It’s been a year.

A year into the unknown and can I use the word unprecedented, or has it been overused? I wanted to write about this last year from a business and home-life perspective for both bear different responsibilities. It came as a seismic shock, coated in eery silence, to be locked down for those first weeks which turned into months. Overnight our world and lives morphed into a dystopian vision that would win the Booker Prize.  

For most of our staff, they had or were bought laptops so they work from home, but we had different circumstances to deal with in terms of how the business would function during a time of pandemic. For instance one of our members of staff wanted to continue working in our small office in Boscombe. The answer was to accommodate that request with the proviso that no-one else could do the same.

In the case of our data centre facility we needed at least one person on site, you know, to turn things off and on again, and occasionally two, to safely handle heavy equipment. Above all, there was one absolute imperative we had to ensure in the face of national lockdown – we were the people keeping online systems running so other businesses could work from home. The GOV UK website even classified our IT and data infrastructure sector as key workers. Not equating ourselves to front line nurses obviously, but we had a responsibility to provide a level of service so other businesses could function through the pandemic.

The new nirvana, working from home.

Many businesses like accountants and solicitors, traditionally hesitant to remote working, adapted and learned to embrace it very, very quickly. The scale of change brought on by the impact of the pandemic meant many years of so-called “Digital Transformation” were turned into a matter of months. I’m sure business owners worried about productivity, not necessarily of workers slacking, but the environment not being conducive. Those fears seem to have been laid to rest; the proclamations on LinkedIn show that.

I have a different take. I also get slightly annoyed on proclamations of, “We don’t need an office anymore”, “We can all work from home now”, and “Save the cost of the office lease.” Observations made in most cases by a certain profile of people I feel the need to respond to. In my view these business owners, or their senior management team, are able to embrace the new world of remote working, and shutting the office for good, because they are much further down the road in life, as in they have a nice stable home, with many rooms, a study even, a garden, or a kitchen diner to spread out in. For these people the experience of not wasting time commuting, and to use that opportunity to spend valuable time with their children before they are bathed and sent to bed, is a fantastic benefit.

However, for younger workers, leaving their place of abode, be it a family home or shared dwelling with friends or strangers, gives a valuable differentiation in their lives. It creates space. Hey, business owner, my message to you is when next in the company Zoom/Teams call, don’t just look at the faces of your staff, take in what’s behind them, the setting, the backdrop. Are they in their bedroom, are they in the eaves of their top floor flat, are they comfortable?

The world of freelancers, consultants and solopreneurs may well say that this is a world they’ve been living with for years and decades even, but for company staff, it’s not what they signed up to from day one. Sure, many people will enjoy moving to remote working but it can’t be taken as a given, and needs to be challenged. We can buy new monitors, laptop stands, keyboards and ergonomic chairs for our staff, as is our responsibility, but we cannot buy space.

I am fortunate as I have a detached house: I can get up and roam around; have my coffee in different rooms to break the monotony, even in the garden on a sunny day. I have a study too, a valuable commodity of space, but even that didn’t make the whole experience easier, as I have not enjoyed working from home. Productivity is low for me. I don’t do piecemeal work or one task for a longer period. I jump around from sales, marketing, support, finance, staff issues, office stuff. I need the energy of an office to bounce around.

Here are my issues regarding having most or all of the team working from home.

We are very much a service business in implementations that also responds to technical support calls too. Where are the quick over-the-shoulder answers? For instance, being in the same room as a colleague who’s taking a support call for which they have no answer can be solved invariably by someone who does. Or if you overhear the run of their conversation, you can cut in to help.

Where are the random conversations? The ones that help you know more about your colleagues, the ones that build friendships outside of the workplace. The ones when you find out what to watch next on NetFlix. You can’t plan random conversations. 

How do you nurture and grow the confidence of younger staff? At times I ask them to explain something technical to me, to go to the meeting room and sketch it on the whiteboard, to redo it, all the while purposely guiding with the aim of making them better at communicating, analysis, problem solving, and more confident at presenting.

Of course, I’m not against any business choosing to be 100% remote working. Every business, every sector is different. It can work and it does work. This blog piece is about sharing what I feel and what I think, not what you should do.

My physical well-being over the course of the year has been in decline. I’ve trained karate regularly since the age of 11 and I’m now fifty-something. I’ve lost a year of karate training and decided early that I wasn’t going to try and train in the hallway and take a half-hearted approach. Thankfully the weather during the first national lockdown was pretty fantastic but I struggled with even walking. This was partly due to recovering from gout but also ending up at times housebound for three days on a trot, forgetting to walk out of the house because I was trying to answer anything and everything quickly under the guise of remote productivity. I even took to taking naps on the sofa during the day, feeling lethargic. Even at the height of summer, with my study being on the side of the house and in the shade until evening, meant it was cold.

I chose to travel to our hosting facility every now and again to break the week up, speak to staff and have thinking time on the journey; the change of scenery certainly helped with my well-being and I was able to write articles and prepare presentations rapidly once in the office.

I missed the laughter.

I will conclude by saying we’ll be keeping the two office locations. In the second lockdown a member of staff asked if they could return to working from the office for their own well-being. Working in the bedroom of a shared house was not good for them. There may be a couple of people that will choose to work from home as it better suits their current life and health needs. Even if we didn’t have our own data centre, I still believe in the power of the physical beating heart of our company. A hybrid approach where we still have a space for those who wish to use occasionally even if they work from home, a place where the confluence of the personal and the social flourishes.

We can treat work either transactionally or emotionally. Why not both?