So many of us are currently having the work at home journey. It can be very different for each of us as well, we certainly don’t all have to deal with the same challenges or get the same benefits. For some of us it is full time, others only part of the time, and others it has yet to be decided with constant changes. I personally have been doing all my work at home, but we went from “a month or two” to “possibly a year or more” just yesterday.
That length difference changes things up more than you might think. To deal with the “temporary” work at home situation I went ahead and bought a second monitor (a decent one), and an office chair. I unfortunately went for the cheap office chair because I thought I wouldn’t be using it for long… and I’m cheap. Now I’ve got one of the cheapest chairs on Amazon, and I will be enjoying its luxury for months to come (ugh).
We’ve also been doing our daily Webex meeting in a pretty short and not very personal manner. Again we all saw it as a temporary thing and did not see the need for it being more… personal or in depth. You might not think of System Admins and other IT folks needing personal action, but we have all started to miss it a little. Yesterday we talked about how we should start being more personable during the meetings, having the video on (which many of us would only sometimes do), talk more, and just make it a little more office like rather than being so separate. Have more peer to peer meetings rather than just the daily group ones, and just try our best to make it an office rather than people working miles apart from each other.
Now the loss of personal interaction can certainly be a negative, but many of us have become accustomed to the positives as well. Working in our casual clothes (come on, we’ve all had our pajama days), seeing our family more often, having more flexibility in our schedules, and it can just be plain relaxing at times. But we also can get easily distracted, take advantage of that flexibility, and we might be starting to get a little heavy into the pajama routine. Luckily those I work with have been able to still accomplish all of our tasks just as good as ever, and have been able to deal with the changes pretty great.
Now we just have to realize it might not be quite as temporary as we thought, which means more changes. Many of us will need to set aside a true work area (I’ve taken over our dining room, and not everyone is happy about that). We’ll have to get accustomed to that new schedule (no commute is awesome), try to have personal interaction in a non-physical environment, and lots more. It’s a new work life, and one that many of us will have to get accustomed to. What have been the biggest changes you have had to deal with? The best, the worst, and maybe even the strangest?