Home office - curse or blessing?

An experience report

Totally unprepared, we all fell into the 1st lockdown of the Corona Pandemic. Exactly fell! We had no problem switching to home office in our company. At least technically. But were we prepared? Mentally, organisationally and professionally?

A look into the immediate past

Working from home has a long tradition at WebGate. In fact, WebGate did not have an office when it was founded. As consultants, we were mainly at our clients or working from home. As we grew and acquired more companies, we added offices and, as a modern company, the possibility to work from home one day a week. We tried to make this as individual as possible, depending on the client and the employee. But did this prepare us for COVID-19?

Reality check 1 - The technical aspect

We were just lucky. Two weeks before the first lockdown, we had completed our mail and CRM migration to the cloud. Our ERP has been in the cloud for 2 years and our development tools are also cloud-based. Our employees have been getting laptops as work tools for a long time. No, we didn't see it coming, it was pure luck!

But I have often wondered what would have happened if we still needed access to our infrastructure in the office. Of course our team would have set up VPN tunnels and so on, but how would that have worked for communication and collaboration? Would we have been able to organise a daily meeting as quickly and easily without cloud-based meeting and chat software? And what about pair programming? Working together on proposals? Collaborating with our clients? I doubt if we could have done that. From a technical point of view, we were just lucky to have chosen the right tools at the right time.

Reality check 2 - The human aspect

But how did this affect us as people? With the closure of the schools, it was immediately clear to Roman and me that our staff were now needed at home. An extraordinary situation had arisen! This demanded the utmost flexibility and adaptation from all of us. But it was not just the fact that the children were suddenly at home, or that the partner also worked from home, that challenged us, but also the fact that we no longer met physically.

One of the things we did was to meet virtually at the same time every day. 15 minutes to share, gossip and hear what was going on "in" the company.

After two weeks I was totally exhausted and my limbs were aching. My body was rebelling against all the meetings. It was as if my body couldn't cope with the fact that the image transmission was very slightly, imperceptibly delayed compared to the sound. I realised how much of the non-verbal message was being lost. And I miss the contact with my fellow participants!

Let's look a little further back

There used to be a reason we came to the office....

Yes, there really was a reason why we humans get together to work. No, it was not because we like to hide in the corner of open-plan offices. The reason has more to do with the coffee machine. We are social creatures, we need to interact. And we need it as much as we need concentrated work. Creativity, decision-making, troubleshooting and many other activities are linked to this exchange.

If we want to find solutions, we need to interact with each other. The team is more than the sum of its parts. We push each other to be good, to be the best. (I know that anyone with children would now say "or the worst"). Our world of work has changed, but when we look back we realise that this working together, having a common goal, has been and continues to be essential to our success as human beings. Whether it was in the past as production communities among farmers, as artisanal family businesses, as factories during industrialisation, or today as large think tanks, we need this togetherness.

Summary of our experience

No, we were not prepared for home office in this form. And I personally don't believe in this isolating form of home office. I am convinced that we need social interaction. But I am also convinced that the home office as part of a company's culture is an important contribution to a healthy society, to a better work-life balance, to the strengthening of families, to the protection of infrastructure and resources. It's just that I think we still have a lot to learn here. We need to find a balance between working together and working individually. Both are important for our mental health. - So the journey towards the workplace of the future continues.

Author: Christian Güdemann