1 year in. Work life after ‘the big experiment in remote work’

What a year it has been. Many months ago, I wrote some initial reflections on the shift caused by Covid-19, with a hint of excitement for the fundamental changes and (perhaps counterintuitively) individual freedoms this will bring to our work lives. Almost a year later, I’m revisiting those thoughts and collecting some new conclusions on the so-called ‘biggest experiment in (forced) remote work’. Here it goes.

Self-awareness and ownership remain the #1 skill to build.

If you’re naturally a self-starter, you’ve probably enjoyed the newly discovered freedoms of remote work in terms of job design, routine design and energy management. But making positive iterations in those areas is only possible if we’re aware of 1) what drains us and 2) what helps us work better.

And that process of self-discovery may as well involve feelings of being overwhelmed, ‘fried’ from screens or burnt out. These experiences however are essential to gain awareness of what makes us tick, what our bodies and minds need at any point in time, and what adjustments to make short- and long-term.

In that sense, I keep my conclusion of August 2020: The one main way we can build better routines is by taking ownership of our time and energy, and consciously designing it in fulfilling ways.

In the absence of routines decided by your office and co-workers, you’ll need the self-discipline of setting your own boundaries and habits. All that is an immense opportunity, not a challenge, if only we take ownership to finally be designers of our (work) lives.

Thoughts for the future: I’d love to see more businesses and teams allocate time for reflection, discuss wellbeing tips and encourage the setting of boundaries.

I find it strange how in the personal sphere of our lives, we make conscious choices of when and where we want to be (where to go to dinner, which hobbies to pick, which friends to hang out with.) but when it comes to work, we largely rely on peer hints and social norms to define our own personal lunch routines, focus times, pattern of taking breaks, resting or creating.

We can’t keep blaming technology for revealing our systemic dysfunctions.

Zoom fatigue, long meetings, blurred work-life boundaries. These are issues we’ve seen becoming more acute in the past year, and technology has been the first one to take the blame. ‘Screen time’s at fault. It would all be easier if we’d be together in a room’. Yet once we dig deeper, we see that the meetings were equally unstructured and unproductive before, we just had more tea break distractions in between that prevented us from feeling the sense of depletion we’re experiencing now.

If we want to come out better at the end of it all, we’ll need to take ownership of our work structures and behaviours, and not blame it on tech.

Thoughts for the future: We need a fundamental shift to the way we work, become more aware of the activities that bring real value and those that don’t. We need to challenge the status quo with courage, continuously, and strive to design our work in a way that …works.

Priorities have changed and ‘the people have spoken’. Going back is not an option.

Imagine someone telling you today that working remotely doesn’t work, that nothing will ever get done and that we MUST be all together to complete any work (well yes, certain Wall Street executives *cough cough* may still be throwing around ideas on that, but I sense they’ll soon find themselves in the role of work ‘dinosaurs’).

We have had a glimpse into how our lives can be designed around our hobbies, our energy levels and our dear ones. There are better ways to spend your lunch breaks that being around a big cantine table with tens of people, talking either projects or small talk.

Thoughts for the future: These revelations of freedom happened even in the context of significant mobility limitations. Once these get removed or at least reduced, it will be hard to convince anyone that ‘being in the office is the only way’, with so much potential for life design just a small step away.

Ergonomics is KEY.

You need your laptop screen at eye level, and hunching over the kitchen table is NOT a sustainable solution. This conclusion brought a dose of realism to my digital nomad dreams, but going back to that self-awareness point above, it definitely gave me new insights into the requirements needed for working from anywhere. I certainly hope no one’s (voluntarily) working from their couch or bed anymore in March 2021.

Thoughts for the future: Innovation in the space of office furniture should consider two things: ergonomic design, easy mobility (mobile office in a park anyone?) and dealing with disruptions. One look on Kickstarter these days reveals some interesting products aimed at helping us get things done in a way that’s not giving us lower back pain.

WFH is not WFA

One year in, there’s still talk of remote working being a big risk of isolation. While there’s an element of truth in that, especially if the way work is done in the company is not designed in an inclusive way, working remotely is not about being alone in a room for the rest of your career (unless you want it to be).

Working From Anywhere, you may even find yourself interacting with more people than you would in your own office, and those people may be brilliant individuals from industries and professions you otherwise would have never interacted with. And if you join social activities, that will be because you’ll genuinely want to, not because you need to rub shoulders in advance of an upcoming promotion talk.

Thoughts for the future: We really need to stop referring to the future of work as being about ‘WFH’. There’s more to life than our living rooms, and those afraid of remote work may well be afraid just because of the inherent limitation of that not-so-exciting vision. It’s WFA, not WFH.

Work boundaries, deep work, respecting the time of individuals are finally getting the visibility they deserve, and are no longer a ‘weird’ claim of the few.

I may be over optimistic here, but I have a sense that many more of us are slowly de-romanticising the concept of ‘busy’ and ‘always on’.

In the avalanche of work projects that seemed to hit us early last year, some companies took an unexpected approach. Instead of speeding up, they slowed down. Some moved to a 4 day work week to encourage recharging. Some extended the duration of their sprints and moved deadlines, to make it more relaxed.

To me, those companies got a fundamental truth about sustainable productivity. Going slower will bring you further.

Thoughts for the future: While some teams modelled rest and deep work, many are still in a rush of do-do-do, zoom calls and messages past working hours. I hope we all catch up on the importance of boundaries, and start to value boundary enforcement the same way we now value instant response and over-availability.

Asynchronous is the slow-down movement we all needed.

And finally, the hero wearing the red cape, asynchronous work. At its core, asynchronous is essentially a mind shift in expectations management. In fact, I am so excited about this movement one year in that I wrote a little Asynch Manifesto (modelled from the Agile Manifesto).

Context-rich communication over Demanding immediate responses

Conscious deep work over Mindless context-switching

Written communication over Joining calls (and running over time)

Intentional work design over Good ol’ gravity effect of the processes we know

Calm and steady over Constant Urgency

Here’s to the future of work.