Between January and April 2020, 2.5 billion branch offices opened up around the world, in home offices, dining rooms, breakfast nooks, kitchen counters, couches, arm chairs and beds. CNN’s Richard Quest helpfully ran three minute segments on how to make this all work, by doing pushups at his desk while his personal trainer encouraged him over ZOOM, and roughly every single person on LinkedIn wrote an article on the top ten tips for the ultimate WFH performance.
It seemed fine. Or sort of anyway.
And then for so many people, it completely fell apart.
WFH turned out to be a misnomer. It implied a geographical shift where people would work on the same computer, using the same software and interacting with the same people, but from a different desk and chair.
In reality, it was rather different.
Not Such an Easy Transition
By May, I’d begun to see it not as WFH at all, but as WWAH* (WKSUDEA)**. It was as wretched to live through as the acronym is to read.
By the end of 2020, I began to fear a second pandemic of burnout and PTSD, and as we push deep into 2021, it only seems to be getting worse.
Colin E Browne, Founder, Happy Sandpit
It hasn’t so much been a challenge of culture. On the whole, I think that has held up rather well. In the absence of a security blanket, remote workers grabbed at the prescribed organizational go-to positions, doing what was expected of them as team players and then doubling down.
The culprit in the end; the thing that has made what organization after organization has glibly called ‘our best year ever’ a Pyrrhic victory, and one that is utterly unsustainable, has been a lack of empathic leadership philosophy.
It’s not what has been said that has led us to this point, but rather precisely, what has not been said.
Many Wrong Turns
Workers who previously started work at eight and left at five, were never ordered not to start work at six and push on to eight. They did it, because they felt the suffocating pressure of impostor syndrome, and nobody stopped them.
Back to back ZOOM meetings that blew the whole day away were never banned.
The relentless inter-meshing of work and life was never explicitly hailed as the delight it can really be. It isn’t so much that having a three year old around the house is distracting; it’s that the distraction is frowned upon.
None of these things were necessarily new of course. Working from an office was never ideal, either. Meetings, overtime, and separating work and life have regularly been the norm.
But there was one other thing this time around, that has I fear, been truly damaging, and might have a long-term impact without urgent leadership intervention.
The Stark Reality
Over the course of the past year, I have become fascinated with accounts of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 – 1920. I’ve read many of them, and learned that there were many similarities, but with one exception: not one of them ever addressed the sheer interminable boredom of lockdowns, isolation and the constant repetition of identical days.
When modern work is stripped down to nothing but its functional parts; when you take away the camaraderie, the banter, the comforting distractions, and the shared sense of purpose that only colleagues chasing the same aim can give to one another, it’s simply too easy to fall out of love with it.
So what to do?
But There’s Hope
Fixing things at this point is going to require a very significant reversal of communication.
You must treat your WWAH people as a business school and go to them to learn. They are by far your best source of intelligence on how to restart the heartbeat.
It will require new mechanisms. It will require time and effort. It will require far better questions, before you can even consider getting to the answers.
More importantly however, it will require a new leadership philosophy. One that is able to admit it made a mess of things and that it has no idea how to fix them on its own. One that sees each of those 2.5 billion branches as a single and unique point of distress, which warrants an individual remedy.
If that sounds overwhelming, it may be because it pretty much is. But this is where we are now.
Finding our way back, will be the biggest exercise in building truly human empathic organisations in history. Rarely has the thing we absolutely have to do, also been the very best thing we can, but this is one such opportunity.
There may be better days ahead after all.
Read more: Top 10 Change Management Books
*Working While at Home: different to Working From Home (WFH) because the latter implies continuity with only a location change, which is a sloppy way of putting lipstick on a very difficult pig, not least because of:
**WKSUDEA: With Kids, Stress, Uncertainty, Dislocation Et Al.
