Holy Goodness. This new reality will take a while to become accustomed to.
As expected, SML is now fully remote. This happened quite rapidly so there wasn’t a huge amount of time to adjust. The biggest difference? Meetings that seemed perfectly fine in person become absolutely torturous remotely. How did we ever get anything accomplished? Why are there so many people in this meeting? Why does this meeting not have an agenda? A purpose? Where are the actions? Such bad discipline!
Our first day was relentless back-to-back group calls (40 people on one!) and everyone was completely wrecked by day’s end. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Everything seems to take twice as long to do. We’re finding our way and trying to be kind to each other.
I’m exercising all of my Manageressing powers to keep everyone relatively positive and upbeat. We’ve started a morning half-hour team video catch-up. By day 2 we’d implemented a low-key dress-up theme. We don’t really talk much about work other than how we’re coping with social isolation and a life indoors. We workshop possible solutions to the ridiculous meetings problem, talk about our mornings, commit to getting some fresh air, exercise and vitamin D. There’s a lot of support, understanding and encouragement. It’s been really lovely and I was pretty humbled when most of the team said it’s the highlight of the working day. Though to be fair – the bar is not very high right now.
Keeping this up this energy and positivity is really enervating. I haven’t been able to do much of an evening other than to collapse in a heap. I’m trying to go gently on myself. I’ll adjust.
It seems ridiculous to be talking of struggling with the challenges of suddenly working remotely when 75,000 people have lost their jobs in the past 10 days. We’re exceptionally fortunate to have both jobs and good health right now – and very fortunate to have ThePalace(OfLove) to self-isolate in.
xxx
A huge thank you to everyone who has been blogging through these dark and strange times. It’s so comforting to read how everyone is dealing with their enforced inside-ness / social isolation / lock-down / sheltering-in-place. We really are all in this together.
And it is lovely to see these favourites posting again!
Now that we’re all trapped with loads of time at our disposal, maybe we’ll finally see a more widespread return to blogging? I plan to make the effort to show up here more. Even if it is just to talk about how I’m climbing the walls.
Stay safe!