work life balance

Teleworking really isn’t for everyone. There are so many people that I talk to who tell me they could never do it. If you even think it’s not for you, it’s not. However, if it’s something you have the opportunity to do and are considering, allow me to share why it works for me and how I feel it is beneficial to our workplaces. I now have a full year under my belt of at least one day a week. A few months ago I moved to two days, and most recently, since my office has been under construction, all my work time has been at home.

For starters, I can sleep in much later. When you eliminate the commute time, parking, and walking an additional quarter of a mile to my office, and the time I was spending before work to shower, dress, and primp for the day, I am able to sleep in over an hour longer than I was before. I could stand to sleep in even longer, but I get up to enjoy a leisurely cup of coffee, a healthy, non-rushed breakfast, and a short meditation session before I log in for the day. My morning routine is so much more pleasant. I no longer feel tired all the time or dread getting up.

Next, I’m unbelievably comfortable for a variety of reasons. The most striking is in the attire I can wear. When I dress after waking up, I put on comfy workout clothes so I can go for a lunch run later in the day. Also, my desk, chair, and surrounding workspace at home are completely suited to my height, likings, and taste. I can control the temperature of the room. Throughout the day, my cats and dog come to visit, hang around, and sleep on or near me. Their presence reminds me I’m home if I briefly get swept away in workplace politics. Not to mention that looking at them and petting them just seems to soothe my soul.

I move around much more. My chair swirls and doesn’t have weird side bars that give my legs bruises when I curl up in my chair as I type away. I’ll take stretch breaks and do some reinvigorating yoga poses that I wouldn’t dream of doing at the office. When I get up to make cups of warm herbal tea throughout the day, instead of walking across the room to the microwave like I do at work, I walk down a flight of stairs and don’t feel grossed out by the water supply or my surroundings. But my favorite is that I use my lunch break to run. I used to use that same break to walk at work. This required changing my shoes, never being appropriately dressed for the weather, and worrying about getting too warm. Now I can perspire as much as I’d like without worry.

I am so much more focused and productive. I’m not distracted by idle chatter or sharing my own nonsensical stories. There are no crazy alarms going off, constant overhead announcements, or loud trash barrels rolling by as I try to converse over the phone. I don’t see or hear the dings and distractions of other people’s computers, desk phones, and cell phones. I don’t overhear anyone else’s personal or professional conversations. Two job roles back, I worked for 7 years in a corridor that had a one-person, non-gender-specific restroom right down the hall from my desk and around the corner from the transportation department, where the drivers would pop in and out all day to use the facilities. The noise of a flushing toilet and horrendous smell would permeate my senses all day. One of my favorite funny memories from that job was when my then boss, who had an adjacent office to mine, said, “Not only do we have to put up with a bunch of sh!t, but it actually has to smell like it too.”

Along the lines of focus, I pay attention during conference calls like I never had before. Unless I have a part to play in a conference call meeting, at work I find it nearly impossible to pay attention. I’m in front of my computer and always multitasking. Now I use conference call times to walk around the house and do some mindless work. I’ll sometimes sweep, start dinner, grab the mail, or do some other random things. Because I’m physically moving while mentally listening and not trying to do two mental activities at once, I am paying far more attention than I ever had on calls before. I’ll often unmute my phone and pipe in or stop to take notes in my email. That is something I hardly ever did at my desk.

It’s overall healthier too. I am in touch with what is going on outside weather-wise because I have windows. Many spaces I have worked in over the years have had no windows or access to the outside. Sometimes, on a sunny day, I will take my laptop out to the deck and actually feel the sun on my skin. The air quality at home isn’t “iffy.” I’m eating better too. At the office, if I forgot my lunch or decided I am not in the mood to eat what I brought, I would stand on a long cafeteria line and purchase something overpriced and not quite as good for me as the things I have at home.

At the end of the day, I log off and hop into the shower. I’m dried and ready for the evening before I would have even been on I-91 sitting in traffic and feeling extremely agitated.

Monetary savings in food, gas, and clothing. Comfort. Healthier atmosphere and food. More sleep. More time. All good stuff, huh?

Enough about me—this can reap great benefits for employers as well.

For starters, there is likely less unexpected or short-term notice time off. Snow days are just as productive and not to mention safer on both ends. If an employee doesn’t feel well but slugs into the office, other employees get sick, then they get their children sick. Then the children need to stay home, be picked up from school, or not be allowed in daycare, which is more time off for others. An employee without a telework agreement who opts to stay home will cost the organization a full day of work. An employee with one who opts to work sick from home loses the organization very little. Additionally, a doctor appointment in the middle of the day before telework for either my children or myself used to mean a whole morning or afternoon off—usually the afternoon, because trying to find a parking space by 8am where I work is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Speaking of parking and space, allowing employees to telework creates both. Office space in many organizations is at a premium. Even having everyone telework one day a week (staggered) would free up 20% of office and parking space.

There is overall less wasted time throughout the day. Lines at the coffee shop, lines in the cafeteria, waiting for elevators, looking for an open bathroom, being in a queue just to warm up food in the microwave, that third Wednesday of each month where the computers reboot for what seems like infinity… just to name a few. Not to mention a lot of time chit-chatting and socializing. Yes, there are times the remote connection kicks me off, but the overall time savings favor the employer with all the other time wasters that happen in the office.

Safety is always an issue. When I was the strategic planner for VA Connecticut, one couldn’t imagine the number of complaints that would come in every week about air quality, requests for asbestos checks, mold checks, ripped carpets that folks trip over, furniture with sharp edges, etc. When it rains or snows, someone was always bound to fall—meaning a visit to employee health, days off, workers’ comp… all kinds of stuff no employer really wants.

Employees are happier when they aren’t rushed, eating well, sleeping more, saving money, moving around, and feeling like their employer is doing something mutually beneficial for both of them. How can you go wrong?

Well… many things can go wrong. That could be a whole other blog. It may be comforting, however, to know there is some strong, sound advice, policies, and guidelines out there. My organization, for example, has trainings required by both the employee and supervisor before beginning. Additionally, clear expectations are required to be written up, and it comes with the caveat that either party can terminate it at any time. Why not swipe some of these best practices from a person or whole organization that does it well? There are hundreds of articles on the web and in HR journals around the world about why it’s a win-win for all to adopt it, and nearly none on how terrible it has gone.

For now, if you are thinking about using an existing policy or implementing one in the workplace, these are some of the reasons I would humbly advocate for it on both ends. I am sure I’m missing many more benefits! Please don’t hesitate to pipe in or comment if you know of any. Horror stories are welcome too!

Thanks for taking the time to read. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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One of my “co workers”

Have you ever sat at work at your desk, in front of your computer, and felt completely immobilized? Perhaps staring at the screen, not being excited about a single thing you should be working on? Conceivably, like me, you’ve procrastinated with just one more thing before you delve in—one last bathroom trip, one more cup of coffee, one last check of your personal phone sitting off to the side… for the 15th time… in the past 5 minutes.

Maybe you’ve been so unmotivated while sitting at your desk that you’ve taken to Google “motivation,” “new jobs,” “career changes,” “inspiration”… and alas, you become desperate because nothing is lighting a spark. So you Google “depression” or “what’s wrong with me?”

I used to be motivated when I was younger. I was the most motivated, happy person I knew—if I was honest with myself and took a break from being so focused to notice that others around me didn’t exactly have the same spark in their eyes about the silliness and mundane work we were doing. At some point, I started to feel my energy and motivation drain. It was depressing because that didn’t feel like me.

After Googling any and all possible search terms to unearth whatever could possibly be wrong with me, I slowly started to tap into a new reality. I began to wake up and realize what a cog in the wheel I’d been—just a small part of a big, giant system churning out widgets at a rapid pace, more rapid than anyone could want them. When people were sick of their widgets and had one too many, advertising was invented to convince people that they should want and need more than they are satisfied with, or they will not be happy or “successful.” So people kept working harder to churn out more widgets, only to buy more—only needing to work harder and longer to do so… only to be constantly chasing their own happiness and wondering what was wrong with them.

A quick Google search on my smartphone this afternoon revealed to me that butter was invented anywhere between 10,000 and a few hundred years ago. Just a small range, right? Nonetheless, sometime, somewhere, at some distant point in time, a human being not too different from you or me sat churning butter at home thinking, “I can’t wait to finish this churning—it’s so monotonous.” The cream likely came from a cow just yards away on the farm, not but a few hours before. It’s likely the butter-maker fantasized about a device that could do this for them, so they could spend more time enjoying life.

Perhaps the butter-maker didn’t overeat butter because he or she knew how much work went into it. Perhaps they didn’t overeat anything at all because they understood how much effort went into getting the food before them, period. If they didn’t hunt and gather it themselves, they knew the individual who had and likely exchanged their butter for it.

At some point in the past few hundred (or thousand) years, humanity’s inventions surpassed our common sense. We made machines to do just about everything we used to do, including butter churning. As a race, we literally left our homesteads and went to work in factories to make things that people needed. The machines churned widgets out so fast that we made what we needed fairly quickly. It should have stopped there—taking only what we needed.

But we kept on churning it all out.

It was monotonous—perhaps even as monotonous as churning butter manually. The only way to get out of this precarious situation and move on to bigger and better things was to churn out widgets with more speed and adeptness than your co-workers around you, so you could instead supervise the line from the catwalk above. It was probably around that point in history that we stopped working together as a human race and started to compete in ways that were harmful to us as a species.

The shiny new line supervisor watching from above might have realized that it could feel quite lonely at the top. Perhaps he looked down at the line and missed the camaraderie and teamwork. However, with that increase in pay and social status, he wasn’t about to say anything. He “made it,” after all. He should feel happy. But he doesn’t. What’s wrong with him?

Just a mere few hundred years later, we live in a world where we want for nothing, yet face ridiculous, cutthroat competition. So much so that our young children in elementary schools are on medications because the stress of having to “succeed” is too much to handle; and there is so much stimulation coming at them from every angle that they have difficulty focusing.

We are sitting at desks, churning out reports no one reads, crunching numbers that can be manipulated so many ways they’ve become useless, and feeling superior for going through more emails than the person next to us. We are pressured to keep up the sales numbers—sell, sell, sell—beat the competition, beat your neighbor, and keep improving upon all of this before your next performance review.

To what end?

At least back in the manual butter-churning days, we felt connected—to our food source, the earth that fed us, the animals that provided for us, our families and friends that we worked collaboratively with on a regular basis in exchange for life’s simplicities. There was a sense of purpose and belonging. One could see the fruit of their labor. Rarely did anyone take more than they needed.

There was no need for speed and churning out widgets at a rapid pace to meet an invisible, unnecessary sales quota that felt completely empty to you after the pat on the back in front of your team… when you went back to your desk to stare at your computer and wonder why you aren’t happy.

There is nothing wrong with you. There is something wrong with society.

We are so far removed from our food sources, our connection to nature, and simplicity that we have lost our connection and relevance to the earth—and to ourselves. We have little meaning and purpose. We feel bored and lonely. We receive all the wrong messages from society to do more, be more, and compete more. We are too tired at the end of the day to spend quality time with family or friends, to volunteer in our communities, to go to a town meeting, or to fight for anything we care about.

We need to take our lives back.

The butter-churning days may have been monotonous, but at least they had purpose. At least the butter-maker directly benefited from what they were doing. At least society was working together for a common purpose and felt part of something bigger than themselves.

What is the purpose of what we are churning out now?

Machines were invented so we could spend more time enjoying life. Why didn’t that happen?

Daily Prompt

via Daily Prompt: Churn

Thanks for taking the time to read. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Why Telework Works (For Me and the Workplace)

On the Wonder of: What’s wrong with me?