Working from Home

 

From The Atlantic, July 29, 2021 “Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this [distrust of working from home] has often been cast as a battle between the old guard and its assumed necessities and a new guard that has found a better way to get things done. But the narrative is not that tidy. Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great “disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “a pure negative” last fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad.” Ed Zitron is the author. The whole article is well worth reading, especially the paragraph about how suck-ups get ahead in an office environment.

 I found this article in a quick Google run – the work-from-home debate is top of a lot of minds these days.

 I ‘worked from home’ in the late 1960’s. I had been teaching at a secondary school, but resigned late in my first pregnancy (as was often expected then) and had a second child fifteen months later. My husband was working toward a PhD. Money was in short supply. When I was offered a job as a lay marker for a Grade 13 school, I jumped at it. And so, large piles of essays were turned over to me at frequent intervals. I did have access to child care – with a good neighbour. But I was also working as a supply teacher on call, and needed to save her time for days when I went into the schools to sub for a missing teacher. Accordingly, I worked on the piles of essays at home.

 My desk was the kitchen table. My link to my employer was a telephone. My timing was entirely his – he wanted to be able to return the work to his students as soon as possible. Almost all of the material was hand-written, with concomitant degrees of legibility. I had lots of sharp red pencils, a pamphlet titled ERRORS IN COMPOSITON (stolen from the Department of English at Queen’s University) as a reference, and two rug rats alternately under my feet and at large on the ground floor of our house. And I did what I believe the modern term for is ‘multi-task’; that is, I fed, wiped, toileted, wiped, cooked, wiped, read and marked, reread, wiped and …………… yeah.

 What saved my sanity was the television. From where we lived, we could access American and Canadian television. There was quite a new children’s program available every morning from 11:00 to 12:00. It was called Sesame Street. The girls were rivetted to it for the whole time it ran. Less enthralling, but still useful, was Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood, which came on from 5:00 to 5:30 and allowed me to prepare dinner in peace. If the pile of essays was too high, I could stretch the TV time with The Friendly Giant some days.

 Anyone who has ever had small children can imagine these conditions – noise, constant interruptions, short work periods, limited space. Looking back, I am amazed at how well I did. I had my husband detour as he drove me to the hospital to deliver our second child so that I could drop off a pile of marked essays. I was reading carefully enough that I once identified a student at risk through her essay and could alert her teacher to get support for her. If it has to be done, I think, it gets done. And all the parents (and pet owners to some extent) who have worked from home this last year can attest to that. Things got done. Even with the distractions and the sometimes unreliable media. Even without peer interaction. Even with the less than ideal setup for doing the work.

 Here comes another batch of quoting, this time from a magazine called “New Scientist” from an article, (August 14 issue) again well worth reading the whole thing, on how the work setup influences how well the task is done. Entitled “Thinking Space” by Annie Murphy Paul, it talks about how creating a sense of belonging and identity in a workspace improves cognition. People who feel an ownership of their space work better – the home team advantage is an example. It discusses how noise and movement detract from concentration, making open-concept offices less productive. Conversely, thinking is a social process, one box avers. Some of this may explain the frequently observed fact that although we provide our children with nice desks in their bedrooms, they do their homework at the kitchen table.

 It seems that what has happened is that a lot of adults, having been forced to do their work as homework, whether on the kitchen table or elsewhere, have discovered that they like it, and their managers have found that in some cases their productivity has increased. Although many people describe the stress that comes from fewer interactions outside the family, and people who live alone identify as being lonely, a great many workers are prepared to continue at home. (Um, if the kids are back in school, that is.)  It is the managers who want the office, with its easier supervisory ambiance, back.

 I have worked in an office, and on my second day in it I hung a painting that I brought from home on the wall opposite my desk, just to mark it as mine, I guess.  That stretch of time was enjoyable in many ways. It was a privilege to have a room of my own, with a door that I could shut and find privacy behind. During that stint I chose, on several occasions, to go in to the office on the weekend and work alone on a complicated job that needed to be organized. I can imagine, however, doing the bulk of what I did there, in pre-computer days, on line from home. And yes, doing that would preclude the coffee breaks where you can sit back and understand more about your fellow workers by parsing body language, tone of voice and positioning far more easily than on Skype or equivalent. I would hate to do job interviews on line, I really would. But I think it could be learned – I just have not had to.

 Many of the workers who have been doing a lot of jobs on line appear to have learned a lot. And want to continue. How many and how often is going, I think, to be the big negotiation when the vaccination levels and transmission rates allow the country to open up again. It is going to be fascinating to watch – from my now quiet house where I have a whole room dedicated as an office and library. But I will be glad when our Book Club is no longer meeting by Skype, even if I have figured out how to do a personal comment and where the mute button is. As for ambient noise – my husband watches a lot of television. With earphones.

Edited to add this just found.