Lockdown and Working from home

Covid-19 has forced most of us to work remotely. This sudden drastic change in our work life has made some of us rethink about the viability of working remotely over an extended period of time.

After slogging in offices for more than ten years, I had started to think that working from home would be the change I want in my work life. It would make my life more relaxed. It would do away with the excruciating commute. The noise at office, the constant interruptions from others and loads of other factors that hinder your focus - all of them would go away. It was like a dream.

When Covid-19 started and lockdown happened, I realized that maybe the long standing dream is coming true. Since everyone was now forced to work from home, this practice would become more mainstream.

Traditionally working from home was not seen as a viable option for large ( or even small) teams for various reasons. Let's look at some of them.

• If a few members of a team work remotely while rest are working from office, it was thought that the remote workers would miss out on essential communications that happen in office informally. There may be important decisions taken or complex issues discussed in impromptu face to face interactions that the remote workers will never be a part of. Even if a summary of such decisions or discussions is later shared in mail with them, they may not get the same feel for it had they been present themselves.
• Lack  of socializing for the employees. Apart from the work that one accomplishes, a large part of the work life today is about meeting people at work place, developing friendships with like minded people and developing long term relationships with people you meet during the course of your work. But with remote work, the majority of time you would spend would be at you home office or a co-working space with you attached to your laptop for most part of it. This may lead to development of a certain kind of fatigue due to lack of enough real life social interactions on a day to day basis.

But there were some benefits as well. 

• Ability to focus to hard problems without any interruptions.
• Save time and money that was earlier wasted on commute. 
• You can live anywhere as long as you have a good internet connection
• Working hours and their time can be flexible

Most people wanted to find a middle path. They would go to office only when needed and work from home when the work could be any without anyone's intervention.

This is the kind of flexibility most of us were looking for. I didn't anticipate what it would be like to be forced to work from home over an extended period of time.

That is what happened with the arrival of covid-19 and subsequent lockdown.  

Working from home doesn't seem that attractive anymore. 

This change of heart could be due to a few reasons. Let's look at them.

• The need to socialize for us to have a stable work life may be more important than we initially thought.
• Going to office and working there, makes it easy to leave the work related stress behind when you get back to home. The commute works as some kind of insulation layer between the two environments. 
• Lack of experience with respect to setting up a home office. Getting the right kind of lighting, the right furniture etc. 
• Maybe due to lockdown, most people have their families at home now. So the distractions haven't gone away. They have just changed their form. Now you could have to Kids/Spouse/Parents, who could be the one disturbing you.

This has been my experience along with that of some people that I have spoken to.

With Major companies like Google and Twitter now allowing their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, other companies are likely to follow suit.

How will this change our work culture? The situation is still evolving and we are living in interesting times. 

Let's wait and watch how it turns out.