Parent’s guide to working from home
Mums and dads are especially prone to guilt and isolation, writes Masha Rumer.
Telecommuters used to get a bad rap, seen as folks who lounge by the pool with a margarita on a Tuesday afternoon.
But technology is making working from home a viable option for many industries.
Today, more than 60 per cent of United States organisations allow some type of teleworking, compared with a mere 20 per cent just two decades ago.
Not everyone is on board with telecommuting. WordPress.com, owned by Automattic, recently closed its physical San Francisco office because hardly anyone showed up. On the other hand, in 2013, Yahoo ended its work-fromhome policy, and so did IBM last year, for thousands of its staff.
Telecommuting has lots of perks, especially for parents. We get to spend more time with family while staying on a career track, retaining an income and holding on to the jobs we love.
No more two-hour commutes, no more of that pumping soundtrack echoing through the fluorescent-light-flooded conference room and the entire office. Remote work, however, isn’t without challenges.
Isolation
It’s incredibly important for people – and take heed especially you, parents – to interact with other people. Working from home can be surprisingly isolating.
Some days, it may be possible to have not spoken to a single human, despite a ton of work correspondence and other ‘‘human-like’’ contact, which may have, in retrospect, been just a scroll through Facebook and texting about dinner plans with a spouse. Even with a part-time schedule, I found that library singalongs and play dates often conflicted with work calls and deadlines.
Although introverts are said to generally do better with remote work, extroverts can manage, as long as they schedule social activities after hours and even during the day: Lunch or a coffee meeting, a trip to the gym with a neighbour, socialising after the kids are in bed.
These solutions aren’t perfect. It sounds dandy, having lunch dates or plugging away at a technology-friendly coffee shop for eight hours. But adding up the cost of that fancy cafe salad, coffees, transportation and child care can seem like a buzzkill. A guilty-conscience buzzkill. And speaking of ...
Guilt
Okay, parents, I don’t need to tell you about guilt – we all experience it some way or another. Working from home as a parent often feels like falling behind in both, even if multi-tasking is our motto.
Guilt runs deep if there’s work to do at odd hours and kids are in the house. My heart breaks thinking of the times my baby watched videos while I had my back turned to him, drafting an urgent email.
Or when my toddler invited me to join her doll’s tea party in the other room and I declined in order to finish a client report.
Likewise, even if you’re exceeding goals at your job like nobody’s business, you might feel the need to overcompensate.
It’s easy to forget that office people often take lunches and coffee breaks, too, and that these things are not only OK, but also necessary.
Always on
When you work from your home, you work all the time and everywhere. No, really.
It’s incredibly hard to draw boundaries between your personal space and workspace, and the same goes for your time.
You’ve probably worked in the kitchen. Taken conference calls in the preschool parking lot. Typed emails in the grocery store and during dinner, checked email in the middle of the night – and maybe in the bathroom. You are always available.
It’s crucial to create realistic boundaries, preferably informing your partner, too. Even if these rules get broken, which they do.
Some examples are stashing the phone and computer away from the time you pick up the kids to when you put them to bed and designating times when you are offline, barring an emergency or a deadline.
Though working from home is practical and rewarding, it requires discipline and selfawareness to ensure that our work works for us. –Washington Post
Masha Rumer is a writer and a communications professional, as well as a mother of two toddlers.