Everyone forced to work remotely because of COVID-19 has a work-from-home pet peeve they’ve picked up in the year since the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic.
For Jeffrey Kash, community development manager for Elevations Credit Union, it’s interminable emails — the six, seven, eight or more emails back-and-forth it can take to have what would be a 90-second chat in the office.
“At this point, when I get an email about certain things, I tell people to just call me,” Kash said.
That is a relatively minor inconvenience, but it also illustrates just how much workplace culture and employee life have changed since March 2020. Popping into someone’s office to ask a quick question is no longer possible. Workers are Zoomed out. Onboarding new employees has become more difficult.
Companies and employees have had to deal not only with the logistical challenges of working remotely, but also the difficulty of maintaining office camaraderie when no one interacts with each other in-person.
“Our teams are used to social interactions between members,” said Bhavna Chhabra, engineering director and site lead for Google’s Boulder office. “All that being taken away was pretty dramatic.”
Chhabra and her team had already begun to prepare for the pandemic before it was officially declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. The day before, Google had mandated that its employees work from home. Chhabra and other managers at Google Boulder at first thought that would last a few weeks, maybe a month.
While Google is a global company that frequently sees teams in different parts of the world collaborate remotely, it had never been open to letting its employees work from home full-time.
This meant that Google employees weren’t set up to do from home a job that in many cases requires multiple big monitors for a powerful desktop computer. Many didn’t have desks or chairs at home.
“We had a little bit of a rocky start because we were not prepared for how long this was going to last,” Chhabra said.
Google provided full-time employees with $1,000 stipends for home office equipment. It also put together kits with monitors, mouses and keyboards to help mitigate those logistical issues.
Kash and his team at Elevations Credit Union, who put on hundreds of events per year, also had to rapidly pivot. For them, it was figuring out how to translate their in-person events into virtual ones. In addition to Zoom, they had to adopt technology for webinars, online surveys, downloading and archiving video of virtual events.
“It was kind of overwhelming,” Kash said. “We’re people people. We’re used to being out there with folks. This was strange. I don’t think any of us had time to process what was going on.”
The process wasn’t just adopting the best technology for what they needed. Kash and his team had to look at the credit union’s membership and assess what they’d be comfortable using. Their event planning also became completely virtual. Kash said he spends at times six to seven hours per day on Zoom.
Zoom and other remote connections have become ubiquitous in nearly every aspect of the workplace. The logistics of recruiting, hiring and training have also changed significantly. Peggy Shell, founder and CEO of the HR firm Creative Alignments LLC, said the pandemic has altered the way she and her clients approach hiring.
In the past, Shell said she would advise clients against recruiting candidates from out-of-state because they were less likely to accept or stay in a job. For workplaces that are entirely remote, that’s no longer a concern. Workers can take a job across the country — or across the world — and not have to worry about moving to where the company is located.
“We were pretty quickly facing questions about how [hiring] works from a remote standpoint,” Shell said. “From a recruiting perspective, one of the best things remote work has done is taken the geographical barrier out of the mix for a number of our clients. They’re no longer beholden to just the areas around their offices.”
Companies must also factor into the hiring process something that would have been unfathomable a year ago — people’s different risk tolerances for COVID-19.
Shell gave an example of one client company that was looking to hire a CEO. An out-of-state candidate was scheduled to fly in for an in-person interview, but they decided at the last second that they weren’t comfortable on an airplane. Other companies have had candidates refuse in-person interviews until they’re vaccinated.
“What do you do in that situation?” Shell said. “Do you not hire that person because of that? It’s a really hard question to answer.”
When an employee does get hired, the pandemic has also changed the onboarding process. Kendra Prospero, founder and CEO of the HR firm Turning the Corner LLC, has hired and trained three employees remotely over the last six months. She said that training during the pandemic requires even more planning and structure than it did before, with specific milestones for the first day, week, month and quarter. She also has had to be more hands-on in training. Going through this process with her own company has helped her advise her clients on what to do with their new workers.
“You don’t want to leave brand-new employees to figure things out for themselves at home,” Prospero said.
Said Chhabra, “For a lot of people that are new, Google is a strong tech company, which means that learning systems and processes can be quite a bit. It’s typically so much easier to stop by someone’s desk and casually ask for help, especially if you’re new.”
Google has set up new mentorship programs during the pandemic and has had its managers set up office hours where employees can get one-on-one time, but that’s not always enough.
“It’s still not the same,” Chhabra said. “Sometimes I feel bad for the people that are new.”
Integrating new employees into company culture and helping them build a relationship with their new coworkers when they haven’t interacted face-to-face has also proved a challenge, as has maintaining general social cohesion between workers.
“I’m a hugger,” Kash said. “It’s weird to have a mask on and just wave at people. Until I can safely engage with society again, it’s a tease just to try.”
At Google, the interior layouts of the buildings are designed to facilitate casual interactions that lead to innovation — in the cafeteria, at the gym, in line for the barista. Those opportunities disappeared when employees were sent home.
Early in the pandemic, many companies tried to organize digital team-building activities: virtual wine tastings, Zoom happy hours, online games. Google tried virtual chocolate tastings. Kash and his husband put on home-cooking lessons from their kitchen. However, social events over Zoom fizzled out fairly quickly. Kash and his husband had a blast sharing their recipes, but burned out after a few months.
“Engagement takes intention when you are working remote,” Shell said. “You have to do things that don’t involve spending more time on Zoom. There has been a decline in the fun factor and the engagement factor.”
Said Prospero, “There’s no replacement for building camaraderie and a team environment face to face.”
With the COVID-19 vaccine rollout speeding up, coworkers may be able to interact in-person, in an office, relatively soon. Even when that is possible, though, work life will not return to the way it was before.
“I am noticing a number of companies that went remote are trying to find a more hybrid solution,” Shell said. “They’re not going to be all remote or all in-office.”
Google will be much more flexible in that regard going forward.
“We’ve realized that some people are more productive when not interrupted by people,” Chhabra said. “We need to allow for a more hybrid model. We’ll be back [in the office], but I don’t think it will be quite the way it was. It will be much more open.”
Prospero said she’s recommending to her client companies that they adopt separate core and flexible work hours when employees come back to the office. Even before the pandemic, Turning The Corner operated that way — all employees had to work from 9 a.m. to noon on Thursdays, but otherwise their schedules were flexible.
Even if things don’t return entirely to normal, any return at all would be welcome: a return to dropping by a coworker’s desk to shoot the breeze, to popping into your manager’s office to ask a quick question, to hitting up happy hour together after work.
“This has reinforced that we are a society, and when that is taken from us, we lose a big part of ourselves,” Kash said.
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