The PJs and toast days are over! Home working is messing with our heads
HAve you been working from home? Before Covid the idea that you could sit in your pyjamas, eat toast and potter away on your laptop while getting paid sounded bliss. Seven months on, I think more and more people are coming to realise it is a gilded cage.
I have no doubt that while the idea of working from home might be appealing, the reality is psychologically toxic.
I count myself fortunate that, being a doctor, I was going into work most days, even during lockdown. I’m not sure how I’d have coped if I had been sent home to work.
Sure, commuting is a pain, but the structure of work — having to start and finish at certain times, is useful.
I’ve had so many friends tell me how, since working from home, they’ve struggled to switch off. It’s all too easy for the working day to bleed into the evening and weekends.
Then there’s the social element which we lose with working from home. A friend recently told me how, after being allowed back into the office in July, she saw a colleague walking down the hallway on the way to a photocopier, whom she hadn’t seen for months. She was overwhelmed with excitement to see her and waved frantically as they greeted each other like long-lost friends.
She realised afterwards that, truth be told, they hardly knew each other and had rarely spoken before Covid. Despite this, they had both been genuinely thrilled to see each other.
The fact is these vague, tentative connections are incredibly important. They feed into our deep-rooted sense of tribal affiliation.
We might not know the person down the corridor well, but we are still connected to them through our place of work, and this sense of connection needs to be fostered and nurtured.
While we have tended to focus on measuring tangible numbers such as the rate of infections or deaths, the virus has taken away something incredibly important that we have rarely thought about: our ability to interact.
It might sound daft, but one of the most important things we do at work isn’t work. We are gregarious animals — interacting with each other, fostering alliances, making connections and friendships, is incredibly important for our emotional wellbeing. And it works the other way round, too. We’ve all had the experience of an infuriating boss or irritating colleague. Frustrations and annoyances are a normal part of working life. But the working environment helps us let off steam. We can go and complain to a sympathetic colleague when something happens.
A surreptitious roll of the eyes in a meeting about a boss droning on lightens the mood and makes things bearable.
These small, apparently inconsequential moments act as the lubricant that helps us work. Conversely, we might complain about a colleague only to find others found them a joy to work with, and that in turn triggers some pause for thought.
Standing around the water cooler was the modern equivalent of sitting round the campfire, chatting and telling stories. It was about forming connections. Of course, those connections might not last outside of work.
Few people we work with will become friends that transcend the working environment. But in order to help us get on with one another, to work and help each other when necessary, we need to be face to face.
There’s no preamble chitchat before Zoom meetings or lingering discussions after everyone has gone, yet these were vital. I was talking to the eminent Professor of Psychiatry, Sir Simon Wessely a few days ago about the pandemic’s impact on our mental health. He said some people have convinced themselves working from home is sustainable in the long term, but he has his doubts.
What we’ve failed to take into account, he says, is how important social interaction is in forming trust — vital for cooperation in all areas of our life. He argued that while we might be able to work from home for a short period, ultimately we all need to return to work to gossip, to form alliances and friendships — it’s not possible to do that virtually. At the moment, we are trading off previously formed relationships, but we need to return soon to build more. He gave an interesting analogy. He likened it to an experiment by the conductor André Previn. To demonstrate the importance of the conductor, half way through a concert, Previn sat down.
The orchestra managed to keep playing for some time, but slowly, the tempo was lost and in time the orchestra had to stop and couldn’t start up again. Without the direction of the conductor, and the sense of playing together to achieve a collective goal, the orchestra became unstuck.
That’s how it will be working from home: we’ll manage for a bit, but eventually need to return. Long term, it’s just not sustainable psychologically.
FINALLY, murmurs of sense over the plight of older people trapped in care homes. Minister for Care Helen Whately has said a trial will take place where relatives will be tested regularly and wear PPE. Banning all visitors has been inhumane — older people should be treated like adults.