This means trouble for everyone involved.
HR professionals and Team Leads, it is time to step up your game!
