The Human side of Working Together
It has always been weighing on my mind since the stay at home period started in Singapore, to put together what I have experienced in this disruptive period.
With the increasing declarations of how remote work is becoming the new normal for all office workers, I wanted to delve into my experience of life before and after remote work.
Along with this post, I would like to first acknowledge my privilege as being part of the niche working class that is able to continue my work from the safety of my home. To all the frontline workers that are risking your safety in keeping our systems functioning, you have my heartfelt gratitude.
First is to bring about the awareness of the merits of the future of remote work.
From the lens of cost and time, there have been many acknowledgments of the reduction of cost on office rent, the reduction of time and energy spent on commuting daily, and to unlock greater focus and agency for employees to control their finite attention. And depending on our phase of life, this flexibility will help many working families to better manage and juggle their commitments of family.
From the lens of direct metrics of time and cost efficiencies, there is no doubt that remote works bring overall benefits to us. But I guess for me in this piece, what I am trying to develop is an awareness of the more intangible and nuanced perspective of what I miss from having an office life, before this stay at home period.
First and foremost, for me would be a celebration of the deep and meaningful interactions that happen when working together in proximity.
The context here is that I do get energized by my interactions with people and thrive in these forms of connections. The experience for me is that the quality of interactions and relationships are enhanced through being present with someone.
As this Atlantic article puts it “the power of presence has no simple explanation”. And I agree with this struggle of how bringing to words the magic of feeling like someone is truly present with you.
A big factor for me is the physical familiarity of faces and routines at our workplaces that help us open up new conversations. Each opportunity to contact helping us build onto our common ground of shared experiences and the trust we have for each other.
The next idea is then on how the digital forms of communication are shaping how we interact with each other.
I think we have all adapted to these tools that give us accessibility to communicate from wherever and whenever, however, I also feel like I am moving towards a life of Zoom fatigue.
I guess it would come from a variety of reasons, from our daily schedules of back to back virtual calls, to the depth of conversations we can have when we have a multitude of other notifications that are happening on our digital screen.
I actually felt that people paid better attention when we were there in the same room, out of common courtesy to put away distractions, and actually pay attention to each other. And I do just miss the serendipity of encounters that we could experience in physical presence.
To be able to touch base when we bump into a familiar face and to check-in with them on their lives and their feelings. It has given me a much wider breadth of experiences and interactions when we work together as a community.
What I am also begging to discover is also a better understanding of what makes the culture of my company; Padang & Co unique and sorely missed by many of my colleagues.
To me, we have a strong and cohesive culture within Padang & Co, with enough psychological safety to show up and bring ourselves to the workplace. There is a spirit of purpose and community that we have forged together that has been fostered through our challenges, company celebrations, one-on-one check-ins, and even from our daily rituals for tea.
We have a uniquely collaborative culture, that I only realize how much we thrived on, once our physical proximity was taken away.
There was agility at the office to be able to quickly cluster and form diverse energy around a mutual challenge.
One that the current remote medium has added more layers in our workflow and has left us more disjointed than before.
And finally, I do miss just having a routine of going out of the house and experiencing life around me in my commute to work.
To me, there is a certain joy from the exposure to new communities, developments, and changes in nature that stimulate my awareness of the wider world around.
I have felt that in the months that have passed by under the stay at home period, that I have not fully connected to what the wider communities and how they are doing.
I do worry that when remote work becomes the new norm for a certain class of workers, will they lose touch with the diverse communities and facilities that make up our daily journeys to work.
What happens to our wider communities when our awareness of our surroundings is becoming more and more fragmented?
“I worry that, in our current focus on the digital, we have lost some of our agency and some of our sense of what being human might mean”
I do believe that we need to be able to form awareness and understanding of the importance of what a physical workplace can offer us.
The more we are caught up with an obsession with cost and convenience as the sole focus, the more we lose sight of intangible factors that give color to our work lives.
Of course, I am not here to dictate what is the right or wrong choice in our journey towards the future of work, however, I just hope that we can find it in us to acknowledge what we might lose if we are not aware of it.
References
- When Working From Home Doesn’t Work — https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/when-working-from-home-doesnt-work/540660/
- In our focus on the digital, have we lost our sense of what being human means? — https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/24/in-our-focus-on-the-digital-have-we-lost-our-sense-of-what-being-human-means
- The New Humanism: Technology should enhance, not replace, human interactions — https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/06/11/the-new-humanism-technology-should-enhance-not-replace-human-interactions/
- Working from home can make people more productive. Just not during a pandemic — https://www.vox.com/2020/3/20/21187469/work-from-home-coronavirus-productivity-mental-health-nicholas-bloom
