‘Is this working from home… or is this trying to work from home during a crisis?’

Andy Eichfeld from Discovery Financial Services jumped into my brain and summed up my thinking with this statement while speaking at The Economist’s Innovation@Work conference.

When it comes to work, the Government has been pretty clear – get a laptop and keep yourself at home. When faced with the threat of COVID spreading with any human contact, I get it.

We’ve spent ten months trying to get work done, contorting it around the rest of our lives and basic needs. We’ve been home-schooling, managing caring responsibilities, trying to get vitamin D and coping with solitary confinement. Trying to book a supermarket delivery slot, stay up to date with latest guidance, file our tax returns and stretch our legs.

Technology and wifi does not automatically mean it is possible to ‘work from home’. After ten months of getting (scraping) by, who is going to make the call that the ask to work from home ‘where possible’ is feeling more ‘impossible’?

Articles around the loneliness and wellbeing struggles of lockdown 3.0 are filling all our feeds. Everyone is locked up and fed up.

Our children are restless. Our workers are frazzled.

We crave daylight, not just for one 30 minute break each day. We crave connections, which is essential to our survival.

This wasn’t meant to be for the long-term. Our projects are no longer ‘ticking over’ for now, and we can no longer excuse our infrastructure for ‘tiding us by’.

When faced with a war, we huddle in, prepare and plan. We were denied this opportunity at the onset of COVID. And this battle certainly has become a war.

If we are faced with many more months of this, where do we get the energy and brain space amongst the perma-stress/exhaustion to plan for the continued working from home?

From talking to managers, HR departments and employees, there is one crucial factor that helps:

Acknowledging how ridiculously hard this all is.

The moments that make the world of difference are the acts of empathy. The, ‘Tell me more about what challenges you face’. The, ‘I hear you, that sounds rough’.

None of us have perfect solutions to the workplace/life/COVID juggle. Acknowledging this may be the solution in itself.