Is Anyone Bored of WFH?

How are you finding the brave new world of working from home; Is it all relaxed meetings in pyjamas and smoothies in the morning, or is it entertaining bored kids and partners.

This blog is is all looking at little late in the COVID day now, but whilst lockdown is being loosened across countries, WFH cultures are likely to persist until certainty around safety in offices & travel is acceptable, and we may be experiencing (or wanting) more working from home in general in the future.

The Walbrook office was generally a hub of action and meetings and interrupting people to get the answer you wanted fast, and for many of us whilst working from home was not a complete unknown, I imagine it wasn’t at the forethought to ensure our work from home lifestyle and interactions were as good as they could be - we’d be in the office the next day anyway, right?

Whilst we’re (nearly) all now in the same perennially WFH scenario, personally I haven’t come across as much as expected conversation about working from home & good ideas to help make it easier and more enjoyable - that might just be me missing out on all these great conversations but to avoid the crushing anxiety which would come with that conclusion I’ve assumed they generally aren’t happening and we all could do with some material to work from.

Luckily someone else has done most of this already, like ThoughtWorks, so I’m just going to summarise some interesting information I’ve come across and link to other people’s work for more detail.

1. Avoid that burnout!

This topic pops up in every single blog / article / podcast / piece of folklore that exists on working from home. Keep a track of your hours, making sure you don’t get pulled into a downward spiral of doing “one more thing”. Separate life from work, ideally by separating your places from rest from your places from work. Make sure you clock off at reasonable times.

Have a routine that you can keep to - close up for the day at your usual time and plan an activity which will force you to do this. If you go off routine, plan to make up the time elsewhere (go for a walk at lunch if you plan on working late).

There is countless evidence [DevOps Handbook, Accelerate, 4 hour week, etc] that burnout affects your quality of work as well as your quality of life, so keep your work effective by avoiding burnout - building that LEGO Millenium Falcon with your kid can be as good for the company as it can for you! (It’s gonna be way better for your kid).

The difficult piece of this will be realising what you actually have time to commit to in the week. Saying no to requests from managers or co-workers can be tough but necessary to ensuring your work stack isn’t overwhelming and over-ambitious. The better you & your team’s capacity constraints are communicated & managed within the team and the wider platform, the better everyone will be at being consistent with delivering on-time and with quality. If you can find a spare 45 minutes, Andy Walker conveyed these ideas much with many more interesting anecdotes that I can pull together!

2. Turn on the damn camera

Raise your hand if you like talking to people face to face rather than over the phone? Oh yeah, thats right, I can’t tell because your camera is off.

We communicate with each other using so much more than our words alone - tone of voice, body movement, facial expressions, all help us express our points of view more coherently to our listeners, and if these are hidden we are limiting our ability to converse effectively. Martin Folwer has some strong words on this!

We’re also working in a global company where it’s likely you’re going to be talking to someone in a language which isn’t their natural language - where non-verbal aspects are likely to be more important in ensuring understanding. How will your dead pan sarcasm be taken the right way if your giveaway grin is hidden by the torn-off piece of a post-it note covering your camera?

Obviously this isn’t going to apply to all cases, you may have good reasons not to have the camera on for all calls, but if you’re worried about other family members or flatmates getting in the shot, remember that everyone has seen that BBC interview enough times to have overcome over the novelty of a tiny intruder running through the room (and, we’re going to hear them anyway).

3. Let the voices be heard!

Online meetings aren’t the free flowing idea factories that we are used to in a conference room. Conversations are generally more fractured, it’s difficult to determine understanding & buy in within the (Teams) room, and with everyone vying to speak with no way to be heard without talking over someone else, opinions can easily be lost to the ether, and a colleagues buy in to the decisions made with it.

Some of these problems can be solved by having cameras on, which gives talkers and listeners alike feedback to peoples reactions within the calls. This can be particularly useful to tell if the ideas & plans you are discussing are resonating with the team, and to determine if those with less inclination to interject seem to have any further opinions they may want to share (assuming you can read the air well!)

Further to this, make sure to make time for everyone to give their opinions; depending on the size of the group, you could go around asking everyone if they have any further input, or asking the group generally - making sure to leave time for people to pipe up!

People generally have different comfort levels with communicating ideas in groups, so if the purpose of the meeting will be to build designs it can be a good idea to make sure this is clear beforehand so those who are less comfortable at shooting ideas from the hip can gather their thoughts together to work though the group with. Which leads to…

4. Have a meeting agenda, & document

Make sure your meeting has an agenda. Meetings are filling up peoples calendars thick and fast, and the last thing people will want is to spend 30 minutes listening to a call to find out they could provide no input at all.

It also gives you a ready made documenting framework; Just add your notes below each agenda point! This can be distributed out at the end of the meeting so everyone can refer back to what was discussed & decided, and keeps anyone who could not in the meeting in the loop.

Add the ability to record meetings, and you have a great resource to reference people to for how a decision was made or to cover any walkthroughs needed. or to go back and listen to how great your phone voice is 😎. Remember that skimming meeting notes is going to be better for most people that skimming through a video highlights reel

5. Take a Break 🍫

Organise some break outs with colleagues like you would in the office. Coffees over a video conference, a few after work drinks, or a game of [insert game idea here] can be a great way to get some social time back with your colleagues, where this has been lost to the drive for efficient meetings and overly full calendars. Use your favourite video conf software for this, discussing your golf score at the weekend isn’t PCI DSS, and vendors have inbuilt games to help spice things up.

Just be careful who you mention having a work quiz to - quiz burnout is real 😅

6. Let YOUR voice be heard

Get a good headset, or use your phone / ipad to dial into meetings on Teams etc. Echos or broken audio is getting a little tedious after 12 weeks 😩. Request a headset from facilities, it may not be on you to provide hardware but it is on you to request what you need!

7. Make the most of working from home

Don’t forget that you are at home and you have a lot more freedoms than you would in the office! Do your kids need 20 minutes help with their homework? Is the sunshine forecast at lunch going to be better cycling weather than the evening downpours? Will your dinner taste much more flavoursome if you season the ingredients mid-morning rather than 5 minutes before? (Yes.)

We have the ability to be more flexible with our working hours (still avoiding point 1), so taking time to enjoy the fact your are at home and not being stuffed like a sardine into a oven-hot tube train to get to work is a luxury you can afford yourself.

Obviously this is better if your availability around these breaks is clear in your calendar and you aren’t jumping off the phone halfway through a client meeting to go surfing, but good surf doesn’t generally accommodate the 9-5 working day - so speak to your team to work out what balance you can strike 🏄‍♂️