What I Called Home-Office

I believe this photo is very familiar to many people, especially my colleagues.??

In March 2020, Eastnets announced that we will start working from home, and since then and until very recently, this is the corner that I call “Home-Office”.

Yes, it is my dining room table - since I found my desk not big enough for my laptop, my notebooks, my mobile, pens, papers, coffee, snacks, tissues, etc. Moreover, I did not want to face the wall.

The painting on the wall, many people I video-called showed admiration for. This is the background they see whenever I turn on my camera (which I did 99% of the time), and of course it is also what I see on the bottom right corner of my screen ??

Let me go back to October-November 2019, thanks to my boss Hazem Mulhim, I was enrolled into the Advanced Management Program at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. I was one of the AMP 117 group, the last group before the pandemic. I do not know how to justly describe the impact of this program on myself, but since completing it, something changed in me. I now can see certain things differently. Most of the time my view is shaped after a retrospect which gives me a distinct perspective on certain situations.

In a certain context during the program, I showed professor Ian Woodward, the program director, one of my paintings and he encouraged me to paint more. This is what I did, I imitated a painting and shared it with the AMP117 group in January 2020. I hanged the painting on one of my walls, not knowing that it will be the background for my home-office for the following two years. It was so reviving to paint after not doing so for more than 10 years. I did not know at that point that painting will be my getaway during the pandemic to survive the complete lockdowns.

Before joining the program, we have been surveyed for behaviors amongst many things,?and accordingly we have been categorized based on the surveyed behaviors into introverts, extraverts, and ambiverts. I was one of the ambiverts, I exhibited behaviors common to both extroverts and introverts. When it was explained, I realized that I fit perfectly in this category.

In early 2020 when the complete lockdowns started being the norm across the globe, I remember this specific joke that we have shared within AMP117 group: {Introverts: check in on your extrovert friends… they are not ok.?They have no idea how this works.}

I am sure none of us expected the lockdowns to last this long! Most things are back to normal now, traveling, going back to our offices, schools, restaurants, clubbing, etc.

But are we, as individuals, back to normal? Extraverts friends, are you ok? How did you manage? are you still extraverts? Since everyone is talking about the new normal, Do you think there will be a new category; Covidverts, as a new set of behaviors?

One amazing exercise done by the program director visualized how biased we can be towards certain people without knowing.?We are biased towards people who are closer to us by distance, by culture, by language, by backgrounds, or by business objectives. We are biased towards our working team mainly. It is 100% true,?unless we are super aware, we are unconsciously biased towards people who are closer to us, and this leads most of the times to unintentional injustice towards people who are not. I kept this in the back of my mind, and I tried to make myself fully aware of it.

It is clear that physical presence has strong impact and influence, and it gives us strong feeling of belonging. Before the pandemic, and despite the frequent travels at Eastnets, we used to gather in one big conference room in Amman-Jordan or Waterloo-Belgium and connect to all other colleagues in other regions by adding them to a video conference. I did not know if these people who are connecting remotely have ever felt they are less privileged, or if they are given the same chances, or if they have the same level of belonging, or if they ever questioned if anyone sees their values. Simply because they are physically far and they are not being able to develop relationships by having casual corridor talks, having lunch with their colleagues,?sharing brilliant ideas with their management over a drink, gathering with colleagues around the white-board trying to challenge each others, etc.?

During the past two years, these biases shrunk. I did not really realize this until very recently, when I started going back to the office beginning of this month. During WFH – we all had exactly the same circumstances across all geographies and all teams. We all stayed home, used the same tools and we all have the same level of accessibility to all people in the organization – starting from the CEO to the most junior person in the company, regardless of our geography or business unit.

The feeling of having equality in approaching people is really good.

I have witnessed many tough moments and many exciting moments while sitting in my home-office facing my small screen. In May 2021, I was promoted to Deputy CEO.?It is sad that I could not celebrate this big achievement properly in person with my teams, nevertheless I believe I was lucky that this big promotion took place after working from my home-office for 14 months. The prior period established a strong rapport between me and almost every single person in the organization at all levels and across all teams and developed a healthy atmosphere due to the ability to connect with everyone equally. Which I believe was a facilitator for this big change in the organization, especially reporting lines.

It was nice to have my first talk as Deputy CEO, jointly with the CEO, to the entire organization and being 100% sure that no one will feel less privileged for not being closer.

Does any one sense this, or it is only me? I do not know. Is this feeling going to continue after we are back to the offices? I do not know.

I am not implying that we should continue working from home. Not at all. I am just sharing my experience and thoughts as a human and as a leader, this might bring new perspective.

What about you? Do you feel the same way? How do we bridge the gap between the benefits of having an equal opportunity access to everyone and everything while remote working, and the clear benefit of going back to our offices?