Musings on Week #7 of WFH

May 2, 2020

Dear Team,

We’re not going back to work. We are at work.

I’ve been reflecting about this lately. And about relationships. Intimacy. Is it possible to be more intimate virtually than when we are in the same room? Until recently, I would have scoffed at the notion.

But then my wife came home from her first day back in the office and I changed my mind.

As most of you know, my wife is a primary care physician. For the past six weeks she has been working from home, meeting with her patients every day via telehealth. The technology has been sketchy at times, and she has had to jump from Doxy to Doximity to FaceTime in any given day to connect, but it’s been working for her. Last week, she arranged to go to her office to meet one of her patients whose condition was particularly complex. 

Sheila entered the exam room, layered with scrubs, her physician coat and then a full-length gown on top. Add to that an N95 mask and gloves and she looked like she was in a hazmat suit. The patient was required to wear a mask, too. Picture a sick patient, anxious about her confusing symptoms, coming downtown to her doctor’s office and being ushered into an exam room only to find her primary care physician, social distancing on the other side of the room, masked behind her PPE. The patient broke down and cried out, “Where’s my doctor?” 

So then, what is more intimate? Sheila in the office in her hazmat suit? Or at home, casually dressed, talking over video to her patient, in her own home?

Eventually we will be permitted to return to our office at closerlook. We will likely be required to wear masks, social distance 6’ apart, avoid small conference rooms. Will this be an improvement over what we do now? Will we feel more connected with our colleagues in the office wearing a mask or on face-to-face Zoom?

I would like us to consider this extended WFH experience as a gift. A gift to reinvent the way we work. Can we use Zoom for even better collaboration than when we were together? And then when we are finally back in the office, face masks down, can we carry these new ways of collaborating back into the non-virtual world?

Zoom is the ultimate equalizer. There is no obvious hierarchy in a zoom meeting. The placement of headshots is arbitrary. This gives us the opportunity to re-contract how we work together, where collaboration is democratized. 

I invite you to consider how you are working now, using tools such as Jira, Teams, Zoom, etc. Are there better ways to use these tools to work together? Communicate more transparently? Collaborate more personally? Deliver more efficiently?

Take your ideas and begin to act your way forward. This is our chance to experiment. To take some risks. To humanize the technology for our purposes.

My hope is that along the way, we will learn to be even better colleagues to each other, more valuable partners to our clients, and personally more connected with the important work that we do every day.

Warmly,

D