WLP268 What’s Going On: Be Happy and Healthy when Working from Home!
In today’s ‘What’s Going On’ episode Pilar and Maya explore some recent articles and research, and they take a closer look at remote work’s main subset right now: working from home.
Maya has recently published “Finding Your Edge: Establishing And Maintaining Boundaries When You Work From Home”, reflecting on issues on many minds right now as we all strive for balance between work and the rest of our lives. These boundaries take many forms, from space and time to tasks and other people, and get increasingly complicated and blurred when work and everything else takes place in the same location.
Knowing what ‘done’ looks like is ever more difficult to define, and even for those with very compartmentalised lives, we cannot help but think about work sometimes during personal times and vice versa. Pilar is good at using time as a boundary, especially during lighter summer evenings which she uses to get out of the house - but this doesn't work so well during the winter.
But we’re all unique, and Maya discusses the spectrum of integrators vs segmenters in the book, as a useful lens for understanding why others manage their task boundaries differently to you. Some love blending and mixing things up, whereas others maintain rigid distinctions between work tasks/thoughts/tools and so on, and the rest of their lives.
During the crisis people have had their boundaries compromised in new ways, but have also found some very creative solutions to finding edges, from mixing up lighting in the home to using different tools (like an old laptop for offline writing, or sitting somewhere different). As we move out of the pandemic and into something hopefully more sustainable, we’ll need to rethink our personal work-life boundary tactics for long term success.
What are you going to experiment with? Maybe you and your team could use this as a theme for a virtual coffee.
23.00 What’s Going On
An interesting article in The Guardian recently offers us another spectrum on which to consider adaptation to remote work and working from home: I'm socially anxious, and working from home has been life-changing. Another salient reminder of the ‘same storm, different boats’ metaphor, that our experiences of the ‘same’ external factors differ hugely from those of others and often in ways we may not see or easily recognise.
Some may connect and relate to others very deeply through the written word, enjoying the peace of isolation, whereas other more extroverted individuals will need to seek the physical presence of others to energise effectively. And we can all use lessons learned during lockdown to reflect on how we interact with people and communicate at work.
Another piece also in The Guardian caught our eye, Spain to launch trial of four-day working week. Neither Pilar nor Maya expected Spain to make the first move in mixing up the way we work, and this is such an exciting and positive development. It’s all part of the thinking and reflecting we all must do right now, about what we want to keep or change, as we craft the new reality and the future of work.
Of course it’s not going to change every employment contract (or the culture and practice behind it) overnight, but it’s a good start, and let’s hope it leads to ever more creative experiments. Anything interesting going on where you work? Let us know!
38:20 Tech updates
Maya recently took part in a BBC virtual studio audience recording, for a live comedy show - an interesting experience, slightly surreal. The reactions were recorded through a separate app to that which the performance was viewed, and it was not a social experience for the individual as headphones were mandatory - so Maya found it quite difficult to remember to laugh out loud, as that felt like an odd thing to do while sat in the office at home. Interesting to reflect on how we perform and interact with each other differently, at a distance.
Zapier recently published a blog about emoji use, How to use Slack emoji to simplify work (and cut out noise), which had some interesting ideas within: the acceptance of the word ‘reactji’, and the power of engagement through a tiny picture that takes a split second, and may communicate volumes (provided we develop shared understanding around that meaning). It’s not just about livening things up and showing personality: emojis can help us get the work done.
Zapier also use them, not surprisingly, to trigger Zaps (the firing of integrations and APIs as well), such as tagging a message to refer to later, or copy out to a Google Doc. Maya uses a Zap to send starred Slack messages to her Omnifocus (task manager) inbox, when a message in Slack needs to be a to-do.
A substack newsletter Taming the hybrid work chimera: Tips from Slack, WordPress, & Salesforce chiefs summarised some interesting conversations in a Clubhouse room, with some high profile participants. Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield teased forthcoming audio rooms and messaging (and stories… why??). Lots of very interesting stuff in this newsletter though.
A final tech note, Why Microsoft wants Discord - does everyone want a piece of the community and audio action? Clubhouse has clearly shaken things up and offered a new way of connecting, and now the big players are seeking to add that functionality fast. But as users surely we can manage to use different apps for different things, we don’t need one platform to absorb them all (even if we’re a long way down the ‘integrator’ spectrum, to callback to the start of our conversation). And perhaps this is more about a data/audience grab, at a segment outside of Microsoft Teams core user base?
59.45 Our community
Our question of the month on LinkedIn this time was:
Thinking about some new individual behaviours and team practices you've adopted over the last year, which ones would you like to continue doing, regardless of whether you continue working remotely in the future?
As ever the Virtual Not Distant community came out with some great responses, and we loved one answer from Nancy Settle-Murphy, about the creation of explicit team norms governing the use of various communications channels. We often talk about communication in remote teams needing greater intentionality, and this is a good one we should look to keep - being consistent and deliberate about what conversation goes where, so it all makes sense in the absence of face-to-face contextual cues.
A lovely response from @The4Habits on twitter too:
Making purposeful connections with our close circle of friends, families and colleagues. Taking the time to listen, empathize and create long-lasting memories. Something we cherish everyday.
So that’s a beautiful note to end on!
Remember, we love your feedback - please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with your thoughts and ideas, and do let us know if you try out any of the ideas that were discussed in this week’s episode.
If you like the podcast, you'll love our monthly round-up of inspirational content and ideas:
(AND right now you’ll get our brilliant new guide to leading through visible teamwork when you subscribe!)