Home, the Reluctant Workplace
Enforced home working has left many over-stretched and disoriented
The sheer fatigue of work-life blur has become an on-going reality for millions of homeworkers who stepped up last year. At the time they virtually had no choice but to do so.
These people had working-from-home thrust upon them. Their adjustment has been fast and furious. They hit the floor running, pressured almost overnight into becoming home workers, teachers, carers and more, all at once.
But this workplace intrusion on home life is, for many, beginning to tell. The novelty has worn off and determination to do good is flagging. Good will is becoming exhausted.
People are still doing their best yet they continue to struggle to demark ‘work’ time and place from home schooling and caring responsibilities, downtime and domestic duties. Then they admonish and berate themselves for not managing this life-segmenting properly, as if it’s something they should instinctively be able to do with no experience or training at all.
Typically Havoc
There are no real working-from-home gurus out there yet, people who do this thing well and can tell the rest of us how it’s done. I’ve been doing it for over fifteen years and still occasionally raise a wrist to my damp forehead, overcome with the mess I’ve made of the day/week/whatever as result of working-from-home havoc.
But I’m beginning to think that in my own way I’m as expert as anyone on this situation. Havoc, to a greater or lesser extent, is the way it is. It’s the way you deal with it that makes the difference to your peace of mind.
I began my path towards ownworking at home a very long time ago. It took a lot of small steps and even larger shifts in attitude (mine and others’) to get here. I wanted this situation, planned for it, worked assiduously and against the odds for it.
I’m here now and it’s all I’d hoped for and it’s nice, but not perfect. It’s different from the ‘normal’ workplace but comes with its own challenges. More varied distractions being one of them, although what constitutes a distraction differs from one person to another. Importantly, working-from-home was my choice; I had time to prepare for it and come to terms with my new work environment.
We all need a WorkNook
Research shows that most of the people currently overseeing the home-as-workplace situation are women, simply because it’s mostly still women who oversee domesticity. Rightly or wrongly, the home pretty much remains their domain.
While men might have a shed, garage or even an office to call their own, women tend to maunder the house, surveying and amassing, settling very little, noting jobs in every quarter. They are less likely, even these days, to have a separate refuge of their own and much less likely to if the residence is small and shared.
This household noticing women do is relentless, a never-ending carousel of potential distraction, ever interfering with their ability to focus on any one thing. They may not act on what they see but their concentration has been disrupted nevertheless.
Of course it’s possible to learn to factor-out this stuff, people do. This has a lot to do with creating dedicated, more sensorially apt work settings, but the ability to do this does not come overnight. People need to be trained in the identification, design or adaption of appropriate workspaces in general and to be fair, employers haven’t had time to catch up with the continuing professional development requirements of employees working-from-home.
However if these employees are going to continue to work-from-home in the droves predicted, serious consideration needs to be given to their up-skilling if the transition from workplace to permanently dispersed/remote/agile and hybrid working (though please not ‘virtual’, people exist physically wherever they happen to be sited) is to be a smooth one.
When Home Means Something Else
Seeking formal, if retrospective, permission from employees to make continued use of their home for business purposes might be a good start if it hasn’t already been done.
While adopting work-from-home practices might be the only way business can survive in the near future, it would still become employers to acknowledge how magnanimous employees have been in opening their private doors thus far when business and the nation needed them to.
Many will find this continued working-from-home situation hard to endure. Like a billeted guest gradually overstaying their welcome, Work in the home may have settled in for good. Some people will need more help than others in fully adapting to this scenario.
Home as we’ve known it may never be the same again. We need to accept this as a fact, at least for the time being. But this is a huge ask of the average employee, especially if being home-based wasn’t what they bought into with the job in the first place. The social impact of the shift away from the recognised workplace setting to somewhere else, probably the home, and the personal adjustment necessary to make it succeed, cannot be overestimated.
People usually rightly regard their home as private, somewhere they can retreat to and escape from work. Many might prefer work not to intrude any further, especially if their home is small and without much opportunity for segregating work from other areas of their life. Additionally, a lot of people have used work as a reason to leave the house in the past. Workplace friendships and other workplace social interactions and the happy part these play in people’s lives is hugely underestimated. Digital communication and screen viewing, already proven as unhealthy in excess, will necessarily increase. How will we deal with these issues amongst so many?
Of course, there is no one right answer to all this. Ways of working, if not perfect solutions, will emerge from the extraordinary global complexity we’re enduring at the moment. But people are ingenious and clever organisations will foster trust as well as innovation. Work and working will go on.
Jane Anderson PhD is a published researcher and practitioner in Sociospacial Reciprocity and Place Therapy. She’s been helping people create supportive, sustainable and productive environments at home and in the workplace for over 30 years.