Having spent a week working remotely I asked our team how it went and here are their initial feelings and insights.

Our team were already setup to work from home given that 99% of what we do is cloud based.

Despite this, kicking everybody out of the office to work from home indefinitely was still a leap of faith.

Here's how they got on...

1) They've spent more time with people that matter

These quotes from two team members say more about this benefit of working remotely than I ever could:

"Mum very naughtily stopping in for a cup of tea during lunch"

and

"More time for the small people, I got to spend Wednesday lunchtime reading books with Eddy, that was nice."

Our relationships with our work friends is important, but time with family is truly priceless.

Some of our team were equally as pleased to spend more time with their furry family.

Others found they ended up chatting to people locally or people that they haven't spoken to in ages all around the world (since everyone is checking up on each other).

Isolating people has ironically brought people closer together.

2) There's a better work/life balance and more personal time

Not having to wake up quite so early was the first benefit mentioned.

The trek in to the office is as short as 5 minutes for some, and as long as 90 minutes for others.

Even short journeys add up to significant amounts of time over the course of a month. All time that could be much better spent.

Some of the team have been using their additional time to exercise or prepare meals from scratch (one example below!). All things that contribute to their long term health and happiness.

Others are happy to be at home surrounded by their pets and family. It's also handy that they no longer have to worry about somebody being at home to accept a parcel delivery!

Regardless of what they do with their additional personal time, the whole team are feeling a reduction in time pressure constraints and an overall improvement in their work/life balance.

3) Traffic is soul destroying

It's hard to overstate the mental torture that commuting can be.

It makes sense if you think about it. You start your morning dreading the commute in. You spend your day at work dreading the commute home.

Sure this might be a first world problem but that minor niggle can build over a period of months and years to suck the pleasure out of even the best jobs.

With the commute no longer a thing, everyone feels that little bit happier and little less stressed.

4) Have a place to call "work"

It can be a dining room table, or a desk tucked in the garden shed. Wherever it is, that's the "workplace" and the rest of the house is home. Having this split is essential for good mental habits and to enforce a routine which is also more essential than ever for remote workers.

It took a couple of days but our PM finally snapped and bought a new desk. Turns out the dining room table just wasn't cutting it!

5) Kindness by default

I've not seen the ?? emoji used quite so frequently as I have this week on our Teams chats.

While the media are keen to highlight only the bad and ugly fallout from COVID-19, and of course it is desperately awful for so many, the team are using it as an opportunity to find ways to be more thoughtful, kind and caring towards each other than ever before.

I hope this is a trend others are seeing too, and that from the darkness of this short period we see a long term and much needed infusion of kindness between people for a long time after COVID-19 is a distant memory.