Home Office with a difference

A work-life adven­ture report by Chiara Westphal.

What ini­tially went through my mind:

• Home Office gen­er­ally works sur­pris­ingly well.
• Yay! You can travel rel­at­ively well with­in Europe again.
• Unlim­ited vaca­tion – Yes well, but actu­ally my tasks and the whole devel­op­ment of the cur­rent pro­jects are much too excit­ing not to pur­sue them myself now.

Res­ult from the above thoughts: I just com­bine everything and call it home office spe­cial weeks. No soon­er said than done. So I grabbed a friend (who is self-employed and has the flex­ib­il­ity to work remotely), a motor­cycle, climb­ing and moun­tain­eer­ing gear, booked a few week­end or half-day kayak tours, and headed to the Alps for three weeks.

Week 1: I am writ­ing up the daily plan of being able to use the prox­im­ity to the moun­tains as a par­tial suc­cess. The weath­er was crappy. An import­ant release was pending. That, to the chag­rin of my com­pan­ion, kept my work­load and time at a con­stant high. In addi­tion, there were small things I had not con­sidered. It is exhaust­ing for all involved when I par­ti­cip­ate in a web con­fer­ence from the com­mon room of an accom­mod­a­tion without a head­set. – I bought a new head­set. Like­wise, it is stu­pid when the accom­mod­a­tion writes that they have WIFI, but it is prac­tic­ally unus­able. – I took out a new cell phone con­tract with a lar­ger mobile data volume. The next few weeks went much better.

My con­clu­sion: these were def­in­itely not the last home office spe­cial weeks!

It is inter­est­ing at this point to think about everything that has con­trib­uted to this con­clu­sion. First and fore­most, of course, I had fun. All my hob­bies were wait­ing for me prac­tic­ally at the front door.

Before I star­ted, how­ever, I thought about how well I could cre­ate a bal­ance. The bal­ance between access­ib­il­ity and effi­ciency and, on the oth­er hand, games, fun, and joy. Of course, it has been expli­citly com­mu­nic­ated in the team so far that it essen­tially does­n’t mat­ter when and how much every­one works. The main thing is that the tasks are com­pleted and if not, that that inform­a­tion is com­mu­nic­ated appro­pri­ately. Nev­er­the­less, it’s an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment to see what hap­pens when you com­pletely ignore com­mon notions of core work­ing hours.

Even if the tim­ing was rather unfa­vor­able, I think that the first week with the release was very import­ant for prov­ing that we could fully rely on each oth­er. I knew it was import­ant, so I was there. From the second week onwards, I ten­ded to arrange my work­ing hours accord­ing to the weath­er. It’s quite  uncon­ven­tion­al to first com­mu­nic­ate when you’ll be avail­able the even­ing before or some­times even on the same day. On sunny days I only worked on import­ant and/or urgent tasks. Of course, this led to the fact that I worked less time over­all than I would usu­ally do in the office. Time and again, this led me to ask myself very con­sciously: is everything going as it should? Yes? Then I can take time off.

An exper­i­ment would­n’t be an exper­i­ment if you did­n’t also have doubts. It was clear to me that I also had to do small things that I would nor­mally have simply worked on with two hours more time. In this respect, one always weighs up in the back­ground wheth­er what one is doing is suf­fi­cient. Because one could achieve con­sid­er­ably more if one worked eight hours instead of four. It’s not just me who notices this, but every­one. The com­mu­nic­a­tion with­in the team was extremely pleas­ant: when in doubt, just ask if there’s any­thing left to do.

Full-day work­shop from a pub in South Tyrol.It was loud. For­tu­nately, how­ever, everything was tuned so that my share of speech was min­im­al. Nev­er­the­less, con­cen­trat­ing on listen­ing deman­ded a lot from me. It got really good when oth­er guests found me increas­ingly enter­tain­ing. Basic­ally because I sat there with my PC and head­set and slurped (really great) pasta on the side. Through­out the meet­ing, I hap­pily declined four or five invit­a­tions to buy me a Grappa. (I know, unne­ces­sary. It would not have made the web con­fer­ence worse, after all. ^^) Dur­ing the work­shop, one of the wait­resses cheer­fully yelled across the room, “You work? No! Hol­i­day, holiday!”

When a guest then held his cell phone with a run­ning video call with his fath­er in front of my nose. He cheer­fully told me some­thing (neither of us spoke a lan­guage that the oth­er could under­stand, but it did­n’t seem to mat­ter). I thought it was an appro­pri­ate time to care­fully bow out of the situ­ation. (Unfor­tu­nately, I nev­er­the­less did not drink Grappa with the oth­er guests then. Because I still had a four-hour motor­cycle trip over the old Bren­ner Pass ahead of me).