It’s another Monday. Start of
another week. Start the day by checking mails while still in bed or while
having tea or coffee and plan the day ahead. Start your laptop by 9 am and then
proceed to take a shower and then breakfast. Then starts the busy day sitting in
a comfortable place of your home, which sometimes does not end at 6 pm. When it
does, the evening ahead looks like a well-deserved time to relax, sans the tiring
commute back to home. This is how life has been in the past one year since the
pandemic and therefore, Work from Home started.
I remember the day before my work from
home had started. We planned how we were going to manage and co-ordinate work
going forward and how things were going to be communicated. While packing
things that day and making sure that my desk was spic and span, I felt that I
would not be gone for long, not realizing that the situation was going to aggravate
further. The seriousness had not seeped in my mind even while going home by in
a jampacked train, where only few women in my compartment had covered their
faces with masks. ‘Such hypochondriacs!’ I felt back then. After getting down
the train that day, daily struggle that it was to be able to get down at my
station after wading through the wild crowd of the train, I felt that work from
home would be a nice break from these daily commute battles. But I had not
anticipated such a long break of one year.
Among so many new surprises that we
got last year, work from home was one of them. It seemed like a foreign concept
for many organisations. Thankfully, the pandemic also changed the definition of
work from home for many who thought that work from home was equivalent to a
holiday and therefore discouraged it. Thus, the pandemic caused a shift in mindset,
though we would have loved that to see that happen under normal circumstances. I
think the biggest victory of working from home is an improvement in
productivity. Especially in cities like Mumbai where the daily commute drains a
person of his or her energy, that saved time and energy levels could be well
invested in completing the tasks at hand. I remember a year back when Work from
Home was seen as something exciting and novel. People saw the extra time worth
investing in their hobbies. Thus, we saw a surge in social media posts of
Dalgona coffee, Mandala art and lots of cakes made in pressure cookers. With gyms
shut, people transformed their homes not only to offices but also to gyms. As a
proof of that, we saw numerous workout posts of not only celebrities but also
of our fellow colleagues who paid serious attention to physical and mental well-being.
I too seized this opportunity to gorge upon many new shows, exercise at home
and read a lot of books. I remember that there was an influx of many new OTT
series that time, probably targeting the relatively free class of working people
and students.
Meetings too got a different face
and we see the funny angle of it through various memes on social media. Team
meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams gained an impetus like never before. While some
enthusiastic people like to leave their cameras on during meetings, wanting to
have a feel of face-to-face meetings, majority choose to be behind the camera
and be silent spectators or listeners and speak when necessary. Conversations which
began with typical small talk topics like “How was your weekend?” or “How is the
weather?” now begin with “Can you hear me?”, “I’m not able to hear you” or “I
can’t see your screen” etc. thus consuming the time for small talk. Dressing up
for virtual meetings was another topic of humorous discussions where there were
memes and videos about people wearing formal shirts or tops over pyjamas. ‘Face
value’ is thus important for some meetings!
While work from home ensures and proves
that we give our best from any corner of the world, it is also seen to have
blurred the lines between personal and professional life, especially for those
who mistake work from home as work for indefinite number of hours because come on,
you are sitting at home and don’t have a train to catch. So might as well sit and
put some extra hours to finish that mountain of work as if there is no tomorrow.
Such way of thinking disrupts the work life balance, which almost compensates
for the commute stress that you want to avoid.
However, it is necessary to lay these boundaries yourself and switch
your mind off post work hours. A sense of discipline needs to be instilled in
our own selves to finish work on time and catch the train which drops us to the
station of enjoying personal life. This mental commute from home office to home
is very important to devote time for your loved ones and most importantly to
yourself. When we were in office, we used to take tea breaks or go on walks
after lunch as a means to spend time with our colleagues and share our experiences
of the day. Now that has stopped and we are working remotely, chats on platforms like
Skype or other IMs don’t seem like real conversations and we instead focus solely
on work, sitting in our chairs for long hours. Breaks at regular intervals or
even a power nap has a lot to contribute towards better productivity. I also read
articles about how office romances are suffering and have declined because of work from home scenario,
which I found funny and made me think how a workplace can have myriad motivational factors for various people.
For me and countless others, work
from home which was earlier new normal is now normal, like any other day with that same longing as before for weekends and checking for weekends clubbed with
public holidays. Initially I remember how so many of us hesitated to utilise
our leave because we were working from home. Soon after realizing that work
from home, after exploring and exhausting its novelty, is like a normal work day,
people considered leave as not only a reason of getaway to exotic locations but
also a reason to de-stress, switch off and relax. The time spent away from laptop also seems like a vacation.
In few articles that I read, employees in some
developed countries too would prefer working from home even after the pandemic given how flexibly they can work within the home office setup.
Work from home, though is a phase, will be a memorable one. The office days and
office fun will be back someday. We have office fun virtually too, by having
virtual lunches or events, but we all know that laughter and banter can’t be
enjoyed virtually as much as in person. Looking at my wardrobe, I remember how
much I used to plan to dress up for the next day to office, one of my
motivations to go to office. I imagine the clothes in my wardrobe expressing envy
to my pyjamas now that their roles have reversed. The pandemic changed our
lives in many ways and even after getting back to office, we will still be cautious
enough to be socially distanced, divided by bottles of sanitizers and masks,
until we get the vaccine of enthusiasm back to enjoy the previous old, former normal
life. Till that happens, we must continue reaping the fruits of work from home
in the best way that we can and show this virus that nothing can beat us down!
