Stick or Twist? Should I retain or change habits established during the pandemic.

Over the last 15 months how I work has evolved,?boundaries between my home and working live blurred and my habits and rituals linked to travelling to my physical working location have evolved and changed – the daily commute evaporated and I like many had to find ways to make remote working work for me, my family and my team.??As regions, countries and organisations slowly open-up question on my mind was when, why and for what reasons should I go back to old habits.?This I’ve developed the 5 Cs of commuting model.?I welcome your views and insights ?-does this model resonate with you?

Building new habits

This year, as those of us in the Northern hemisphere prepare to enjoy some time off during the summer, perhaps you, like me, have been thinking about a return to a traditional workplace. Since March 2020, I have been working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, in my case, I have not visited my normal office base for 475 days – after I adjust for weekends and holidays, this means I have been working remotely for 301 days.

Why is this important? A study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology[1] reported that it takes between 18 and 254 days to form a new habit. The human brain is wired for habits because they’re efficient and they free up mental resources for other tasks. A lot of my daily behaviour is composed of habits. These are automatic actions that I do without thinking and repeat them the same way every day. And I, like many other office-based or knowledge workers, have had plenty of time to develop and embed new routines which are now embedded as habits – for better or worse!

Think about all the habits you have that you don’t even remember trying to create… Perhaps you put your keys in the same pocket when you walk out the door, or maybe you have a routine that you go through every weekday when you first wake up. Did I consciously condition myself to respond immediately to pop-up reminders that my next Teams/zoom/hang-out meeting is about to start? Did I think carefully about blocking my schedule from dawn to dusk with meetings rather than listen to Radio 4 on my morning commute into the office? Did I initially truly consider the impact of working from home on my own, or my colleagues’ and friends’ mental health and wellbeing? Have I started to make that “caring” part of my routine today? Yes – indeed, I’m pleased to say that is one habit I want to retain permanently!

Blurring boundaries

Over the last 18 months, I have been considering the pros and cons of remote working. I recognise that whilst it is possible to build and work as high performing teams remotely, the importance of communication is amplified. Why? Because when working remotely it is easy to miss some, if not all, of the context of someone’s situation. As humans, we’re great at picking up subtle signals using body language and tone of voice. For example, some of the most basic ways to build rapport with others include smiling, tilting your chin lower so you're not looking down on them, matching their handshake strength, and slowing down your speech so you come across as being more credible. The challenge is that when in a remote setting these aren’t as helpful, so I for one find it harder to build and maintain relationships and this has had to be an area of focus for me.

When working remotely, I initially felt a need to be always on, available constantly. Then gradually I recognised a need and built (or is it rebuilt?) a habit of leaving my desk to go for a walk at lunchtime. Let me be clear I used to walk between meetings, but now one of my new engrained habits is to spend whole days engaged in virtual meetings. Initially they all ran back-to-back and the number of steps I took a day declined. Those steps I used to accumulate in a series of short walks to/from bus stops, carparks, to meeting rooms and to the canteen, have been replaced with a regular 30-minute walk. I describe block out time for this as “immovable” and what I mean is that it must happen at some time between 8am and 6pm every single working day – I can shift the time, but I can’t cancel it. Equally, in this new hyperconnected digital working environment, I learned to build in other subtle habits – 30-minute meetings became 25 minutes, 60-minute meetings became 55 minutes and I started to use this time to stand, move, stretch, and even rest my eyes by taking 20 seconds to look at something 20 metres away every 20 minutes. I started to book out time to be uncontactable via Teams messages so I could focus on pieces of work and communicate with my team during time I dedicated for them to simply drop in for a chat, as needed.

What the pandemic has reminded me is that it is possible to build strong relationships in a remote team, provided that each team, and each team member, needs to find the way that works best for them. The last 18 months have provided many of us with an opportunity to experiment with different options and find out what works best for us as individuals but also for the teams we are part of. The most important learning has been to find ways to share the context of our personal situation with our teammates and vice versa.

Five Cs of commuting

As spring gradually slipped into summer, and as the UK unwinds legal restrictions on social interactions, my thoughts are turning to my return to the workplace. Is now the time for me to stick with each, or even all, of my new work-related habits or should I make changes? This is a conundrum that many office-based workers need to consider.

To aid my thinking I developed a framework, the 5C’s of Commuting, to help me decide when I should travel physically to any workplace that isn’t my spare bedroom. I’ve talked it through with my manager and discussed what would enable me to perform at my best in the future. I’ve also shared it with some colleagues (current and former), and they encouraged me to share more broadly. I am interested in your views on this framework and whether it resonates with anyone else or not, and why.

So, my five main reasons to Commute to the traditional workplace include the need for: Collaborations, Connections, Celebrations, Collisions and Customers.

ü?Collaborations: To complete activities that we now know how to do virtually but (in my collaborators’ and my experience) are best done in person. These include ideation and planning sessions, working together on a problem definition, or solving exercise etc.

ü?Connections:?Meeting the range of co-workers and teams I work closely with to re-establish and renew relationships. I have colleagues with whom I work closely today that I have never met in person although we have regular video-enabled, face-to-face meetings.

ü?Collisions: The networks and connections that often start with an accidental or unplanned introduction are incredibly valuable. These are the connections that happen organically, by the water cooler, whilst in the line waiting for a coffee, walking around the workplace with colleague who introduces you to someone they bump into or spot in the corridor. These can help break down unintended silos between groups, drive enterprise thinking and stimulate novel approaches to business challenges and spark ideas and innovations. They can also include help leaders be visible and offer more colleagues the chance to connect with them informally.

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ü?Celebrations: A virtual celebration can only go so far. In my opinion, teams deliver together and should be provided with the opportunity to celebrate successes and learnings together. That is not to say we haven’t celebrated, commiserated, and connected informally over the last 18 months, but I’m looking forward to thanking people in person. That said, I may still well refrain from handshaking for some time yet!

ü?Customers: Whether the customer is a different function or group within your business, or if they are external to the organisation, meeting for the first time, renewing existing relationships and refreshing relations between organisations where key contacts have changed role over the last 18 months are all great reasons to meet in person again.

As well as describing when I need to physically be on a site, personally I found this framework equally helpful to articulate when I don’t need to be in an office. Working in a multi-national company with sites in many countries and multiple locations in the UK, I have started to use this framework to define those activities where I could choose to work remotely. For example, when interacting with colleagues based in a different site, geography, or time-zone, I’m comfortable to continue to work from home. Similarly, if I need to focus to finalise a document or complete some individual work, as an introvert, I prefer to focus by working in a quiet environment undisturbed for the time required to complete the task. I also now value the extra time and energy that I have gained by not commuting on a daily and weekly basis.

“Stick or Twist”

In summary, I will not simply return to my pre-pandemic habit of being in an office at least 4 days every week, instead I will take a more nuanced approach. My commitment is to work with my colleagues, collaborators, and customers to make sure they get what they need from me and vice versa but without always defaulting to in person meetings. ?I’m keen to learn so would welcome your views on whether my approach resonates with you or not.

How might this new hybrid approach work in practice? Experience has shown that when teams are split between remote and offices, those who are remote do not always get the same share of voice. So, moving forward, even if 4 people are in the office and 4 are working remotely, when we meet, I will encourage us all to use the video facility our laptops, so the experience is common for everyone.?This may require us to adapt how we work – for example, by requiring one person in the room to use a Jabra or similar speaker and the rest to mute their microphones and speakers – but it will provide a more common experience for everyone and avoid the dominance that often happens when some people are co-located and others not. I am already testing this approach with a team today, some of whom are working in a clinical setting and as such need to be physically present to interact with patients when not in my meetings, and it is working for us.

[1] Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 998–1009 (2010)