How to Work Well from Home

When events such as the coronavirus outbreak force many to work from home, possibly for the first time ever, what is likely to happen?

Firstly, some cultural context. In the USA, knowledge workers tend to have decent-sized homes and long, congested commutes. Consequently, they often already have home offices and tried and tested work-from-home routines. This is not the case world-wide. 

In APAC, people live in much smaller apartments.* Also, whereas congestion in places such as Manila and Kuala Lumpur make US traffic seem light, in Hong Kong and Singapore, travelling to work is cheap, fast and easy. 

So what are people in Hong Kong and Singapore likely to experience when forced to work from home for an extended period? I spoke to Elaine Ly from the South China Morning Post about what might happen.

Shock and Angst

Initially, they will probably not get as much done. A decision has been forced on them by a burning platform in a period of fear and anxiety and this will affect their initial attitude towards change. Businesses need to be aware that how employees react in the first week will not necessarily be an indicator of their longer-term performance. 

The immediate response to this level of anxiety-provoking disruption will be psychologically challenging. Everyone will worry about how they can possibly work in a small apartment full of people, including noisy and active young children. They will also feel guilty about failing to do as much work as they think they should. They might begin to feel alienated from work. This combination of worry, guilt and alienation has the potential to send them spiraling into self-doubt, action-paralysis and depression. 

To work well from home in such conditions requires thinking about achieving good work in a very different way. It is going to be impossible for a husband and wife living in a cramped space with small children to work in the manner in which they would in the office. Rather than worry about targets, deadlines and key performance indicators (KPIs), which will only add stress to the worries and anxieties they are already experiencing, they need to put being human at the centre of the work experience. 

Being Human in the Digital Workplace

What does work in the digital workplace actually look like? Marketing imagery shows smiling and relaxed people in funky spaces doing high-tech work. This is not a wide-scale reality. 

• Research has discovered that people switch tasks roughly every three minutes, and switch context roughly every ten minutes in today’s workplaces. Once they have moved away from their core task, it takes them almost half-an-hour to return.  
• Research also indicates that the ability to effectively multi-task on good work across multiple contexts is borderline impossible. Consequently, a lot of the doing is sloppy and inattentive. 
• Digital distractions (such as reading email and other text messages) and business-as-usual meetings add up to a 57-hour week for the average US employee. 

Due to the above, most people only manage to complete just over two hours of truly productive work in an eight-hour day. To counter this, they either work longer (bad for their mood and health) or work faster (worse for them across every marker). 

As a consequence of the above, many digitally transforming societies are experiencing a productivity paradox. In the US, despite all the tech, productivity is increasing at lower-levels than any business cycle since WWII. 

Working from home can strip out a lot of the above behaviours. While digital distractions cannot be fully drowned out, they can be made to retreat into the background for a few hours. Workplace interruptions such as noise and gossip have disappeared. The employee who finds a way to take advantage of this by doing at least 2.5 hours of fully-focused, uninterrupted, distraction-free work, will be ahead of the game. 

Biological Clocks and Circadian Rhythms

Working well in a cramped and crowded home-working environment requires a deep understanding of human rhythms, interpersonal cooperation, and some good, old-fashioned personal discipline. An ideally-managed working-day should look like this:

Focus-work - most humans are more focused and productive in the morning. The period from 07:00 to 12:00 could ideally be split between husband and wife, with one looking after the children for 2.5 hours while the other locks the bedroom door and does focused work. Then vice versa. 

Break-Bread - the family should eat lunch together taking plenty of time. Sharing stories over food is the oldest of human habits and it will help everyone relax and re-energise. 

Shallow-work  - shallow-work is the emailing, admin and other stuff that must be done but doesn’t add value. The best time to do this is in the hour after lunch, when food is digesting and second-stage alertness has yet to kick in. If anyone still needs an extra 60-90 minutes of focus time, then this should start an hour after lunch when alertness briefly rises again.  

Collaboration-work - virtual meetings should take place late afternoon, when alertness is dropping and everyone requires a social kick to remain energised. 

Social Connection - Humans are social animals. Staying mentally healthy requires social connection, which will be limited in the present situation. As part of collaboration-work, find out how colleagues are coping. Talking about it is going to help everybody release tension and find and enjoy much-needed camaraderie. 

Sleep - Privilege sleep. If we don’t get enough sleep, then our circadian rhythm is off-kilter and it is impossible to do all of the above effectively. Most humans require 7-8 hours. It is also best to avoid blue light in the hour before sleeping , so screens should be turned off or set to night-light colouring. 

Restrictions on Collaboration and Learning

While it is very possible that productivity will go up when working from home, the ability to creatively solve complex problems will likely go down. This is because it requires collaboration and ongoing learning to do it well. 

• Great collaboration is analogue, requiring person-to-person interactions. This can happen in a custom-designed collaboration space or whilst breaking bread in a liminal space. 
• Learning work requires access to multiple learning environments and technologies, which will be difficult in a small apartment. 

However, these are topics for another time. Once we all get back to work. 

Until then, work well and stay healthy. 

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* Apartments in Hong Kong are on average the smallest in the world (484 sq ft). Many of these are homes to more than three people. As a comparison, the average one-bed flat size in Manhattan, New York, is 716 sq ft. In London it is 550 sq ft.

Text by roundPegz fellow Richard Claydon: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/drrichardclaydon/

Illustration by roundPegz fellow Jonathan Hood: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jonathan-hood/

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