Will virtual work during quarantine forever change our work relationships?

It’s interesting the degree to which remote work has taken a whole new form.

We have been getting used to video calls and team meetings for quite some time now – some of us turning  looking professional from the neck-up (only) into an art form.  But virtual work has always been associated with professional context and so we make points to keep it as professional as possible, our respective work cultures notwithstanding.

But now that everyone (who can)  needs to work from home and all of our meetings are virtual and have been / will be for a rather extended period I think we are starting to see something very interesting happen.  

It appears that complete immersion of our “formal” workspaces into our  most personal spaces – our homes  - has made the virtual environment rather intimate and begun to blur the boundaries between our professional and personal lives.

Suddenly the walls of formality have begun to rapidly crumble, making way for familiarity.  We have meetings with coworkers in our PJs.   We accidentally use our more “provocative” coffee mugs and don’t realize it (that happened on a recent team huddle at Shed!). Some of us may have stopped bothering to brush our hair for meetings.   Your client’s kids jump into their laps and we get to see their working Easter egg designs and new hot wheels cars.  The list of meeting-norm-breaking moments (for better or worse) gets ever longer.

So what does it mean for our workplace culture when we stop being so formal and “start getting real”?   How much info about our colleagues and clients is TMI?  How will virtual versus live work requirements be impacted?   And WTF is HR supposed to do about it when everyone is on their own turf and free to be however irresponsible they want with no "official" boundaries between work time and playtime? Will we relate to our colleagues and clients become more like family? What will belonging to one another in that way do for the quality of our work and of our lives overall?

I’d love to hear your predictions and thoughts and (honestly) funny stories about how work life has already changed and will continue to change for you and our fellow quarantine colleagues…