Team Partners Telecommunications

Working From Home…Another View!

Posted on Jun 22, 2021  | Tags: WFH

We hadn’t really intended that last month’s blog about working from home (WFH) should necessarily have a follow-up, but even since it was written (May 21) a backlash to WFH has been emerging. The most overt has been a well-publicised suggestion that “bosses” shouldn’t be allowed to email or contact their staff outside working hours, and some workers referring to their homes as being their office-with-a-bed, but we want to look at something else…and it’s to ask the question, what falls through the cracks when we work at home?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog it will have been hard to have missed the fact that we’re very into relationships…and to clear any doubt let us just assure you that we’re referring here to people’s need to be in relationship with others. We’re naturally social, we want to be around others, we don’t do so well on our own, which is why “Solitary” is a punishment. WFH places us in Solitary, and all the Zoom in the world doesn’t replace human contact, we hope you’ll agree with that.

So, back to the question, what is it that gets lost when we work from home, what falls through the cracks, unnoticed until it turns up? The answer lies not so much in relationships per se but in what happens when physical relationships take place: people talk, not just about specific projects or clients but about work generally, they natter, shoot the breeze and learn about aspects of their work that never get mentioned in Zoom calls.

Here’s a true story. Xerox has more manuals than you can shake a stick at covering the correct functioning of their copiers. Their engineers have even more covering their incorrect functioning and how to mend faults. At one point Xerox changed the way their engineers worked, giving them less opportunity to meet together for breaks, and then found that, over time, their engineers were taking longer to mend machines, and failing to more often. They researched why, and found the reason is a single conversation with a seasoned engineer. Break time was when the engineers discussed the jobs they were working on and what they had done to identify and fix problems. They seldom referred to the manuals, they learned from each other. I’m paraphrasing but what he said was, “The manual tells me to run off 1000 copies and a whole lot of tests. What I learned from the guys was to dig through the waste bin and see what had been thrown out, because those told me what the problem was more quickly and cheaply.”

There’s a point to all this, which is that what employees and their bosses think they do in the office is only a small part of it. A lot of the learning is unrecognised. In the office we learn how to navigate our work world, we have rituals and practices that are integral to the way that what we do turns out, and these things are what gives each of our businesses its individual flavour. WFH has its benefits, undoubtedly, but it cannot easily replace the office without changing the essence of what each business represents.