When you tell people they can work from home—or are required to work from home—confusion about expectations can occur. On the one hand, working from home is a great luxury that allows for expanded lifestyle flexibility. On the other hand, when your home is your workplace, the boss can text or call at nearly any time and it will be considered acceptable. Or will it?
An article in Harvard Business Review by Bobbi Thomason and Jennifer Franczak highlights three primary tensions managers of hybrid workplaces are confronting:
- “First, the tension between allowing employees to work when they want and expecting them to be available all the time.
- Second, the tension between employees feeling isolated when not working from an office and feeling invaded by communication technologies.
- Finally, the tension between what practices are possible in a hybrid workplace and what is preferred and rewarded.”
I reflected early in the pandemic’s stay-at-home order that the peace of my lunch hour was gone. I used to ignore calls and texts during my long lunchtime walk—and, generally, no one from work would call me during that time. When people are not before your eyes in an office, it’s like all day is lunch. When people are working remotely, how can you tell when they’re “at lunch”?
I wondered about the best way to approach the setting of boundaries when people are not physically present. Is it to enforce a rule that, outside of business-life-and-death emergencies, there should be no calls or texts outside of what each employee considers working hours? For one employee, like me, that might mean no calls or texts earlier than 10:30 a.m. and no later than 6:30 p.m., and for another employee, it might mean no calls or texts before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m. I remember one morning, when I was still getting used to my home serving as my workplace, being surprised when the phone buzzed and it was a work call as I went about my pre-work morning routine. It was past 9 a.m., but earlier than I usually sit down at my desk. If I had been commuting to the office, I wouldn’t have gotten the call on my personal phone, and so I wouldn’t have known about it until 30 minutes later when I got to the office and saw the blinking voicemail light on my phone.
There also is a sense of intrusion stemming from the use of video calls. If the calls took place at the office, there usually would be no need for the use of video. On the other hand, because the calls are being received while people are at home, the video feed can feel like a violation of privacy. Even with the use of false backgrounds—which often are unusable because of a funny halo effect around peoples’ heads—you are getting an “at home” shot of someone. People have gotten themselves ready for a day at home, rather than at the office, and have their personal lives surrounding them. That means a child, spouse, other relative, or pet could stray into the shot, or the doorbell could ring. Maybe they left something in the kitchen or another room. Without the use of video, employees can move freely around their homes, keeping private what would be exposed if a camera were trained on them. A workplace that respects boundaries would favor audio-only calls into employees’ private homes. Video is most appropriate for use when employees are at the office and they are calling employees at another company, who are at their own office, for a meeting. Yet, when we worked full-time in-person in offices, video calls were seldom used.
When people are offered vacation time, they may feel like there is an expectation they won’t use all of it, Thomason and Franczak point out. I wonder if the much-hyped added flexibility of the hybrid workplace is similar. Organizations should meet to decide if they really mean the message they may be sending about wanting to accommodate employees’ new expectations. If you mean it, then it’s important to create a structure that allows employees to set working hours and parameters while at home. An employee may have no problem doing a video call at 9 a.m. at the office, but 9 a.m. at home can be much different. To ensure employees take a lunch break, you could give them the option of letting colleagues know when they are on break. Co-workers would be instructed, barring an emergency, to never call or text the employee during that time.
Working sometimes from home and sometimes from the office requires a structure that acknowledges how different those two environments are, and how different people are when in their home versus sitting at a desk away from their personal lives.
Has your organization put a structure in place to ensure employees feel they have boundaries between work and home, and are able to take advantage of the greater flexibility you may have encouraged them to expect?
