Back At Work
We are fast approaching a whole quarter (3 months) of the COVID-19 crisis. Now that I’ve been “back in the office” for a week, I feel I have enough perspective to write about it. Overall, it’s more or less what I expected: some things have barely changed, while other things have changed dramatically, and some of the dramatic changes I believe are pretty much here to stay. So I’ll go through each type of thing in turn.
The Things that have Barely Changed. There is still an expectation that I be at the office by 8 a.m. There are still timesheets, reports, and purchase orders to be processed. I still find that I sit in my office chair too long, and need to be reminded to get up and move around from time to time. I still get the afternoon “drowsies.” I still get frustrated from time to time by ignorance, apathy, incompetence, and excessive self-interest. There are still meetings, rumors, gossip, announcements, requests for favors, and negotiations.
The Things that have Changed Dramatically (But are Unlikely to Last). There are temperature screenings every morning…anyone with a temperature above 100.4 F is not allowed into the office. Every building has only one entrance for control (we can exit through any door for safety and distancing reasons). Everyone is required to wash their hands immediately upon entering the building. Masks or face coverings are required at all times, unless we have an enclosed office (I do) and are in it alone. All touch surfaces are to be sanitized at least daily. Food and drink are not allowed to be consumed in break rooms or common areas. Even the largest restrooms are to be used one-at-a-time only.
The Things that have Changed Dramatically and Probably Permanently. Travel, other than to and from the office, is very closely scrutinized and generally prohibited. The only in-person meetings allowed are very small, very brief, and masks + distancing are required. Zoom, GoToMeeting, Skype, and Webex are the new PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. Just about every meeting is remote, and there seem to be a ton of remote meetings. Emails, texts, and IMs fly around more prolifically than ever before. Very little is actually printed out on paper. People generally keep to themselves all day and it’s much quieter than ever before in the office.
In many ways, as an introvert, I actually prefer this new way of doing business over the old way. Meetings seem to be a lot more efficient and things are easier to document and recall when necessary. So far, the toughest thing to replicate from “the old way” is what I call the hallway conversation. The little, usually brief, usually informal, conversations that happen when bumping into a coworker in the hall or in the minutes just before/after a conference room meeting are especially hard to mimic by dialing or texting the coworker directly. And at my workplace, we don’t have Slack or Microsoft Teams or anything like that. Maybe this is the next tech problem that my organization needs to solve, because I don’t see the “traditional” conference room meeting or hallway encounter returning anytime soon, if ever.
I do like the fluidity and flexibility of some work hours now, especially in the afternoons. I have always had difficulty with concentration and productivity in the middle of the day. I’m not sure why…for decades I’ve done my best work in the mornings and early evenings. Now, I can go to the office in the morning, go home before 5 and exercise/eat/do chores, then catch up on a little work right before dinner. I hope I can hang on to this even after the pandemic crisis, because it matches my own daily rhythms and makes me both happier and more productive. It will be a tough sell to my organization to adopt this scheme permanently, but I can dream.
Bike Newbie 