Apr. 22, 2022 "'I miss remote work already': Workers are back in offices — and it's been very, very awkward": Today I found this article by Taylor Telford on the Financial Post:
After two years of isolation, the return to offices has been a master class in awkwardness.
Recently, Katherine, a consultant at an investment bank in New York, met a colleague for the first time. He went for a fist-bump four times in the same interaction.
“He was like, ‘Hell yeah! That’s great, Katherine!’ Fist bump. ‘Yeah, I’ll see you later!” Fist bump. ‘Okay, I’m going to head out!’ Fist bump,” she said. “The fourth time, I looked up at him and was like, ‘Are you sure?’ and he just held it there.”
She gave him the fourth bump.
As of April 11, an average of 43 per cent of workers had returned to offices across 10 of the United States’ top business centres, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and D.C., according to data monitored by Kastle Systems. In late December, during the Omicron surge, occupancy averaged just 17.5 per cent.
The upward creep of office occupancy is charting a major milestone in the country’s emergence from the pandemic, a sign we’re attempting to pick up where we left off.
But reunions with colleagues and forgotten Girl Scout cookies and old phone chargers have been accompanied by feelings of uncertainty.
Some workers are coming back to the same desks but no longer know their colleagues.
Others are braving offices for the first time, having joined the workforce in the remote-everything era.
Katherine, who is identified only by her first name to speak freely about her employer, went back to the office in February. She still calls her co-workers her “Internet friends.” They know each other from Zoom, but in person, they feel like strangers.
After weeks of “co-existing” and internally playing the “Do I know you?” game, Katherine, 26, started going out of her way to introduce herself to colleagues.
“People are so excited sometimes when you do say hi and you do meet them, they don’t really know how to act,” she said. “Everyone approaches it awkwardly but kindly.”
As singular and transformative as the past two years have been, workers have broadly been having parallel experiences until now. Companies shuttered operations and adopted remote work by necessity and in unison in the early phases of the pandemic. But as the virus recedes and firms are forced to chart their own courses, we’re in “this weird liminal state” that presents an even greater degree of uncertainty, said Andrew Knight, professor of organizational behaviour at Washington University in St. Louis.
“In my opinion, we’re actually seeing far greater struggles on the human side as people are trying to figure out exactly what the new routines are going to be and as organizations are struggling to adjust to people’s new beliefs about work,” Knight told The Washington Post.
Being around other people feels draining.
Swapping flexibility for anything mandatory seems like a downgrade.
Old routines have become foreign and taxing: suiting up and commuting, making calls in front of co-workers, navigating run-ins with bosses in the restroom, picking a seat in the company kitchen. And the new stuff is weirder, like schlepping into work just to sit on Zoom calls in an empty office.
Social media has been studded with posts about the less rosy realities of encountering colleagues in their physical forms, from unwanted physical contact to farts.
“Moments ago, on my first day back to the office in person since 3/11/2020, the woman next to me in the courthouse passed gas loudly — very loudly — three times,” one person tweeted last week. “I miss remote work already.”
When you’re in the same space as your colleagues, “now all of a sudden we actually have to co-ordinate our preferences,” Knight said, from the office thermostat to masking etiquette, which creates “minor points of friction” that can compound.
Barbara Holland, HR adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management, said one of the most basic steps to creating a comfortable environment in the current landscape is “making sure that people who are very comfortable are aware that others may not have the same feelings.”
Some of this can be encoded in policy — like mask, vaccination and social distancing requirements — but invariably, there will be a learning curve, Holland said.
She’s felt it herself as she adjusts to ways of greeting her colleagues. She’s tried the air hug and the waving and the elbow-bumping, but sometimes, she still can’t help but go for the handshake.
“Usually if the person hesitates I pull my hand back really quick and say “Oh, I’m so sorry — habit,’ ” Holland said. But she knows she’s not alone in falling back on old routines.
“There are lot of people who still do shake hands,” Holland said. “It’s going to be hard to completely break that habit for some.”
Nitya Chawla, an assistant professor of management at Texas A&M University, studied worker anxiety early in the pandemic. At that time, workers were grappling with fears that were mostly related to catching COVID.
But two years later, as more companies bring workers back to offices, the anxieties have shifted to things that used to be second nature, Chawla said, like how to make small talk about anything other than COVID or how to dress for the office.
“We’ve been in such a different head space,” Chawla said. “Now, it’s more like, “Oh my gosh, have we forgotten how to interact?’ ”
The carnival of interpersonal interaction that is the typical office now feels overwhelming for many.
Research shows that the unconscious parade of calculations and adjustments we make when we’re around other people — monitoring our thoughts, emotions and communication and reacting accordingly — is “extremely exhausting,” Chawla said.
Katherine has noticed a gap
between her colleagues that graduated and started working remotely
versus those “who knew what the real world was like.”
She’s been trying to help out, offering advice about things she thought were common knowledge:
Here’s what you should do with your hands during a meeting.
Direct your attention to the person who’s presenting.
Take notes,
make eye contact.
Don’t bring a snack.
Don’t touch your phone.
“They literally do not know this, which is so mind-boggling to me,” Katherine said.
“I feel so bad for them. But they’re learning.”
She’s seen some “insane” fashion choices from younger cohorts, too. Recently, a younger colleague came into the bank sporting a plaid suit like the one Cher wears in “Clueless” with white cowboy boots. Someone else wore their Balenciaga joggers on casual Friday.
“What is this?” Katherine said. “There is no world in which this needs to be worn to the office.”
Her own style has shifted to prioritize ease and efficiency; “everything needs to look good and be super comfortable.” She’s whittled her makeup routine down so it’s “snatched in five minutes.” She’s noticed the trend toward energy conservation more generally, not just in herself but in her colleagues. She suspects it’s because people are feeling more taxed by in-person interactions.
“At the end of the workday, where before we’d be like, ‘Let’s go grab ramen or a drink or whatever,’ now it’s like, ‘Ugh, let me go home and mind my own business. I need some alone time.’ ”
James Davitt can relate. By nature, he’s “more of the headphones, head-down type of guy.” But before the pandemic, he’d been trying to make a change. He took a job in financial services at a small community bank in Connecticut and tried to be outgoing. He started saying hi to more people, dropping by his colleagues’ desks for some spontaneous chit-chat.
Davitt, 27, was among the first ones back in his office in mid-March, but he doesn’t feel the same impulses to socialize now. Even so, usually only a few other people are in the office when he’s there.
When he does have to interact with his co-workers, it feels a little awkward. He keeps running into people who were hired during the pandemic, whose names he doesn’t know. Then there are “the distance and the handshakes, those little nuances of interacting with people, the face-to-face contact,” Davitt said.
“I don’t know how they feel about the situation,” Davitt said. “I don’t know what they’ve been through. I don’t know if they’ve ever gotten (COVID). There’s a lot of unknowns.”
Apr. 26, 2022 "The end of sick days: Working from home has made it harder to take time off": Today I found this article by Emma Jacobs on the Financial Post:
When Rachel* got COVID, her employer expected her to carry on working remotely rather than take a sick day. “I was very, very tired,” she says. “(It) was very difficult to focus.”
The special needs teacher based in the south-east of England delivered her lessons from home to pupils in the classroom, helped by a teaching assistant.
“You felt that if you didn’t do it, you were letting people down.” Her difficulties were compounded by the weak school internet connection and some challenging behaviour from students.
It was a stark example of the way tools introduced in the pandemic to help isolating students and teachers have transformed working life.
Zoom calls,
and Slack channels
have facilitated work during lockdowns and made it easy for employees to stay at home if they had COVID,
but they have also made it harder to take sick days.
Elizabeth Rimmer, chief executive of LawCare, a charity that supports good mental health in the legal community, has joined numerous webinars and virtual meetings in recent weeks attended by people struggling on with COVID.
“They didn’t look good. (People) can lie in bed with their laptop and power through even if they are unwell.”
Jane van Zyl, chief executive of Working Families, an advocacy group, says: “We have to be mindful that
the lesson from the pandemic is
flexible working
and not working round the clock.”
This is an important issue for employers. Anne Sammon, employment partner at Pinsent Masons, the law firm, has received increasing numbers of inquiries from organizations that are worried about employees’ digital presenteeism. “They want to set the right tone over expectations.
The challenge from an employer’s perspective is how to strike the balance. What you want (managers) to say is, ‘Use your common sense.’ But that doesn’t give people clarity.”
It is not just that technology makes it easier to work from our sick beds, but also that remote and hybrid working could weaken bonds between colleagues.
Research has found that employees who have “social support” are more likely to disclose their illness and so reduce the pressure to work.
The data are still emerging on the effect of widespread remote working on sick days. Last year in the U.K., the Office for National Statistics reported a record low in the number of days people were absent from work.
It dropped from 3.1 per cent of working hours lost due to sickness absence in 1995 to 1.8 per cent in 2020.
The ONS said that furlough and remote working, preventing the spread of viruses such as flu, were likely causes for the drop
while the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a trade body, found the overwhelming majority of respondents (84 per cent) had observed “presenteeism” — when people come to work when ill.
In the U.S., one survey in 2020 found workers were less likely to take time off due to working at home and the belief that it would be frowned upon by their employers.
Pre-pandemic research on a Chinese company with a remote workforce also found that employees took fewer paid sick days because they worked from home.
Some employers have responded to the new pressures experienced by employees working remotely through the pandemic by giving staff additional days off to look after their well-being, notably LinkedIn and Hootsuite, which both gave staff an extra week.
Sick pay is key to encouraging workers to take time off. This was underlined in February, when Boris Johnson, the U.K. prime minister, instructed workers to be like the Germans and become “disciplined about not going into work when you are sick.”
He was criticized for ignoring the fact that statutory sick pay in the U.K. is meagre compared with Germany, where employees receive full pay in the initial weeks of their illness.
Past research has found that efforts to reduce absences, for example, by reducing sick pay, could increase presenteeism and ultimately “lead to more illness and lower productivity.”
Yet the pandemic has shifted employers’ attitudes to sickness, according to Laura Empson, professor in the management of professional service firms at Bayes Business School, City, University of London.
“It’s becoming possible to say I need a break for mental well-being, it’s not that it’s OK to say but at least it’s being said.
Things that were unthinkable pre-COVID are at least possible but not yet acceptable.”
Clients realize that if someone is working when not well, it can be counterproductive and impact employee engagement, says Sammon.
While Alun Baker, chief executive of GoodShape, a well-being company, says:
“The
personal,
corporate
and financial risk
of working when physically or mentally unwell is significant.”
This should encourage employers to propagate a culture that “ensures employees don’t feel pressured to work at all costs,” he adds.
The problem is that policies relating to sickness absence are only effective if they are properly communicated to staff and understood.
The key is making line managers understand the risks of allowing employees who are ill to carry on working,
as well as managing workload to reduce the pressure on staff who are unwell.
Remote working adds another layer of complexity by making it harder to monitor employee well-being.
“When someone comes into the office and is visibly unwell, you can pull them aside,” Sammon says. “When they are remote, you might not speak to them all day.”
Mental health problems can be harder to pick up, though signs might be logging on at strange hours, or not engaging.
“We are seeing a real focus on training managers to be better managers,” says Sammon.
Sam Rope, vice-president of human resources in the U.K. and Ireland for Adecco, the recruitment group, says the company leaves individuals to determine whether they are fit to work for the first seven days, which “ensures that there are no onerous reporting requirements,” and encourages “managers and leaders to lead by example.”
On concerns around presenteeism, Maria Karanika-Murray, associate professor in occupational health psychology at Nottingham Trent University, points out that the word may be too blunt a term to be useful. In a research paper, she describes it as “an adaptive behaviour aimed at meeting work and performance demands during impaired capacity owing to ill-health.”
She suggests seeing it as a continuum of behaviour from restorative, helping a worker to keep in touch with colleagues, providing some stimulation, to dysfunctional, hampering both health and performance.
There is a difference between “functional presenteeism” and behaviour that is harmful. She makes a case for challenging the assumption that it is always negative.
Just as organizations have started to realize some stress is useful to performance,
while too much is overwhelming
and too little under-stimulating.
“There is an optimal middle for performance,” she says.
In a flexible hybrid work situation, inevitably some of this is down to workers’ judgment. “In an ideal world, if there are enough options for flexible work, we might not need sick leave,” says Karanika-Murray. “It will all be about adjustments.”
One consultant who worked through COVID symptoms says she found it useful to continue running a project.
“Ironically, the adrenaline from the campaign actually helped clear my head.”
However, she would stay away from the office when unwell, even if experiencing minor ailments. “I felt it never makes sense to take a cold or bug (and) get my colleagues ill when you run a company with a small team.”
Much depends on the culture of the workplace: the examples set by senior executives, the jibes made about slacking off or bingeing on streaming services. Ultimately it comes down to trusting employees to
take time off when they need it
and not abuse the flexibility.
Organizations do not usually plan effectively for sickness cover,
which could alleviate the guilt and stress associated with taking time off.
“We don’t look at the whole team to see what skills are complementary so that if someone needs to take time off that (they) aren’t overloaded” on their return, says Karanika-Murray.
For Rachel, the special needs teacher, the difficulties of remote learning while sick have forced her and co-workers to come up with different solutions.
“It’s made me say more about how we set cover and what resources are available when we are too sick to think about anything but ourselves.
We are set in our ways about how we teach. It might not mean we teach the way we (usually) teach.”
*Not her real name
© 2022 The Financial Times Ltd.
The end of sick days: Working from home has made it harder to take time off | Financial Post
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