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Working From Home — Setting Up For Success
Like many people this year, working remotely went from an occasional occurrence to an enforced environment. Throw in some kids being “home schooled-ish” and a national shortage of toilet roll and you’ve got the ingredients for a nightmare ready to roll…
Luckily, we were pretty much good-to-go from an enablement point of view with cloud based services for most tooling and more traditional remote access for everything else. However, what I was not prepared for was the move to entire days filled with video calls.
At the start, the default behaviour was to try and replicate an office environment using video calls. When you wanted to talk to someone, you’d book some time that inevitably got filled…so much so, that whole days would pass with nothing but back-to-back calls. Most would include some pleasantries, people asking if you could hear them or being told they were on mute and lots of kids or pets injecting welcome relief to the relentless onslaught of talking heads bobbing about in boxes.
As time passed, things improved, work has become more asynchronous, meetings more focused and video calls less awkward. However, one element has stayed broadly the same:
Video calls feel like second class citizens to face to face meetings
