After a long drive to Wetherby (5 hours) to deliver a 4 hour workshop, followed by another 5 hour drive home, I was pleased to do some virtual delivery the following day. I was absolutely wiped out by the driving and I’d forgotten how much I dislike driving and meal for one’s!
I did like the face-to-face delivery and being in a room with people engaging in proper conversations. It felt great to be back at ‘proper’ work. As we return to service I can imagine there are a lot of people with mixed emotions about going back to the way it was. I’m hearing more examples of companies being flexible and adapting rules to suit the business and individuals. People are having brilliant conversations about making work, work for everyone involved.
Two years ago, if you’d have asked to work from home a couple of days a week, the answer would probably been “NO” due to the company policy, or “It’s always been this way” mentality. It’s amazing how quickly we can adapt when there is a crisis and we are forced to make changes. We can be very creative when our backs are against the wall.
Not that I liked having to change the way we did business and, truth be told, if CV-19 hadn’t happened I’d probably still be travelling all over the place and wasting time when there were different options available. We had video conferencing before CV-19 but no-one really trusted people to actually work from home. They thought it would be less productive and people would skive off, how wrong were we?
It was almost the opposite, people worked harder and longer hours at home. It was difficult to distinguish where work started and stopped and ‘office hours’ didn’t really exist – we were open 24/7. A quick look at the emails when you went to make a coffee or when your partner was watching something on TV or the kids had gone to bed, it was relentless.
I saw people going from meeting to meeting with no time to take proper breaks or even lunch. No time to stop and reflect, check in or make sense of the day. The to do list getting longer and longer and the unimportant emails filling up the in-box, waiting to be read just to understand it wasn’t useful. CC and BCC because everyone was creating paper trails, just in case. 80% were of no interest what so ever, but we still had to read them, just in case!
The changes we have made have been fantastic, but now is the time to get the balance back. Restore our life balance and take control of our precious time here. Time to manage our emails instead of allowing them to manage us. Time to stop, pause and breathe, re-focus our minds.
Take back control – remember, you live every day and die only once, so just make sure you maximise the living part.