This article is written by Jean Kunz, a director with the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and Apolitical Insider Fellow. The views expressed here are her own. This article is edited by Jennifer M. Miller, PhD in Public Policy from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Apolitical Insider Fellow

When we were asked to work from home in mid-March in response to Covid-19, I breathed a sigh of relief.

At last, for the next few weeks, I would escape my Office 2.0 environment with small cubicles divided by low dividers that one could see the entire floor just by sitting at their desks. Located along a corridor and facing the printer room, my office was a social space.

Colleagues would chat in the printer room while waiting for their documents to be printed. Others would pass by my office, continuing their conversations on their way to their office, oblivious of the cubicle wall and the person behind. I would often raise my desk as a gentle reminder that someone was trying to work.

My entire team was spread along the same hallway. Collaboration was not easy. If someone wanted something from another teammate, one would have to walk up or down the hallway to get to the other person. We often yelled across our work stations if we needed a quick response. For any team meetings or weekly one-on-one with individual team members, I would need to book a meeting room, a coveted commodity.

There is no virtual watercooler

For the first three weeks of working from home, I felt an increase in productivity, away from the chatters and the noise.

I was able to work on reports without the interruptions in the office. My level of concentration improved, so did my creativity. It took less time to polish a document at home than I would in the office. As a team, we met more regularly than in the office, thanks to Zoom, MS Teams and FaceTime. Instead of finding a meeting room, I just typed in a meeting ID and password for Zoom. Video conference or phone call was sufficient.

In-person communications make resolving difference easier. Communication is more than verbal

As working from home is becoming the norm, I am starting to miss the office. Not my actual office per se, but it is the following three aspects of the office life that I miss.

First of all, I miss seeing my colleagues in-person.

Meetings on Teams can not replace meetings in-person. It is efficient to work on a document together and take notes in real-time. Yet, team meetings are more than transactional. It is about interactions and through these interactions, new ideas flow.

A majority of our communications are non-verbal. These non-verbal cues and nuances are readily picked up face-to-face rather than on a screen or by phone or email. This was important, especially in one-on-one conversations. Constant video calls on Zoom and Teams can be tiring, as it is difficult to gauge the physical cues of participants on the call. Further, there is the disruption of mail delivery, interruption of phones, as well as kids and pets.

Second, I miss the spontaneity of human interaction. In the office, if I need to bounce ideas with colleagues or if there was an issue to be resolved, I would simply walk to their desks or ask them out for coffee, instead of messaging them or initiating FaceTime or teleconference which may or may not work. In-person communications also make resolving differences easier. Communication is more than verbal.

I hope that the Covid-19 would make Office 2.0 more bearable

Third, I miss the informal channel of information; the kitchen and the watercooler. We “bumped into” colleagues when making coffee or tea in the kitchen. We take lunch breaks and catch up with our lives both in the office and outside. In this age of information overload, it was common to have missed an email announcement or newsletter arrived in our inbox. At times, some information did not even make it to our inbox.

This information gap was often filled by casual conversations while we heated up our lunch or filled our water bottles.

It’s not about the office

As we are talking about returning to the workplace, the focus has been on the nature of our work and whether it can be done remotely.

I have been asked whether I would prefer to be back in the office. My response has been whether we could make the office work for me. In a sense, I hope that the Covid-19 would make Office 2.0 more bearable if there would be plexiglass dividers higher than the low dividers. With more space between workstations, there could be more privacy for employees. Perhaps people may change their habits of printing every document as they did pre-pandemic, hence, less traffic outside my office.

Certainly, the floor capacity would not be the same as pre-Covid-19. Another possibility could be that teams would come at different times of the week for in-person meetings instead of everyone coming to the office at the same time. Evidently, I still do not like my office set up and I can be just as productive or even more so by working from home. But when it is safe for me and my colleagues to return to our workspace, even for a few days a week, I will do so for the simple reason that I miss people. — Jean Kunz

(Picture credit: Unsplash)