Working from home. Boy have we heard enough about that this year. What works, what doesn’t, dos and don’ts of setting up your home office, how to team build with remote teams, the list goes on.
I don’t know if it was a radio program or a blog I was reading but I came across a thought that was pretty fascinating to me.
“While more companies and workers are embracing the benefits of remote work, long-term arrangements may not live up to the hype. Experts say extended remote work threatenss a “decay in culture”, as out of office workers face increased isolation, distractions, and blurred lines between work and home life. Short-term success amid the pandemic has largely been rooted in established relationships, which are harder to build and maintain online, Axios reports. It’s even led some companies to rebuild virtual simulations of their offices to give employees the social experiences of office life.”
Kelli Nguyen
The idea of virtual office simulations is something I never would have imagined.
But given the way this pandemic has unfolded and the changes that have been brought about because of it, I would posit that long term, we’re going to have to learn how to cope with this, whether there’s a decay in culture or not.
I saw an article on CNN recently that said effectively, there is no getting back to normal and the sooner we accept that and embrace the new reality the better off we’ll be. That’s more the side of the discussion that I come down on. I think that like many other times in history we’ve undergone a paradigm shift where things have just changed, and they aren’t going to be like they were in the past.
Maybe that isn’t a bad thing if we embrace it and learn to live with it, but as long as we oppose it and try to have our virtual work spaces and so on, I think that change is going to be very difficult to accept and adapt to.
My encouragement when I speak with people is to embrace the change. Figure out what The New Normal looks like, arrange your house and your schedule around it and make it something you can live with and flourish in.
I could be wrong, I hope that I am. I miss baseball games and movies and restaurants, but this new normal isn’t entirely without it’s merits, we just have to be very intentional for the time being to see the virtues as this way of doing things becomes second nature.