Home or Office Working?

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Once again, I turn to write about the current coronavirus lockdown in the UK. One of its unexpected consequences was a widespread experiment about working from home.

Even in IT, an industry that by its nature is well-suited to remote working, adoption has been very gradual. Many people still work in offices, their employers still wary of a setup where employees may have less oversight and thereby become less productive.

Employees themselves might also have their reasons to prefer the office to the home. In both cases, the drawbacks that prevent us from fully embracing the remote movement may be imaginary, and one of the virtues of the lockdown is that it suddenly forced everyone to test those hypotheses as in a big scientific experiment.

I’m sure many companies will take action based on the results of their observations after the lockdown is over.

This post today is my contribution to that. It is fully anecdotal, in that I will give my personal views, and why I’ve so far preferred co-located working.

Why I Preferred Office Working

Working remotely is often offered as a perk in IT jobs. You are more flexible with your time, and you will have a better work-life balance, etc. And there are advantages to the employer as well.

But there are still reasons to avoid it. This period allowed me to experience and assess those reasons first hand, and mostly they still hold water.

You Need a Physical Separation Between Work and Personal Space and Time

When your workplace is the same place where you live, the boundaries between work- and personal-time become very loose. That is not good, because then you can easily find yourself working for longer hours than you had to, destroy your work-life balance and ultimately harm your health.

Ideally, when working from home, you should have a well defined spatial separation, a room where you can lock yourself away during work time. Going into that space and locking the door is as much a threshold crossing as in any adventure.

It represents a change of reality type that enables your mind more easily to focus on a different activity while you’re in that space, and in this sense, it is similar to entering a temple for a celebration. While that lasts, the participants are in ritual space and time, a nature different from the ordinary world, whether they realize it or not.

In the same way that temples often have some physical feature that surreptitiously induces a change of attitude (eg a low gate to force you to bow your head and enter in humility, or imposing walls and tall decorated ceilings to inspire awe of the divinity), your work-space should remind you and comment you to an attitude of work and separation from the family reality.

It should be tailored to your work needs and remove other distractions, where you can sit comfortably for a long time and have access to everything (and everyone) you need to perform your work. The locked door makes it just that little harder to easily transfer between work and non-work modes. And yet, such small differences are often so efficient and keeping you focused!

Now, UK houses or flats are comparatively small and expensive, and in rented accommodation with a limited number of rooms, setting a dedicated work-area will be hard. In my case, the “home-office” is very porous and is far from ideal, so I have a tendency to prefer the office.

The Strange Role of the Commute

Going to your office every day is a much more effective way of separating both activities. Not only do you have a dedicated place with the correct setup, you also have to go through the commute to get there. And this is the more effective the longer it is.

You have a void-time for your mind to adapt, with a distinctive unpleasant feeling that removes the cosy home space from your mind before you go into the office. This is mainly due to the general quality of transportation (your experience may be different if you commute on foot through green areas).

I’m not a psychologist, so do not quote me on this, but I’d bet that this feeling of hating your commute also has an impact and predisposes you to like your job less than if you did not commute, even if all the other conditions were equal, and want to leave it behind when you get home.

But there is yet another advantage to the commute. You have an implicit and sometimes very hard obligation on when you can leave your work so that you can honour other commitments. If you don’t have a train to catch at a certain time, it is easy to extend your work time just a “little more to finish hunting that bug”. And that can quickly escalate into longer than it should.

You Need People Around You

I bet this changes from person to person. Even in IT, where I’d guess most of us are introverts, we still need other people. During the workday, there are situations where you need to stop and relax for a couple of minutes. You can go grab a coffee, have a chat, even play some quick office-style of game.

This human interaction keeps you alive to others, and since the majority of your time is spent at work, it is a good idea to do it around people.

Working from home can feel lonely and even alienating.

I could not test this hypothesis exactly. Because of Covid-19, we are mostly all in lockdown and so there are more people at home than usual. I could not feel lonely during this time. But the fact remains that I also cannot quite hang out with my colleagues except virtually.

Still, because the relationships between teammates were already formed before remote work started, we’ve been able to keep and nurture them. On the other hand, all the contact with people from other teams virtually disappeared, which is a signal of how disconnected you can feel in a steady long-term remote position. It will be hard to compensate with family or your also-remote-working friends.

In the end, even if it is hard or not always wise to make friends at work, you still need a peer group, that little bit of escape from your personal pod, to seek some solace or advice about problems at home. The work-place has the advantage of bringing you in contact with others who most likely come from similar backgrounds to you and probably are going through similar life stages and difficulty. These are your ideal peers.

On Balance…

All in all, this has been a worthwhile experiment, with some positive outcomes. I think remote working turned out better than I was expecting and that where we can use it, we should. The positive impacts are of several kinds, while the negatives are manageable.

• same or improved productivity, given adequate tools
• better health
• less stress
• reduced costs
• more family life, with attendant benefits and difficulties
• more time and flexibility

The main drawbacks, I’d say, were these:

• worse team-building
• more isolation
• requires a good working-space in the house
• require more self-discipline

The conclusion is that, when the lockdown is relaxed and we are allowed to go back to London and office-based work, I may like to give another try at working from home, at least a few days a week. Without the pressure of childcare, there are important benefits to be gained from this.

If the above resonates with you, and you have similar or opposite experiences you’d like to share, please tell me about them in the comments below.

And don’t forget to like and share this post. Thank you.