Last year (2019) I started teleworking one day a week. Until then, I’d never done it before and I wanted to try it. Actually, one of the main reasons I left the company I worked for at the time (Ayesa) was precisely this: my job didn’t allow teleworking and the company I changed to (Ricoh) did.
This year (2020) I changed jobs again. The new company (EUIGS) didn’t have a teleworking culture at the moment, but an experienced friend of mine had told me great things about EUIGS. Teleworking one day a week had been great at Ricoh, but I needed fresh air.
Then, just when I was about to start with EUIGS, the covid situation exploded.
EUIGS had to change its culture in record time and, I must say, they did a great job!
I finally started at EUIGS working remotely from day one. Today we enjoy full teleworking at EUIGS, until the covid situation gets ‘normalized’. And my truth is, I’ve never been happier in my work life.
Pros of working from home
On average, in my case, I spend an hour and 45 minutes commuting when I have to go to and come back from the office. This extra time that I have now, I’m spending it sleeping (30 minutes), studying (45 minutes) and working out (20 minutes plus 10 minutes to take a shower). As a consecuence of having this extra time, my daily mood is usually better because, after work, I can fully devote my time to my family (wife, two kids and two dogs, if you’re wondering).
Economics
You could argue that there are new expenditures when teleworking that you have to face: the Internet connection, electricity consumption, etc. But, at least in my case, the gas I save not having to go to the office is higher than those new expenses. So, actually, I’m saving money when working remotely.
EUIGS is also saving all that money in their water, electricity, etc. bills. So it seems to be a win-win situation.
Socializing
I don’t know about you, but working from home I can tell you that I’m having more training, more help from my colleagues and I’m making more new friends than ever before working at the office. It’s true that, as I said before, I joined EUIGS teleworking from day one, so I have nothing to miss. But I can say that I’ve never felt lonely or left behind: on the contrary, I feel more relaxed and friendly than ever before. I feel as part of a splendid group of professionals. And, beyond my specific group in the company, there’s also a human richness that is difficult to experience when you are at the office: in the videocalls you can see the home of everyone, even their children or pets. So, not only now we connect with more people, it also gets more intimate and human than I ever dreamed of.
To telework or not to telework
So, at least in the Software Development industry, the question doesn’t seem to be about teleworking or not. In fact, software development in reality is and will always be a teleworking job, regardless of where you are: even at the office, software is not hardware, it’s the flow that goes from the brain/hands of human developers to different servers that always are remote from the developers’ brains.
One of the unconfortable but important questions hidden behind all this is: do managers and companies trust their people? How do I know if Bob is right now playing Call of Duty with his playstation instead of doing his real duty?
To telecontrol or not to telecontrol people
What I really think about this is that the new paradigm has nothing to do with teleworking. At least in the IT industry, teleworking is already a fact. To be successful, the new mindset that everyone (and, mostly, the managers) is going to have to reflect upon is: people don’t need to be controlled to do their job: people just need help to control the results of their job. People need feedback to get more focused. People need useful processes to improve their performance. People need trust to more easily let their love and care for their job come up to the forefront.
Who’s the boss?
The other day, a friend of mine (yes, he also works as a software developer) gave me a really valuable image: with telework, everyone seems like a boss, with their own private office.
Apart from the comical ego metaphor of everyone being a boss, the coolest thing about it is not the way it looks but what it entails: the energy that a programmer needs to concentrate on the code is much less than when she’s at the office. Therefore, the level of concentration that the programmers have now at their own room has increased exponentially. In the office, there are lots of interruptions and distractions: working from home, you can choose to isolate yourself when you need to, something you can’t do at the office. This way, having a private office uncovers its true and forgotten utility: it’s not for looking important but for doing important things. And coding is indeed an important thing. And it requires a good deal of concentration to do it well.
Of course, concentrating is more difficult when the kids are at home, screaming at their top of their lungs. But that has nothing to do with teleworking but with the consecuences of closing schools due to the covid. For those of you that, like me, have kids, just imagine the concentration you’d be able to achieve if they were at school, when the covid situation gets controlled over time.
And what about pair-programming? Well, just make a video call and nobody else has to listen to your conversation, just the interested parts. So, my dream of an office that looked like a library, where everyone spoke whispering in order not to bother or interrupt the others, has finally come true. Indirectly, yeah, but who cares?
One last reflection
Sometimes companies have toxic people whose only job seems to be to use their social engineering to meet their private agendas, climbing the corporate ladder without giving real value to the company they work for. What is worse, it’s usually the contrary with this kind of people, especially when they have some type of management role: they subtract value to the company without the company finding out (or finding it out too late). They bully people, they demotivate them, etc.
When everyone’s working from home, this kind of behaviour is going to be challenging for these people. Now, they still won’t supply value to the company, but at least it’s going to be harder for them to subtract it: bullying, being cynical or whatever social ‘technique’ they’re using for their own purposes isn’t going to be as effective as before in the office, because the arena has changed and everyone’s working in their own arena.
So, to wrap it up, covid sucks but teleworking tastes really good. Enjoy!
