www.cmswire.com: I have worked from home for 30 years, but never in forced isolation. Many of you reading this are probably now in the same boat.
Although the technology for remote collaborative working has been around for 30 years, the adoption rate had (until recently) been slow but steady. The adoption rate has shot up to almost 100% in recent weeks as all non-essential industries are working remotely to help flatten the COVID-19 infection curve.
8 comments:
Dealing with remote work this last month has not been pleasant, at least for me. I miss the relative simplicity of working in studio on projects and the motivation of being surrounded by others doing the same thing or more. I may hate the stress culture at CMU but it does motivate me to get things done. Morale can get a bit low being alone or away from that school environment. One thing I've always found particularly interesting about professionals that work from home, in my experience, is that I don't see them do that much work. When my parents worked from home in past most of the time I saw them actually accomplishing things sporadically and taking breaks often. I remember thinking "you get paid by the hour but you spend maybe 15 minutes of each hour ACTUALLY doing what you're supposed to." It makes me wonder if working from home increases productivity during the short bursts of work or if it just decreases the expectation of what a person can accomplish in a certain time frame as employers begin to see this level of productivity across the board with working from home employees.
Switching to working online was not initially not hard for me. I was used to doing a lot of my homework that wasn’t for Susan or Dick on my computer. Those classes however made the shift hard. I have also been at home and gotten the chance to talk to my dad who is working from home currently and he has had a much different experience than some of what this article is discussing. Part of this article talks about less status meetings, but my dad has had these types of meetings all the time. He was talking today about how he actually is more stressed out working at home because he is being forced to join these calls and zooms and just sit through them and listen but he might have to speak at some point so he actually has to pay attention and can’t do other work at the same time. This has been similar for my classes. Some classes where they were just work periods when I already finished a project meant that I could go and do something else or continue sleeping. There were other classes I had where attendance and participation was required which made me get dressed and get out of bed, and most of those ones I enjoyed, but nonetheless, it did kind of suck not being able to multitask. I am also the type of person who sits in class normally and just kind of doodles on my paper because I simply can’t sit and focus for that long, yet I am still listening, but this was really hard with my situation at home during corona mini.
Project management software has always kind of fascinated me. There is a really fine line between the software working for you, and you having to work to make the software worth it for the time and money needed to invest in it. That being said, I’ve always prefered in-person check-ins and quick meetings to any sort of program, as hearing things from peoples’ mouths is usually more reliable and efficient than having them learn an entirely new program (and remembering to use it). Of course, that’s no longer an efficient or effective way to do things, given that none of us are in the same physical space as our colleagues or peers. When I managed my imaginarium team and we had to shift online, the thought of using a project management platform crossed my mind, but at the end of the day I didn’t want to put one more thing on my team’s shoulders; moving back home and shifting classes to a new online software was enough to deal with.
Working from home the last few months has been a big struggle for me mostly because I'm still not very good at managing myself in this environment. While at school I have very different stimulation that improves my productivity, namely the physical environment and social interaction I get there. I kind of wish that I had gotten to read this article at the beginning of this process, but I think it will be useful information for working in teams in the future and also in keeping track of myself this summer. Thinking of the "critical path" towards an end goal allows you to prioritize things and keep you on track for a project, which I think will be particularly helpful when trying to work in a void. I am also hoping to have more frequent non-school related calls with people in the future because I think that having interaction is one of the things that makes me most able to sit down and get things done.
The author talks a lot about all the things he has had to start changing as a result of remote pandemic working and learning. A very large portion of these things were related to technology, and I just hope to god that workplaces do not expect everyone to just know how to do these things. My mom is in her fifties, and is not the most technology proficient. She has sat at home literally crying over her computer just trying desperately to figure out how to do receipts for her work remotely. Of course my siblings and I did our best to help, but people need to remember that the modifying of critical processes for remote work is hard, especially for older people. And as retirement slowly becomes more of a fictional thing for people, and the age of employed people gets higher, people need to advocate for workers who might need additional help making that transition.
I read someone saying that people around the world trying to adapt to remote work is like people trying to learn how to bike. No one can ride a bike perfectly at the first attempt. Others might indicate that walking is faster than biking unsteadily. However, once you have learned how to bike, you can get to places ten times faster than walking. Since we all have just started learning how to remote work, it is non-sense to compare working remote and in office, and conclude what is better. That being said, I am struggling very much to adapt to new circumstances. One thing I strongly agree with the article is that “learning to trust those working remotely” is the key. I have problem in trusting others and trusting myself working remotely. I hesitate people trusting me. I am simply losing confidence in myself. Some people do give up learning how to bike. I hope I would be able to acquire before I give up thinking that I don’t have a good taste in working remotely by nature.
Now that the school year has come to a close, I have been given the chance to reflect on my performance during remote instruction and really think about how it went for me. Performance-wise, I think everyone has good and bad days but the bad days were significantly worse than the ones that I had during the normal academic year. With that in mind, I really think this article is helpful for people that have more of a management role within their newly remote company. The idea of breaking up projects into smaller tasks with a shorter timeline in an effort to maintain a certain level of control over your employees seems like a poor way to manage people at this time. It is no surprise that the world has seemed to stop so the thought of rushing employees to complete a task seems like a wasted use of urgency. Like I said before, everybody has good and bad days and I think we should be using this time of isolation to work on ourselves and not be rushed by our bosses.
I thought this article was interesting as it provided a look into the corporate world and how they’re adjusting to the virus and the necessary changes in workflow as a result of working from home. In some ways, the theatrical shutdown is almost easier - there’s really no way to do our jobs fully online, so everyone is just out of work. For companies where this is not the case, the transition to online is bringing its own set of challenges. I think this article gets at the point that a lot of people have been making in various ways, that we can’t expect perfection and we can’t necessarily expect to be meeting previous performance levels right now. This article really got at some of the less obvious reasons for this, like not only are employees potentially struggling with technology, but it causes smaller issues like managers needing to find new ways to check in and most likely doing less micromanaging, and figuring out how to distribute work remotely. There is also the issue of less face-to-face interaction between employees and in general, which in many cases is leaving people frustrated and emotionally fragile.
Post a Comment