Workplace design: Are you grown up enough to work from home?

Seriously though.. are you? Most of us say (behind our hands to our nearest and dearest) that we might be *insert real age here* years old but we really feel like we are 20, or at a push, 30… We will never “grow up” in our heads, we’ll never actually feel 47.. or 57… or 80… we are who we are, age is literally just a number…

So. What does this mean about being responsible enough to manage our jobs that are usually part of the day to day trudge of getting up, working out (pah!), going to one place of work, staying all day, coming home, dinner, wine/no wine, bed… rinse and repeat….?

Can we just take all that routine and throw it out of the window… walk past that laundry pile? Not prepare the evening dinner, ignore that parcel that just arrived from Amazon? C’mon, how many of us have dry-shampooed our hair, thrown on a bit of lippy, earrings & maybe a necklace for our Zoom meetings – knowing we are effectively in our PJ’s from the waist down. I even watched a video on how to fake it on Zoom… #truestory.

We learn from a young age that we go to work. We don’t stay at home and work. We’re not all made for that. We don’t all have the tools.. but in the dreaded pandemic times, we have had to be as productive, less distracted, more engaged, let’s face it, more appreciative of our employer for keeping us in work than ever before. It’s like a whole new set of responsibilities.

And who is truly talking about ‘work from home burnout’. It’s a thing. Seriously. It has it’s own acronym (#WFHB). When we try to balance everything and we don’t have the delineation of leaving for work and coming home to help us navigate the difference between our day’s responsibilities, that’s when we burnout. Moving between meetings via the kitchen or the laundry room and ‘just’ throwing a wash in might seem convenient on the surface, but it means we never stop. One study out of the US says women are actually doing 23% more housework when they work from home in the same timeframe. TWENTY THREE PERCENT. This is not a case of us being more ‘efficient’ – it means we are cramming more into our world. And when that happens, nobody wins in the long run. #WFHB is a real thing. Pay attention.

So, my friends, what I’m telling you is that no one should be expecting more of you. No one should be expecting that you know what to do and how to manage school age kids, dinner prep, working from your spare bedroom and the weirdness that is ZOOM and all the idiosyncrasies that come with that – every. single. day. At last count we’ve been ‘COVID 19-ing’ for 20 weeks… TWENTY WEEKS. That’s 140 days… Instead of beating yourself up that you’re not getting that email sent, or your home school sticky notes are overriding your work ‘to do’ list… give yourself a break.. This too will pass – it might feel like it’s here forever, but you will get back to normal. Not a new normal (I firmly believe), a real normal. We are human beings – we will always revert to the path of least resistance in time. Our brains are wired that way. So the journey back to our old normal may be slower than any of us want but we will get there.

In the meantime, stay safe everyone. Six feet isn’t hard. Masks aren’t hard. Hand washing isn’t hard. Being kind and understanding isn’t hard. Losing our jobs, losing our business, losing a loved one.. that’s hard. Hold your breath. We’ll get back. We’ve got this.

Missed the last column?

Galloway: No ‘effing’ beige