Discoveries About Working From Home

The Remote Work Experiment

• Discoveries about Working From Home
• Why I Preferred the Office

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The coronavirus pandemic has forced me, like many others, to work from home on a continuous base, without childcare support and for an indeterminate length of time.

That has forced me to reevaluate long-held beliefs I had about working from home and the office, and understand which kind of location I actually prefer.

This is the first part of an internal monologue on which one is preferable. It is fully anecdotal, in that I don’t offer research and only give my views on the remote experiment as I have been living it.

Join me and see what I’ve found.

Reduced Costs

A few things about working from home are obvious and expected. There is no commute, which is an immediate saving in terms of time, money and health. Just the cost of going to London and buying lunch every day is a reduction of hundreds of pounds a month. Easily around the minimum monthly wage in Portugal, which helps me put things in perspective.

By itself, this is a strong motivator to avoid the office. But if your wage is comfortable enough that what remains makes it worthwhile, other two factors are more immediate and compelling: avoiding a long crowded and uncomfortable commute, and stressing about time delays and missed trains.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys travelling to London by train or having to take the underground. And if before I would shrug over the observation these were polluted environments and a reliable diffuser of colds and flu, and just take it as a contingency of the job, in times of Coronavirus it became obvious how much effect they can have on the population’s health as a whole and how avoidable they can be.

So, no commute: Good!

Improvements and Challenges to Family Life

There is a fundamental aspect in which this period differs from true remote working: children are at home and so many people have been furloughed or lost their jobs that many families will all be home as well. And with that come balances and difficulties.

Being confined at home with the whole family is a real blessing but it does put a lot of stress on the parents if the children are still young and require constant supervision. If the family dynamics are tense, then this may be a problem. And even if the bonds improve at the start, being too close without breaks can strain them after enough time. Fortunately, this is not a permanent situation.

So there is a tightrope to walk for the family. Parents can’t both be working full time at the same time, so someone has to keep an eye on the children, especially if you don’t want them to spend all their waking hours in front of a screen.

If both parents are still employed, this is a hard balance. They may have to time-share, but that will push one of them to work during unsocial hours and possibly when they’re already tired and less productive. This may further strain relations, with one party feeling more disadvantaged than the other.

It’s also hard to keep children motivated away from their friends, and without indulging on too much screen time. Cooking up new activities is hard, as well as keeping them away from one of their love-objects for hours on end, when s/he is there so near, is almost torture.

We enforced communal rituals around meals to develop the sense of family and make the best of this forced confinement. That brought back a bit of the Southern European mode of life, with slower meals and all of us together at breakfast- and lunch-time, a luxury I had forgotten years ago.

I Felt More Productive

Despite all the technology around us to enable remote working, the big question employers ask is whether their employees will be less productive working at home.

That depends on your family support. If you can isolate yourself and work at home as if you were in your private office, then sure, it’s all about the technology. If not, there is going to be an issue around time management, at least during the lockdown.

When you have to dedicate time from your working day to family or childcare, those are hours taken from your workday. Even if you compensate them later, you won’t be at your peak or able to collaborate with your teammates, and your productivity tends to be less.

That, I hope, is expected of everyone at this stage, and tolerated in our current circumstances. So I’d like to focus here instead on the time when I’m able to contribute to my workday in my normal hours.

I think the most natural worry of employers and managers when moving to remote working is whether the employees will slack off. Maybe some will do, but my experience is that, as emphasized by Patty McCord in her book about the culture at Netflix, we all want to be treated like adults and we do have pride in doing great work.

In the end, it feels like we all actually work more from home. There is a need to show that you are a team player and contribute, and in a tight-knit project where there are frequent collaborations between team members, it becomes impossible to hide.

… But That Needs Good Tools and Practices

It may be just my case and my team, but I find our usual practices reinforce each other in this aspect. They are standard and well-known, but let me clarify.

Our “Daily Stand-up” meetings ensure everyone is contributing, by exposing what everyone did the previous day; the constant request of small Code Reviews (for example via Github Pull-Requests) by every team member, and an always-on Slack channel, further force us to be there. Finally, we are dealing with a new project where we are all forced to learn a new technology stack, so we frequently depend on each other to explain aspects of things we didn’t learn yet, which means more interaction.

We also have good tools. All of us have a good internet connection, and our code is all in Github anyway. We can easily collaborate with video calls and even pair program with VS Code live share if we must.

On this front, I have to mention that Google Hangout meetings won the day, and are our go-to tool for everything, from regular meetings to catchups and code discussions. It turned out to be an effective substitute for pair-programming sessions and even the odd interaction in the office.

But I advise you to invest in a good headset with a microphone. The quality of your sounds is paramount here, and it soon became painfully obvious how inadequate laptop-integrated microphones can be, and how distracting and ineffective a meeting can be where a significant chunk of your time you’re just asking someone else to repeat themselves.

So, the conclusion is that productivity did not go down, even with the impact of some occasional and unavoidable family interruptions. I even notice that it feels like we work more (my colleagues have expressed the same opinion), as it is easier to lose track of time. Without the pressing need to catch the train to do dinner shopping before the shop closes,  we can easily stay at the desk for longer and start earlier.

Social Relationships Will Deteriorate

I think this is the one aspect that suffered more. As expected, I have fewer people around me. We are, after all, in confinement to our homes, and this is not normal remote-working. But even in the best of circumstances, you only have your family around you while you work from home, if at all. It can be pretty lonely.

How you cope with it depends on what you’re like. You have to transfer your office friendships to their digital version, but there are things you lose. The immediacy of communication, the non-verbal signs, the physical presence. Even just an occasional game.

I can’t quite tell what it is, but physicality is important for me in developing relationships. I’ve not yet had to onboard any unknown person into the team or the company in these times, but I think it would be harder for them to develop the same level of trust and relationship that we can have in the physical world.

On the other hand, I noticed I lost virtually all the contact with everyone else outside my team, and it feels like the whole company has been reduced to just that small core. There is no longer a reason to chat with the guy sitting next to you in the office but doing something different; or to eavesdrop on someone’s account of their holidays or their new hobby. And I find that is a major loss.

So, while it seems possible to keep previously existing office-relationships at a decent level, it will probably be hard to build one from scratch. And that leaves me thinking how this paradigm would work from zero in a 100% remote setting.

You Need Strong Discipline

I don’t use this word in a negative sense of punishment, but it is essential to have a strong will. If your workspace is not well-delineated, there are many temptations around. If there is no one watching you, there is the risk of slacking and indulgence.

Even if you know you may be found out by not turning up with your work, you may be tempted to ride it out and create justifications and excuses… a lot like not delivering your essay at school.

This links back again to being treated as an adult. Part of it is assuming your responsibility and accountability, and avoiding these behaviours. But in the end, it all comes down to self-discipline.

Remote work won’t work without self-discipline.

And that works both ways. It’s as bad to take too-long breaks for food or videos as it is to stay longer at work and neglect yourself and your mental health.

In the second part of this series, I will tell you why I used to prefer the office. Stay tuned to for why that may be a good idea.

If you have similar experiences you’d like to share, please post them in the comments below. While you’re at it, you could also like it and share it with your contacts.