Apr 21, 2022
In this episode, Maya and Pilar
discuss the mental health challenges in returning to the office
space, the evolution of communication in the workplace and the
reasons why many people do not want to work remotely – in Spain and
other places.
The set up of a hybrid workplace continues with
its challenges. In episode 106 of My Pocket Psych, guest Dr. Hayley Lewis talked about how she was
working with a government organisation whose chief exec wanted to
reduce the office space in order to cut down on public
spending.
However, when she looked into the living conditions of some of the employees, it was clear that asking (or offering) people to work from home would end up with some individuals working in difficult conditions.
While we’re making sure we can
have the conversation so that people can work flexibly, there’s
also a need to help people speak out when they feel they can’t use
their homes for work.
In any case, saving money by reducing the
office space might not be as straight-forward as it looks.
According to a set of yet to be released data that Maya’s had
access to, to make remote work permanent in some organisations,
they will have to invest heavily in IT and cybersecurity, etc.
Something they maybe didn’t do during the pandemic.
09.45
MINS
The
return to the office is bringing some unexpected challenges and
this article covers a few of them:
Everyone Is Not OK, but Back at
Work Anyway.
For example, the dynamics of a team that used to be colocated might have changed when it went suddenly remote. And now that they have to return to their previous workspace… it might not be easy. Many people have changed, and had different experiences of working remotely during the pandemic.
We need to continue talking about how we’re doing, we’re still in transition. What medium people prefer for being open about how they’re feeling might vary. For some, the best medium might be face to face, others might prefer to tell you how they are on Slack, there’s great diversity in this.
Different people and different teams will figure it out as they go along. What’s common is that there is still a lot of uncertainty around what the future of the workplace will look like, and still around the pandemic. (And have you heard of “Schrodinger’s Covid”?)
19.00 MINS
On a lighter note, Slack has
published this article about how written communication at work is
changing and becoming more informal:
From jargon to emoji, the evolution
of workplace communication styles.
Instead of business jargon, people prefer to
adopt more informal ways of talking to colleagues, using GIFs and
emojis. Is this a hangover from the way we were taught to write
“properly” at school? Or is it that we communicate much more in
writing with colleagues and therefore can adopt more informal and
playful ways of doing so? However, we can’t let informality
bring a lack of clarity (Maya’s words!) and we still need to adopt
formal ways of writing when needed.
Pilar doesn’t like emojis that duplicate a
message, like the article with a smiley face followed by “enjoying”
in the text. Sometimes it feels like information overload. But some
of these emojis have a lot of energy behind them, and they have
their place.
Different teams will evolve their own ways of communicating, even how you react to messages, or even having their own designs.
(Let us know what you think of this!)
29.20 MINS
We
move on to a recent article about how telework is being adopted now
in Spain, post-lockdown, “Dos
años después del confinamiento, ¿qué pasa con el teletrabajo en
España?”(It’s been two
years after lockdown. What’s going on with telework in Spain?).
It’s been written by regular guest on the show Eva
Rimbau-Gilabert.
(You can hear her talk about the state of
remote work in Spain pre-pandemic in
episode 214 The View from South Europe.)
“The most prominent reason why there is not as
much teleworking as possible is that a large part of the people who
could telework prefer not to do so (58.5%). The reasons for wanting
to work face-to-face include disadvantages of teleworking such as
lack of social contact with colleagues, difficulties disconnecting
from work or work overload. Added to this is the fact that the
private home may not be suitable for
teleworking.”
This
reflects much of what we were talking about earlier and we’re sure
this is not the case only in Spain. It’s still difficult to
disconnect from work, this sometimes has to do with culture,
sometimes with individuals, and mobile phones don’t make it any
easier!
This
research says 58.5% people don’t want to continue teleworking,
which is similar to what we heard from previous guest Laurel in
episode 298, that the number of people in the US asking to work
remotely hasn’t increased, it’s just their negotiation power has
changed.
“The majority of people who have ever
teleworked indicate that, once the pandemic is over, they would
like to telework every day (23.5% without ever going to the
workplace, and 24.7% going occasionally), with an average
preference of 3.8 days of telecommuting per
week.”
Even
though we hear that the main reason for going back to using the
office is to see our colleagues, it looks like a decent percentage
of people don’t have a need to go back to the workplace. It’s a
minority, but it’s there. (Maybe it was always there, but we didn’t
know about it…)
Finally, the article talks about complex vs simple communication, and how they benefit from different spaces. It helps to define “communication” and “collaboration” when we’re talking about how to best do it.
Some people might prefer the
office for complex communication, while others might prefer to do
that kind of communication away from each other, taking their time.
(Thanks to listener Pedro for this latter point of view, the
conversation on
LinkedIn is
here.)
Different spaces are more
suited to different kinds of interactions, and these will vary
between teams, and even at different stages of the work. Coworking
spaces don’t seem to have gone mainstream yet in Spain, even though
they can provide a good alternative to working from
home.
To talk about all these different things takes time, so it’s worth thinking about moving some of our more transactional, simple team communication to the asynchronous space so that we can use our time together to talk through the next iteration of how we work.
Finally, a shout out to Omnipresent and Oyster for their April Fool’s memos! They almost got us!