Over the past 12 months, I have lost two team members because they insisted on being allowed to work from home. Even while hiring, I had to pass over a few very good profiles because they either wanted to work from another city or wanted a commitment on the number of days they would work from home.
Before March 2020 terms such as “work from home” and “remote work” were distant concepts that the cool companies offered their employees. COVID changed all that. But like with anything that is adopted in a compressed timeline, it didn’t give us the opportunity to learn new behaviors to support these concepts. It may come as a surprise to many that work-from-home and remote-work are not new concepts. They have been around ever since the internet and laptops became ubiquitous. In fact, I remember people telling me they were working from home even earlier, in the early days of mobile phones. These were people in Sales. They could do their work on the phone.
But in those days work-from-home was shorthand for doing minimum work. It was the standard excuse to watch India playing cricket, or attending a family function, or taking care of the kid on a school holiday.
My first brush with real work-from-home came on a trip to the Netherlands. My Dutch colleague would work from home three days a week. This was encouraged to avoid traffic congestion, to reduce fuel usage, and to reduce pollution. On those days, my colleague would sign in at exactly 9 a.m. his time. From that point on he would be at his desk all the way until 6 p.m. On those days, not a single message went unanswered. More than unanswered, it would be answered immediately. In fact, he was more available when he worked from home than when he came into the office.
While the COVID lockdown experience showed us that work-from-home is technically feasible in India, it didn’t give us the time to learn the etiquette needed to make it work. Recently, a manager related how one of her directs asked her if he would work from home. Her reply to him was, “I don’t care where you work from as long as you get your work done.” While that seems like a reasonable approach, it leaves out one key element. It isn’t whether the person who is working from home can get their tasks done. The real question is how does it affect the other people whose tasks are dependent on this person being available. If you working from home translates to other people having to wait for you to get back to them or having to align their work timings with yours, then it is a failure. No one person’s time is more important than another’s.
To make work-from-home a success, we must meet the following minimum criteria.
Team work timings must be clearly defined. Non-adherence must be called out. Work-from-home is not an implicit permission to work-when-you-want.
Current status must be communicated clearly. In an office we can see whether someone is at their desk or not, so we don’t waste time standing around waiting for them to return. In a work-from-home situation, we must have a way to know whether the person is at their desk and if not, when they will be back. This allows co-workers to plan their day better.
Redundancies of critical infrastructure should be installed in the home. This is India – you will lose electricity without warning, or your internet will go down. These should not be considered legitimate excuses for not being available. Power backup and a second internet provider are a must rather than a good-to-have.
This is not a comprehensive list. You should consider amending it to suit your specific needs. But the fact remains that work-from-home is not about technology, it is about the right habits that will enable us to use the technology to our advantage.
Is it possible to make work-from-home and remote-working a reality? Yes, it requires a change in behavior in the way people are used to working. From being fastidious about their commitments, to removing unpredictability with regard to their availability, without inculcating these habits such initiatives will lead to reduced productivity and general unhappiness. While the COVID crisis pushed us to adopt remote workplaces, it didn’t give us time to build new habits. Companies that want to explore the culture of remote working must take a step back and begin by first making behaviors that enable remote working the default behaviors.
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