A year of Home-cum-Office

 

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!