Working remotely - Before and After
What changed in remote work before and after Covid-19
2021 it’s about to end and I’ve been reading on LinkedIn, a lot of posts telling the benefits of working remotely. Luckily, I had the opportunity to work remotely before Corona-19 and I would like to share what I’ve been learned leading teams remotely before and after the lockdown situation.
The Coronavirus situation forced almost all companies to shift to remote work, however things are slowly(or not) getting back to normal, and returning to the office starts to be one of the conversations we have in video calls.
I would like to share some of my thoughts about how working from home was before and after the coronavirus.
Benefits are real but, be careful! If you were already working remotely, you probably heard from your friends’ phrases like “you are so lucky, I wish I could work from home too” because we picture working from home brings plenty of benefits, indeed, the benefits are real but here some differences that I notice of working remotely in regular times (before 2020) and after 2020:
Flexible hours — Yes, you can optimize your time, but this requires a lot of discipline to works, having an agenda updated daily will help for sure but it is enough?
Before: If you had someone living with you, I take the risk to say probably those people (includes wife, roommate, kids, parents, relatives) weren’t at home full-time during your working hours, which means you had less interruption, more focus and the feeling of being more productive higher than never.
After: Your house turns an empty place into a full noise place, in the beginning people are learning what is working from home, so they don’t understand why you can’t open the door when the doorbell rings or why you don’t give so much attention when they pop up at your room talking about what happened on some morning tv show. It is chaotic but fortunately, things fall into place and get better with time.
Enjoy the comforts of home — After a long trip I used to say “Nothing better than sleeping in our own bed”, I’m a stay-at-home person, I love watching movies on Friday night and I cal tell you, there is nothing best than using your own bathroom. All I said we can understand as before because those are great to do if it is a choice. After May 2020 (when Brazil went into “lockdown”), staying at home sounds like an obligation than an option, this definitely changes the way we experienced working from home, after an exhausting day you hadn’t other choices rather than stay home (at least we were supposed to do that), we’ve tried to keep connected with our relationships through video calls and discover it’s tiring and it wore us out so much that we couldn’t wait to have the opportunity to meet again in person(family members and co-workers).
Work from anywhere — It’s great to have the opportunity to work anywhere, but this “anywhere” has to follow basic requirements such as stable internet, a comfortable place that allows you to do your job without any risks to injure your back or anything worse. Those things seem obvious but just scroll your LinkedIn feed and you may have a good chance to see someone working at mountain taint, beach chair, close by a pool considering you are in a regular work routine, you probably will find problems whether answering a call with the team or going to the most extreme case, being in public places having your equipment stolen (here in Brazil is not so extreme case) or broken by accident.
You must be thinking right now where Work from anywhere fits with before and after 2020?
Well, the truth is, issues related to “work from anywhere” always will exist, the question is how companies that were forced to shift to remote work will deal with it and we‘ll see that in 2022.
