It’s 2 years of working from home. I was a kind of guy who never had a work desk as such at home. Actually not even in office, preferred to walk around talking to people instead of chatting on the communicator. I took my work home (I don’t mean my colleagues accompanied me home every evening), but only as much as I could do through my phone and not my laptop. How much I could take home funnily evolved in line with the mobile device. Nokia made me only talk to colleagues but blackberry made me write mails and chat, iPhone made me read presentations (but yes, I stopped talking to my colleagues. How the function of call never gets used in a phone is really amazing. Like every YouTuber says “I will place a link at the bottom to my other blog which talks about it”).
Taking about phones, features of a phone, any electronic device gets you carried away isn’t it. Anyway, switching back to the first line of this blog, 2 years of working from home, has it made us more productive? Less productive? Same ? (Answer to this is really how you perceive and certainly not an actual measurement in my opinion. Of course it’s my bloody opinion in my bloody blog init?). On a rectangular dinner table if someone who craves for attention is made to sit at a corner what does happen? Hell breaks loose. Either the person leaves the dinner early or makes so much noise (controversial remarks reaching the other end, attention grabbing comments, upon failure pure noise accompanied with facial expression and chest thumping - pity me, I have witnessed it). These attention craving people end up being very productive or totally loose it. They communicate excessively, browse the company global account list and ping anyone of the millions and check up on their well-being / share about their well-being, upon knowing any of the other colleagues having a meeting directly jump into it (if one can) and ask random questions, of course leaving behind the unknown person who was explaining about a brilliant way of making one’s toilets totally oder less by changing eating habits. Last but one resort, write a sentimental email to all the people (you think you know) confessing something which triggers a response in the vicinity of compassion. (Generally works, no one can leave an email unanswered which reads “I have in grown toe nail” accompanied with a picture, maybe even downloaded from picturestohelppeoplewithfomo.org). Anyway by staying in touch “which ever way” increases productivity as it’s the only thing that’s really missing because of missing human contact. Others who don’t have a problem being not included slowly phase out, focus on other parts of life apart from work, being exercise, cooking, buying expensive / inexpensive articles from Amazon, returning them, cleaning (oh I can go on). These folks end up being branded less productive in the circle of work, naturally.
Finally, “same”. Can it be that all things we believed while setting up beautiful campuses, internet links with bandwidth in broad gauge, seatings designed to create privacy but transparency, etc can be replaced with a laptop on a dining table connected to the same network your Alexa or Siri is using to share your deepest secrets with their daddies and your cat chooses your presentation template while accidentally stepping on the keyboard (I wanted say dog but generally cats are allowed on the dining table more than dogs, I have seen it on TV, I have, I have, if you haven’t I will paste a link at the bottom and you can see it for yourself). Well, yes it does as it seems - I mean collective productivity is the same. There has been a productivity loss due to the person shopping on Amazon and productivity increase due to the person browsing picturestohelppeoplewithfomo.org (yes I copy pasted!!). Collectively which is end of the day the organisation we work for is unaffected.
*link for my other blog about calls
*link where cats walk on dining table and not dogs
(If the links are doing nothing, get a new mouse and stop complaining)