Why lockdown gave us a weird idea of working from home

A researcher worries the lockdown may have left us with a negative and unfair impression of working from home. Photo / Getty Images

It was about halfway through lockdown when I found myself, lying belly-down on my front lawn, chatting to one of New Zealand's most esteemed scientists.

If Sir Peter Gluckman had been able to see I was phoning from within a kiddy's miniature tepee, I wouldn't have blamed him for not taking my call.

It proved to be the only refuge I could find from the noisy 4-year-old who'd overrun the workspace I've set up in our garage.

Such was the strange experience of that six weeks in which many of us – and nearly half of us for the first time, as surveys indicate – made our kitchens and living rooms our new offices.

Still, initial research suggests many of us now want to go back, escaping the gaze of our bosses, trading dull conference room meetings for Zoom sessions, and saving cash by opting for cheese toasties instead of cafe paninis.

For myself, level 4 wasn't too much of a shock.

I've always worked away from the Herald's Central Auckland newsroom, and moving my young family back to our home province of Taranaki proved one of the best decisions we ever made.

I keep in touch with our chief reporters easily enough over phone, email or Slack, often joking that I'm calling from the beach or the pub.

My home office is a desk, a laptop, a couple of op-shop sofas, two guitars, a few hundred books, an old fridge filled with frozen pies, and a turntable for playing records. A stack of Led Zeppelin vinyl helped me churn through endless Covid-19 stories amid the thick of the crisis.

I'll admit my set-up is far from perfect. Along with small children sometimes invading the space, it can come with other unexpected background sounds at the worst of times. While talking live on air to the BBC once, the neighbour decided to fire up his two-stroke lawnmower.

Yet I'd struggle to see how I could go back to working out of a busy, open-plan office – and I'm not alone.

Some journalists have makeshift studios and offices. Others have teepees pic.twitter.com/7K7OqXAQb2

— Jamie Morton (@Jamienzherald) April 1, 2020

One Otago University survey of 2595 Kiwis working from home during the lockdown found that three quarters felt equally or more productive and about nine in 10 wanted to keep doing it at least part-time.

Interestingly, nearly 40 per cent never worked from home in any way – and 82 per cent figured they had the right resources to do their job.

"A balance is what we want — the best of both worlds for both the individual and the organisation,'' researcher Paula O'Kane told the Otago Daily Times.

Still though, the sheer weirdness of level 4 – those awkward Zoom meetings, toddler tantrums and marital spats over who gets the home office – might have left many newcomers with a tainted perception.

One Kiwi researcher believes that may indeed have happened, and has analysed his and others' experiences in a just-published study.

When the country effectively shut down in March, Victoria University's Professor Alexander Richter saw his fellow lecturers have to juggle distressed students with quickly reorganising courses, deadlines and assessments.

"I spent several weeks in dozens of online meetings with colleagues and students to understand the new situation and to coordinate," said Richter, who specialises in digital work design at the university's Wellington School of Business and Government.

"Ultimately, I personally feel a lot closer to the colleagues that were on my side when we went through this together.

"I also appreciate how understanding the students in my programmes were. There was a lot of solidarity from all sides."

Even for someone who lectures in digital work, basing himself from home was demanding.

"We had two school kids and a toddler at home and then extended our bubble with a newborn during lockdown level 4," he said.

"So it was busy in the house, but, again, the lockdown brought us closer as a family. Many colleagues and students were in similar situations and open to unconventional approaches."

That often meant phone calls in the evenings.

When he analysed the experience for his new paper, just published in the International Journal of Information Management, what especially struck him was what he called "ad hoc adoption".

That was people being forced to use digital tools, like conferencing software, without much time to get used to it.

I was one of them. I'd never used video interview platform Blinder before using it to speak with one sector chief executive, and found myself scrambling to figure it out just a few minutes before the interview began.

"One could say the lockdown acted as a facilitator for digital work," Richter said.

"This led to increasing awareness about what is possible with the tools – and what is not."

Also, it may have added to those misconceptions.

"I hear often how stressful and tiring digital work is. However, the stress we all had during the lockdown was not due to digital work, but due to the crisis situation we were in," he said.

"Digital work did not force us into these many coordination meetings – the crisis did."

Another point was the idea that companies could now make digital work the norm for employees who were previously unused to it.

Rather, Richter said, companies and workers needed time to properly adapt.

"Only with growing experience, we will be able to use digital work tools in a way that is really beneficial and do not risk increasing our stress-levels by an increasing amount of zoom calls," he said.

"We need to avoid digital overload and focusing on productivity and wellbeing."

Along with that was the mistaken need for many of us to prove ourselves when we're not in the office – something which risked workers doing more than they needed to, simply to please their boss.

"All in all, I think we all need to give ourselves more time to embrace the chances and acknowledge the risks of digital work and find social ways to deal with the new situation," he said.

"I think the lockdown made us reflect on the ways we work: digital work gives us flexibility and can help everybody to work more in a way that suits them best,.

"I read a few times over the last weeks, 'okay, the lock-down is over, let's get back to work'. But an office is only a place and does not define our work."

Richter stressed that he wasn't advocating for us not to come into the office anymore – but at the same time, he figured digital work had come to stay, bringing benefits to our companies, environment and our own wellbeing.

Perhaps just not with pesky toddlers.