A Call To Preserve Humanity in our Workplace

COVID-19 has turned the way we work upside down. But retaining our humanity at work is critical to our survival.

We’re over half a year into the world of remote work, and thousands of articles have been published with advice on how to work from home. Unfortunately, too many of those articles focus on surface-level advice–”how to Zoom,” for example–and not on how to work effectively from home, especially during a pandemic. 

When COVID-19 first hit, working from home was about surviving, not thriving. But now that remote work has become the new, semi-permanent (if not actually permanent) reality for so many of us, it’s time to shift the focus to thriving: working well from home, sustainably. 

Those two concepts–working well and working sustainably–are important any time, pandemic or not. But in a year of major global upheaval to the way we live and work, the dangers of burnout become even more perilous. We’ve talked about burnout ad nauseum, but it’s never been a more serious threat than during COVID-19. 

This fall, we’ll be presenting a series of articles on how to work effectively from home. Effective remote work requires a shift in how managers manage and how team members approach their workdays. Above all, we know from the last seven-plus months that working remotely during a pandemic can get a little messy.

We all want to work as well as possible, and with a few changes to how we think about and approach the workday, working as well as possible is possible.

Before we launch into the “how” of working well remotely (both during and after the pandemic), we need to talk about restoring humanity to our workday.

COVID-19 has revealed many truths about us as a society, especially about the way we work. The pandemic pulled the rug back on issues we had previously been swept under it, especially for working parents. But when the lines between work and home suddenly blurred (or disappeared altogether), employees and employers alike could no longer just “grin and bear it.” 

One employer, in an attempt to show his team that he understood how hard it was to juggle both full-time work and full-time parenting once workplaces and schools shut down and entire families were stuck at home together, told them that they could “just get their work done whenever they can.”

He was trying to communicate that he understood many employees could no longer be fully focused and engaged between 8 and 5 every day. But what he was really saying was “it’s too bad you have to juggle work and parenting, but it’s not my fault. You’ll just have to suck it up and sacrifice sleep or other priorities so you can work instead. There’s no grace here.”

The struggle to balance work and family priorities and do all the things is nothing new for working parents. But before, there was some semblance of help. Sneaking in the occasional late night or Saturday morning of work in order to make up for lost time caring for a sick child during the week wasn’t ideal, but it was doable. Now families are having to transform their homes into both workspaces and classrooms, with not enough hours in the day to do both well.

We heard the story of another boss who, when reminded by an employee that they couldn’t attend a Zoom meeting at a certain time because they needed to help their child with schooling, brazenly responded, “Oh, is that still going on?”

Being able to “forget” there’s a pandemic is a privilege reserved for very few people, and any boss or manager who has found their own schedule relatively unaltered must show compassion and understanding for their team. 

We shared back in April how important it is to not neglect the mental health of your team during COVID-19. September is a great time to review (or create) your “Pandemic Statement of Principles” to guide the way you work and relate as a team throughout the pandemic. You may find you need to update your guiding principles to reflect changes to your workday that have become permanent, or make tweaks to what hasn’t been working. 

Keep your eye out for the upcoming blogs in our series on working well effectively and sustainably from home, including how to manage outcome-focused work when working remotely, how core hours can keep communication and creativity flowing when teams are scattered, and most importantly, how to combat the unique pitfalls of burnout when working remotely. 

Above all, remember that we are still in uncharted waters. We hope that when we come out the other side of this pandemic, we didn’t just use it as an opportunity to innovate and adapt. Our greatest desire for our workplaces is that we remembered that our employees, coworkers, and teams are made up of human beings, and that a workplace without humanity isn’t a workplace worth working at.