I don’t have a pithy image to go with this post, but yesterday we officially went on remote protocols. Like literally everyone out there I am dealing with life in pandemia, where social distancing… that thing the introverts and anxiety ridden among us have been practicing our entire life. I am officially sitting in my work place and yes I am wearing pants. Well that is a slight lie because I opted for shorts instead of my usual jeans, but I am properly dressed. I attempted to maintain as much of my morning routine as possible as I got up, showered, left the house, picked up breakfast and then instead of driving to the office I drove back home. What makes it doubly odd is that both my wife and I are now remote workers for the time being, though currently she is on spring break.
I had the sudden realization yesterday that managing a team of 16 remote employees is going to be an awful lot like leading a raid group. The challenge of leading a raid is that you effectively have a group of unpaid volunteers that you somehow are trying to get working towards the same goal with nothing but text and voice chat in order to wrangle them. When it comes to actual employees at least there are some financial hooks that you have that you can flex, but otherwise I think remote work is going to feel extremely similar. While we swapped Discord and Ventrilo for more professional tools like Microsoft Teams… the theory is very similar.
While sitting down to write this I am already connected in with my team and answering some initial tech support questions as we attempt to make sure everyone can get into their machines as intended. Kenzie is extremely confused because she knows that I should be leaving my office any minute now and continues to pace around as if to remind me that I have to run out the door. Hopefully at some point she will settle in on her box beside me and chill. The thing that concerns me the most is that it is only 7:10 and I already feel pretty isolated. I have a feeling that we are going to have to keep a chat going or something in the background that folks can drop in and out of just to have some human contact, which is bizarre for me to admit considering that I can go hours without saying a word on most days.
I pitched this concept as a grand new adventure to my employees. We come from a very “butts in seats” culture where if you are not in your seat at a specific time then you must not be actually working. One of the biggest complaints that I have heard over the years is that we don’t really have a good remote work option, and as a result this is now our chance to prove that things can in fact get done when we are all in different locations. So my hope is that we can embrace this opportunity and show that productivity comes in a bunch of different packages. This is either going to go amazingly well or backfire horribly, but I believe it is going to be the former rather than the later. Just the fact that I can work from cocoon like darkness of my office is a major upgrade to the harsh brightness of the fluorescent light sea of cubical.
Some parting thoughts however. I did some research going into this situation and one of the things that I found helpful is a pamphlet that community veteran Sanya Weathers created with some of her tips and tricks from a career of working remotely. She is currently selling it on Amazon Kindle for a little under $3 and then planning on donating the proceeds to her local food pantry. I ended up taking this version, converting it to PDF and then sending it out to my employees and putting in a donation through her coffee link for each of them and a few more just in case it spread within the company. I found the advice to be invaluable and the writing style was easily approachable and as such I am hoping it helps my crew in making the adjustment.
The thing is… at this point none of us know how long this is going to go on. It is wrecking the daily routine and as a result we are going to have to find a brand new one. I also fully expect that this blog is going to shift around a bit as a result given that my gaming patterns are being interrupted as well. Yesterday was so draining that I more or less melted into the sofa when I got home and did the whole dozing in and out of sleep thing until we finally decided to go to the bedroom around 9 pm. I maybe knocked out a few quests in Elder Scrolls Online, but my appetite for gaming was minimal just due to the sheer exhaustion of existing in pandemia. We are in the time of community spread and I hope we all make it out okay on the other end. I am going to continue to talk about the things that concern me but I am likely not going to be promoting posts like this one. This one is only for the folks who read me on a daily basis.