WFH vs WFO

Well, it’s a perspective. Home-bodies might feel like staying at home all day and doing nothing or just staying at home and doing everything. Some people just find the kick outside. People, platform, pizazz is their forte and it’s a misconception that those are the most funny, happening people.

All this seems to be a character based judgment into categories but there came a time in the 2020s when we all had to stay at home irrespective of our character to be able to stay at home or not.

There came the term WFH and it honestly wrecked my life. I have seen two sides of this coin where I have heard second hand experiences where people have really benefited from this world-wide phenomena. I did too, initially. But can this be considered as a serious option to alter our life and consider it for the rest of our lives? Well, that’s questionable!

I began my career working from home. I even missed out one year of my college during the lockdown period. Corona had struck when I was in the last part of my 3rd year and just when college was starting to get fun and liberal, we had to stay indoors. I never got to experience the college fun of going out, bunking classes or just hangout with my friends.

This was all okay back then. I hadn’t put much thought into it but now that I think of it, it seems like a huge miss in my life.

Anyhoo, when it came to working from home, it seemed like a bed of roses. I was with my parents and food, laundry, company and most of my expenses were taken care of as my mother used to make good food and my father paid for all the household expenses and all my money was going into savings. I was enjoying the initial days by shopping, spending on all the stuff I didn’t need and a lot more.

I even got to go to yoga at home via online classes ( the only thing I’m grateful for) and took multiple workcations with my cousins and friends and also helped my mother in the household chores by taking her to grocery, the vegetable market, hospital for her checkup or just we used to have mother-daughter dinners occasionally.

I recently changed my company and came into a company that requires you to come to the office. It’s an early stage startup and working from home wasn’t a good option as they needed folks inside the office for better collaboration and getting things done. I agree with them.

I was apprehensive while joining the company and the thought of taking so much effort just to come to office seemed so futile but boy, did I change my mind!!

I realized what I was missing all these days and I’m glad I got a job that requires you to come to the office. Let me comprehend what I was missing.

1. Back home, I didn’t have a proper workstation and used to often sit wherever I could, on the dining table, sofa or bed in an inverted position most of the time (which seriously hurts the back). Having a workstation is very important. And it’s not just for your back but also mentally, you need to compartmentalize your work and your home. Basically, on days when we feel burnt out, we go home. We go and relax and not think about work. But when your workplace is your home, there is no escape place to go to. As we think it’s our mind doing all the actions, it’s our atmosphere too.

Whenever I go to the office, I feel like working because everyone around me is. If I ever feel burnt out, then I would look forward to going back home and relaxing and there’s the environment compartmentalization.

When you combine workplace and home, you do not feel like you’re actually taking a break. It feels as though you are still somewhere stuck at work. As though your desk is constantly calling you and you haven’t completely detached from work.

2. And that’s pretty much the case while working as well. In my office, everybody around me is working. They are hustling, churning good things, meetings and constant discussions which provokes me to work as well. It’s quite natural that when everyone is doing the one thing in your room, you would want to do the same thing as well. At home, that’s not the case. I need to push myself to work everyday. I had no motivation whatsoever. I have my mom constantly talking to my relatives, TV is on, the news is on. I have another tab on my laptop where there’s YouTube or some series running and I cannot focus my mind onto one thing or work because there are too many distractions to think of.

At home, I’m usually lousy and that psychologically can be a consequence of many things.

a) You aren’t wearing office clothes. People who have worked from home till now do not really change into office clothes and sit for work. And not wearing office clothes can actually constitute to a lot of damage.

Psychologically, if you see since we aren’t wearing office clothes, our mind still thinks we are at home and not technically at work. It doesn’t quite register that the office has begun and we need to get into full work mode. Like I said, our environment plays a major role in what our mind has to decide. Turns out, clothes do too.

b) No-timings of lunch, break or fun. That was a huge stumbling block. When I was at home, I was hogging on food my mom made and my lunch time was whenever she gave me lunch. And it quite didn’t feel like lunch because I was eating all the time. When you’re in an office space, your lunch time is usually from 1–2. That’s when most of the folks eat lunch except for the 5–10% who eat late because they have some work or they generally eat late. Since most of the folks are eating at that time, you tend to eat at that time too. There are multiple advantages to this. One, you are eating your lunch on time most of the days. You have a scheduled time for your lunch and then you can focus on your work post lunch. Your mind is scheduled to eat lunch at that time which makes a good habit.

c) No-work timings: That was a huge deal breaker for me. I just didn’t have work timings. God, was that killing?!! I can’t even imagine what a life I led and it was so cumbersome. I didn’t have a schedule. I just woke up and opened my laptop, I would check work messages while doing Yoga. I would open slack while eating. I was always wired and even at late nights, I worked late. I hate to do any of it now. If I’m exercising, I’m exercising. I’m not working. I just went inside my room and worked and came out for lunch or something. It feels so bad to do and wasn’t a good lifestyle at all.

d) No proper communication with your manager. Well, I’m just hitting it out of the park with the deal breakers. At home, when you don’t see your manager everyday and when he doesn’t really know you as a person, there is a huge gap between you and your manager. Now I feel I’m much closer to my manager. He knows me on a human level because we meet each other everyday, have lunches and joke around and he is always near my sight. In reality, that helps a lot to establish a relationship with your manager. I didn’t know anyone above my manager. They did not put Dps on their slack so there was no chance I even knew how they looked. I was working but didn’t feel connected. Our one-on-one was the only place I could talk freely and silly me, so immature back then that I couldnt convey a lot of stuff on my mind.

e) Communication: Communication is so tough while working from home. Today, at the office to get features tested and pushed, I just need to walk 5 steps, catch hold of the folks who have AIs on them and just ask them to do it. Sit with them and get it done. Whereas in WFH, it’s always messaging. Messaging really wrecks everything. Be it a relationship or work. I had to always message folks and wait for the response and it felt so slow. And to explain things over call and get their response always felt so disconnected now that I see the fruits of connecting offline.

f) Surveillance: At home, there is no surveillance. You can do whatever you want like watching a video while working or listening to a podcast. I had gotten into the same habit too. I used to always have something playing on my device all the time while working which would decrease my productivity and stretch the work to more hours before I fully complete it. That also drains the mind. I have realized over time and experience that mono-tasking is better than multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is like giving 50% of your brain to both the tasks which means none of the tasks are getting done productively in the end. Whereas mono-tasking helps you focus on that one task which means you now know the task much better and have a deeper understanding of it and your brain isn’t confused with the context switch. At work, playing a podcast or watching a movie isn’t quite appropriate. Folks are roaming around you all the time, your manager is constantly around you and it wouldn’t feel right to play something behind and work and feels like a time-theft. Initially, when working from the office I was playing a podcast in the background, and in one of my many interactions with my manager, he told me not to do that and when I stopped doing it, I could see the effects. Even solving the smallest bug felt so accomplishing and my brain started to become more focused. I was actually focusing on my tasks and features which meant less re-work of the same thing, less bugs and quality delivery of product in the end.

g) Connectivity: You never really connect with your teammates while working from home as there is no humanly contact except for the screens. Nor do they take the time and effort to talk to you outside of work as the distance is too much and often they have other personal things to do. But when you are seeing your team mate everyday in the office, eventually you tend to make conversations (unless he/she is a heavily grumpy person), go for coffees together, have lunch or go out for a drink after a heavy day of work and that’s what makes the connection. You sit next to each other or nearby which makes all the teammates stay more connected.

h) Public Speaking: I didn’t realize this until recently. Giving scrum updates on a google meet and in front of everyone in the office is soooo different. I cannot stress enough on how much you are void of the public and giving a demo looking at the screen and in front of 10–12 people is like chalk and cheese. I did not have the confidence to speak up in front of my teammates and was often shy, stammery while giving demos. My first demo was a total disaster. I couldn’t even tell them half of my features and was always stammery. I won the public speaking competition in my college and was surprised when I realized I couldn’t give a simple demo of the feature that I had developed. The feature that I know of in and out.

Talking to a screen is not the same when you have to face people and look them in the eye and handle the expressions they give in the meetings. I gradually stirred up the confidence and now my demos go smoothly.

All in all, I am thankful that I’ve started to go to the office and work now as Work from Home seems to be too demeaning on the personality, lifestyle and work culture.

That’s my thought and experience of the Work from home versus the Work from Office culture.

Hope you had a good reading.