A Hybrid Work-Life Balance
The three dimensions of the future of work
Business Unusual: A Hybrid Work-Life Balance
At some point in our careers we’ve all dreamt about effortlessly managing our workload from a comfy sofa at home or a sun lounger by the beach. What our wildest daydreams never anticipated was being forced to do the former while lusting for the latter, all under the strictest restrictions.
Personally, I had been working a nomadic lifestyle for a while. I was on a Zoom Pro plan since 2018, did most of my work from hotel lobbies, and if Careem and Uber ever agreed on anything (other than the largest exit of a MENA Startup) it was that DXB Terminal 3 should always be my top suggested destination no matter where I am actually going.
Come 2020, things drastically changed, and I discovered that board meetings are not only much easier to schedule but also much more effective over Zoom, and that I could actually work barefoot, soothed in the aromas of the latest banana bread wafting from our oven, which in my case was the biggest contributor to THE COVID-19 i.e. the 19 pounds of weight I put on through the second quarter of this year.
But the picture was not all rosy, and I eventually found myself working non-stop, turning into a Zoombie as excitement over webinars and online happy hours quickly faded away and the lines between office and home totally blurred. Most days it felt like I was spinning plates while juggling hats and riding a unicycle that was also on fire.
That is NOT the future of work, but an extreme exercise of “Working From Home Under Lockdown” which hopefully would lead us into a hybrid reality, where we seamlessly transition between home and office, creating a multi-dimensional challenge which I tackled in a report recently published by Meditari in collaboration with GraviTeams, where we highlight the challenges that people and organizations face, and we describe the paradigm shift required to enable safer, more secure, and more productive work– it is definitely worth a read!
The Individual Dimension
The human side of work can never be highlighted enough, this was especially felt by those living alone or in smaller quarters. There are ongoing concerns about burnout and Zoom fatigue as we find ourselves flowing through an endless stream of online meetings which are easier than ever to organize and join, while we are hyper-available across devices, geographies and time zones.
We must balance accessibility with our very human need to sign out from tech and switch off every once in a while. Thankfully this is the part that is easiest to remedy as employees and organizations balance the work/home ratio and find their sweet spot. The impetus remains on the company to establish a corporate culture that clearly defines the etiquette and sets reasonable boundaries for everyone involved.
The Technical Dimension
If ever there was a time to build a hybrid organization, it is now, and the tech team is thankfully first to spring into action, enabling a plethora of cloud collaboration apps. However most of these services do not integrate intuitively or seamlessly among each other, and thus we end up in comical scenarios where notes are hand-written during a Zoom, transcribed into Word and finally saved on Dropbox only to start the second half of the equation where the real adventure starts as you try to find something, and the answer lies in a charade of iPhone screenshots.
The Organizational Dimension
Going forward, most of us would like to maintain the freedom of working from home, but we also don’t want that decision to be forced upon us. This flexibility, which was considered a perk before 2020, now turns into a strategic decision by most companies, driven by health concerns, as well as cost-cutting and the need to reduce uncertainty.
It may seem like we have run a planet-wide experiment on how to restructure organizations for a post-pandemic future, as for the first time ever, a working model that combines home and office has become THE way forward. This will allow us as employees to find balance between convenience and all those things we missed about the office: collaboration, connection, and (here… I admit it) routine!
Whether you’ve enjoyed working from home, missed the office, or would love a hybrid version of both, the truth is that there’s no return to a new normal; going forward it is Business Unusual.
Wirelessly yours,
Ziad
This article and the accompanying report were collaboratively written on laptops in across 3 time-zones, 4 cities and multiple flights (yes!), comments and edits were exchanged on various messaging and cloud storage platforms, while background music was piped through wireless headphones connected to a smartphone running a streaming music app. All devices were wirelessly connected to the various home and co-working space WiFi networks.
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