Nasty work from home discoveries
Afew weeks ago, I had a lot of friends who had very romantic ideas about working from home. You could make #motivated playlists! Whip up salads for lunch! Become a lean, mean email-answering machine now there’s no Sandra at the next desk yapping away!
But now we’re all realising that working from home is like throwing your first dinner party.
However romantic and cool you think it’s gonna be, it’ll end up being far more overwhelming, underwhelming and lonely than you realised. And, just as when your dinner party guests sit down to your roast chicken and reveal their veganism, it holds a lot of nasty discoveries.
The first is about yourself obviously. You’re not a lean, mean, efficiency machine. Actually, you’re only able to do any work after you’ve categorised all the drawing pins in your home office cork board by colour. And pin size. And from left to right in infinitely minute geometrically pleasing patterns until, oh God, it’s 5pm.
But your need for pin-board symmetry pales in comparison to the second, rather larger discovery of the home-bubble based workplace. Your partner’s work self.
For many of us who’ve never worked with, or even seen our partner at work, we’re meeting our partner’s work self for the first time. It’s weird.
Maybe they’ve got Americanlevel enthusiasm for sporting references and exclamation points (‘‘Hey Team!’’), are actually a secret feminist (‘‘Actually I don’t think Lucy was finished there . . .’’) or lean so heavily on jargon they sound like someone playing a Very Important Businessman in a Michael Bay film (‘‘at the end of the day we need to circle back and get closure on these deliverables, Sandra’’).
What’s even more disconcerting is that you’re probably realising for the first time that they’re a much better human at work than they are at home . . . And has anyone else, now that they can hear their partner in a Zoom meeting being so balanced and open-minded, wanted to shout that yesterday they sulked for 20 minutes because you left the lid off the jam jar?
We’re coming face to face with the full arsenal of our partner’s professional skills. The depth of their patience, empathy, listening, conflict management
. . . and this begs the question, why aren’t they more like this at home? Because it’s definitely something I’m guilty of...
There could be a lot of obvious reasons. All these skills are emotional labour, and after a full day of that at work you may not want to come home and still be ‘‘on’’. You may feel that all these skills are just part of the role you play at work, and your partner loves you for who you really are.
Or things may just be way more emotionally complicated with your partner which dampens your ability to talk-about-this-reasonably-Sandra.
But we can’t escape the fact that we get complacent with loved ones because they can’t stop us doing our jobs or fire our sorry asses. y partner and I have actually worked together for a long time. So we have already softened many of the hard edges of the work/home clash. But it’s made him really astute at pointing out other glaring discrepancies between my work and home self.
There was a sobering moment after the first meet-my-family dinner where he turned and said, ‘‘How come you can listen and laugh attentively to some nitwit you’re interviewing about importing screws or whatever . . . but you won’t let your Mum get a word in edgeways in a conversation?’’
He was right. When I’m interviewing someone, they have the information I need. So I’ll be empathetic, considerate and attentive in order to do my job well. And the same with my bosses and colleagues, their relative power over me forces out my most attentive behaviour.
Whereas Mum lacks that immediate power and I get lazy. In the same way, you might not be as patient with your partner as you are with a colleague, simply because you can get away with it.
And sure, your loved ones like you more than Sandra does so they’ll put up with more. But not only are they seeing the full limit of your skills, they’re seeing them at a time of severe lockdowninduced pressure at home. And we can’t forget that we can get fired from a relationship, however longterm.
So perhaps now is actually the time to do a performance review – do we need to circle back to that bottom line and see if we’re giving our best to our relationship?
Because if not, our chances of getting made redundant from our relationships are spiralling.
M