I worked from home for two weeks when my son started school — and it made a huge difference.
In September this year, my 4-year-old started school. It was a big, happy milestone in my personal life — but it could also have been a big complication in my professional life. Reception classes usually start gradually as children settle in, which means parents have to be available for sometimes random drop-off and pick-up times in the first weeks. In our case, as first-generation immigrant parents with no grandparents to help and full-time jobs, we also had to organize and put in place a complex combination of wrap-around childcare at either side of the school day. How would I manage to fit all this around my job?
So back in August I went to my line manager and said I was going to take two weeks of paid annual leave and one week of unpaid annual leave off to make this work. Luckily, she said no.
She suggested that instead of doing that, we could try out a remote, flexible working arrangement that would allow me to be there for my child’s first weeks of school, without using up all my annual leave and sacrificing my salary in the process.
Our agreement was this:
- I would work from home for two straight weeks.
- I would change my usual working pattern (4 days in the office, 1 day off) and stretch my 28 weekly hours through 5 days instead of 4. This, combined with an earlier start than usual, would allow me to be there for all pick-ups and to do one drop-off a week.
- Crucially, we also agreed that this would be an experiment: we would use it to learn about whether and how our organisation could implement more flexible and adaptive working patterns for everyone.
A month later, I am back in the office. So what have I learnt?
- Technology isn’t everything…
To make remote working work for me, I needed to be able to join a lot of meetings and conversations and stand-ups across the 2 weeks — just over 30, according to my calculations. I relied on tech tools like Skype — but even more, I relied on the people in the room. They had to remember that I wasn’t in the office, call me, and then follow the meeting etiquette needed for me to be able to participate fully, from ensuring I could hear them to sharing slides beforehand. This is not a small cultural shift: I found that in some cases the assumption was that it was up to me, the person at home, to make it work. This is a mental habit that it can take a while to change, but it should be a conversation your organisation has, if you want to promote flexibility.
2. … but it helps.
Having said that, if the tools don’t work, then you may not be able to join in anyway. I found that Slack was a life-saver when it came to all those quick exchanges with people for which I’d have normally just walked up to their desk. Skype was generally ok for conference calls, but when it fell down, we had no alternative. My favourite hack was when a colleague Facetimed me into a stand-up, moving their phone around the group of people so I could hear. But whichever tech you use, it’s valuable to test it from the point of view of the remote workers, not just the people in the office.
3. Quiet time: it won’t happen.
If you think that by working from home you’re automatically going to have more time for deep focus work, think again: my diary was just as busy as when I was in the office — and why wouldn’t it be? I spent the first week assuming that thinking time would just happen to me, but in the second week I made sure to block out some hours in my diary for reading challenging stuff, ideation, planning and all the kind of things that you shouldn’t just do in the 15 minute gaps between meetings. The balance felt much better, and it showed me the importance of organizing your calendar more mindfully and consciously, a lesson I’m now trying to apply whether I’m in the office or at home.
4. Flexibility = motivation
It’s impossible to overstate the difference that this arrangement made to my work-life balance. I was able to properly focus on work during working hours, since I didn’t have to worry about rushing around, and to be fully present in my child’s day outside of working hours. And this positive impact didn’t stop after those two weeks: knowing that my manager and my organisation supported me when I needed more flexibility makes me more motivated and dedicated every day, benefiting both myself and my team.
5. And yet this is still so difficult.
When I discuss this experience with friends and family, it’s very clear that I’m privileged: I am the exception, not the rule. Most people don’t have access to this type of flexibility. Organisations struggle to see what this could look like for them — even a supposedly modern company like Facebook, as recently exposed by data scientist Eliza Khuner.
Flexible working tends to be presented as a working parents’ issue — and indeed this was my case, too — but there can be many reasons why an employee needs a different working arrangement, either for a period of time or on a more regular basis: being a carer, moving house, going through a difficult personal time. In 2018, with the benefit of endless tech tools allowing us to bring people in the room, what’s missing is the will, not the way to make this work.
But if flexible, adaptable work makes us more motivated, satisfied and ultimately loyal as employees, it’s hard to see why organisations wouldn’t benefit, too. And if everyone wins, what do we have to lose?
