Working from Home is No Vacation!
Not Reporting to the Office Regularly has Actually Meant More Work—but are We Working Better?
By Clay Thomas, Principal SCMO2
As I’m sure most of you reading have also experienced, the work habits we have spent a career developing have changed dramatically. Management consulting is traditionally performed face-to-face as we work with our customer counterparts. The rapport built together “in the trenches” has always been key to user adoption, making it much more challenging to capture customer trust as a virtual voice. Offering strategic guidance and delivering complex solutions through heavy use of screenshares and conference calls is a skill nobody had mastered before.
Unsurprisingly, market forces are winning out and those consultants who can perform in this environment are the ones who are surviving. And as SCMO2 scrambled to adapt, we all discovered that we’re actually pretty good at performing the skills required to succeed in the new paradigm. The one unexpected outcome though, for me personally at least, is I am putting in quite a bit more work!
One would think that not having to regularly board planes and travel from customer site to customer site would free up time and extend bandwidth, resulting in more free time and less stress. But I have found the opposite to be true. Not only are there all of the virtual conversations and meetings to attend, the inbox and to-do list seems to have increased since I am not constantly on the move.
Video conferencing may have allowed us to reduce (or eliminate altogether) business travel, but it still is not an efficient replacement for meaningful personal interaction. Making a point, or demonstrating a process, or building a relationship or motivating a team is much more difficult to achieve through a screen, and the amount of prep time that is spent on developing supporting documents and content seems to exceed the time it used to take to simply get on a plane and show up in the customer’s office.
Time management, task tracking and increased efficiency are so crucial in delivering customer expectations. Not that this wasn’t true before, but achieving success in this new paradigm leaves little margin of forgiveness. The less smart we work, the more work we inevitably have to do.
As a result, I find it important each morning to mentally ‘go to the office’ and prepare to be in a real working environment even if I am still at home. I may break up my day differently by checking in on my children’s schoolwork, or having lunch in the back yard or maybe even squeezing in some house work during an afternoon break. But now I fervently structure my days—and my focus—to support a work-from-home setting that closely mimics the in-person collaborative environment we’re all used to. It’s not ideal, but we are all making it work.
I have to admit, I really am looking forward to getting back on a plane, visiting our clients and rolling up my sleeves over the laptop in a conference room. The drudgery of corporate travel may have been the bane of our professional lives prior to this pandemic, but you know what they say … careful what you wish for.
