Early Adaptations: Remote Work Diaries #1
We were as ready as we thought we could be to ‘go remote’. As regular travellers with access to many of the tools that make knowledge work from ‘anywhere’ possible and a plan for operating 100% remote, we felt ready. And having spent considerable time researching remote work we felt forewarned about the challenges.
But how prepared were we?
As a business we believe in the power of lived experience to create a different sort of understanding — embodied knowledge of a phenomenon. Our shift to remote working offers us, we reasoned, a great opportunity to see for ourselves how the theory or ‘second-hand accounts’ are quite different from the lived experience of something.
So we decided to do some auto-ethnography. We created a set of live field notes. The team contributes to them across the day; sharing observations, feelings, challenges and their responses. At times a formal set of notes, at others it’s a way for people to share their emotional response to a complete change in daily life.
In this piece, we share some of our early reflections on the switch to remote work. Along with observations, and reflections on how our experience squares with existing research, we have included practical suggestions.
The theme that pervades the last 40 years of research into remote work is how people manage the absence of spatial, social and temporal structures and boundaries.
It’s no surprise that we have found the same. Here’s what we discovered, and how we have adapted.
When it comes to space, it’s nice to have a good set up but it’s essential to have boundaries
Creating a workspace was an exciting prospect from some of us and a challenging one for others, depending on resources available.
We quickly realised the defining characteristic of this particular remote experiment is that everyone is WFH. This means sharing space with co-workers in the form of partners, flatmates and children. For many of us, our first days at home involved an awkward dance around rooms, testing wi-fi reach, soundproofing and laptop camera angles in every corner. Finding quiet and privacy often means retreating to a bedroom, which can feel uncomfortably intimate for VC calls.
With any uncharted social territory, establishing etiquette is a useful way to proceed, as one colleague discovered:
“The working ‘rule’ is that if you’re the one who joins a call first you get to stay in the main room and the other person has to relocate if they need to go on a call.”
However, the biggest challenge we faced collectively was the sudden spatial intrusion of work into the home. We soon came up with various ways to draw a line between the professional and personal — what Nippert-Eng (1996) describes as ‘segmenting’ behaviour as part of the ‘boundary work’ essential to navigating home and work lives.
In our own research, we found that some remote workers went with the flow — splicing work and home life together in a makeshift way (we called them embracers).
It turns out that we are, by and large, ‘mitigators’ who try to recreate the structure of the office. We did this in the following ways:
Rearranging furniture and belongings between working and non-working hours.
“I set up a completely unique workspace in my house so I don’t associate my bed/kitchen table/bedroom desk with work. It is a fold-out desk from Ikea so I can unpack it and re-pack it at the end of the day thereby adding a bit of ritual at the beginning and end of my workday.”
Ahrentzen (1990) draws on Irving Goffman’s theory of the self to explain the importance of material props for an individual’s orientation towards work within the home. Furniture and decor constitute ‘scenery’ that create theatrical ‘stages’, which shape the role an individual plays in that context. Colleagues certainly found this to be true, creating and dismantling the work stage to help transition into and out of their professional roles.
“I’ve been packing up all my work stuff into my backpack at the end of the workday. It’s like putting my stuff in my cubby at the office. It keeps our place cleaner and helps me not think about work stuff.”
Recreating a commute is what Ahrentzen (1990) refers to as a ‘transition ritual’ to replace the function that commuting previously played in demarcating the start or end of the working day. Many of us found ourselves performing such rituals:
“I find leaving the house in the morning for a quick walk before work and then again at the end of the day is particularly helpful for setting boundaries between work and living space. Mentally I’m trying to treat my flat as an ‘office’ when I come back from my walk.”
Marking work and non-work hours with a different soundtrack.
“I’m experimenting with music to change up the energy when I’m not working to help ’split’ up the space and signal working vs not working.”
Proactive time management is crucial
Despite working regular hours, we all found our first week at home exhausting. Several features of remote working made it particularly tiring.
- Communication can be overwhelming in an all-remote team as people over-communicate to compensate for lack of in-person interaction.
- It’s easier for virtual meetings to run over.
“Hangout calls are often going over the scheduled time due to unrestricted space (no one can kick us out).”
- There are fewer natural breaks and reasons to move physically.
“It’s amazing how much you take those little interstitial movements between floors in the office for granted.”
But by week two, we started to take more active steps to manage our time, break up the day and maintain work/life balance.
Things that worked for us included:
- Setting reminders for breaks during the day
“I’m going to use a timer to make sure I take breaks and see each ‘sitting’ as a focused task.”
- Using list tools
“I made a Trello list so I could happily put things in the ‘done today’ bucket.”
- Scheduling non-work activities
“I created a Monday–Friday schedule to keep myself motivated and to remember to do other things than just work work.”
Moving office culture online is possible, but there are limitations
As a close-knit and sociable team, we were keen to maintain our strong culture from afar. We’ve made efforts to translate social office rituals, both formal and informal, into virtual ones.
- We start the day by saying good morning on Slack and sharing photo updates (pets are a favourite theme)
- We continue to be curious and envious of each other’s lunches
- We meet weekly for Fika…
- …and end Friday with beers.
While these regular social interactions are much appreciated, there are some elements of embodied togetherness that simply can’t be replicated. Take Fika: on the surface, the key ingredients are conversation and eating baked goods, something we can do easily together from afar.
However, we all felt the remote experience was lacklustre, and reflected on what was missing. Fika in the office has a host — someone who takes the time to plan, prepare and serve treats and coffee to the rest of the team. Neither this expression of care nor the communal sensory experience of sharing food is simple to reproduce at a distance.
Spontaneous interaction is the missing piece
Three weeks in we are feeling like we’re getting the hang of this. Adjustments made, routines reinforced and office rituals adapted. Yet there’s a nagging feeling that one apparently inconsequential aspect of office life is missing: the unintended, snatched conversation.
These take place stacking the dishwasher, at the end of a meeting, in the lift up to the office or by spontaneous arrangement when two people head out to get lunch. These brief encounters and interactions create social bonds, shared social understanding and often lead to new ideas. More than their instrumental importance they are what makes an office a social space we enjoy coming to.
As Judith Heerwagen and colleagues have noted we rely on visual cues and the perception of availability to make these happen. That subtle sense that some is ‘open’ to interacting. These cues are easy to read when we’re in the same space. Less so now.
In a lovely 2008 paper ‘The Translucence of Twitter’, Ingrid Erikson explored how home workers and freelancers used the ‘micro-blogging’ site to create visibility, awareness and accountability between themselves. Erikson proposed that such “socially translucent designs are meant to act like the window in a door — revealing clues to what might be ahead, but without full detail.”
How we create the conditions for these all-important, unintended encounters is work in progress and is likely to rely on the artful combination of our Slack and a new social practice. The art of sending blank text messages in Japan is one example of creative innovation to sustain bonds or trigger interaction.
Making Things Visible
Much of what we have experienced won’t be news to scholars of remote work. It chimes with our own experience studying this over the last few years.
Yet reading the literature, and studying others’ lives is quite different from experiencing it for ourselves. Jumping in has forced us to adapt on the fly, mid-project, and finding out what works for us.
We’ve learned for ourselves that:
- Creating structure and reimposing boundaries matters
- Compensating for absence of presence through more communication has its limits
- Not all office rituals can be virtualized and new ones are needed
- Unplanned interactions are vital to social and information exchange in an office
- Time management is more vital than ever — in and between meetings and across home and work time
While this period is not without challenges, it also offers an incredible moment of clarity. In a piece for the New York Times, Priya Parker argues that the disruption caused by COVID-19 could transform the act of social gathering for the better by making visible its core components: “this spell will force us to focus on what matters — and decide what that is.”
The same can be said for work. Taking away the scaffolding we usually lean on to function forces us to figure out what lies at the heart of productive work and happy teams. There’s an opportunity for us all to emerge as more intentional, thoughtful and adaptable organisations in the process.
// Erin Hackett
We’re here to help.
Despite the disruptions to life caused by COVID-19 our work continues. We’re engaged across a range of remote-first work be that competitive intelligence analysis or video- and mobile diary studies. On-going work is exploring collaboration platform adoption in small businesses, PC use by enterprise workers and spatial computing technologies.
Whilst we believe in the power of embodiment to get at the heart of human experience we have always embraced technology that makes our research and work possible from a distance.
To find out more about how we can help you email Tom.Rowley@stripepartners.com
References
Ahrentzen, S. B. (1990). Managing conflict by managing boundaries: how professional homeworkers cope with multiple roles at home. Environment and Behavior, 22(6).
Erickson, I. (2008). The translucence of Twitter. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2008(1), pp. 64–78.
Heerwagen, J.H., Kampschroer, K., Powell, K.M., and V. Loftness. (2004). Collaborative knowledge work environments. Building Research & Information, 32(6), pp. 510–528.
Nippert-Eng, C. (1996). Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parker, P. (2020). How to Be Together Apart In the Time of Coronavirus. New York Times, [online]. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/internet-coronavirus-social-distancing [Accessed 08 Apr. 2020].
