Thread by @LaylaMcCay

Was in the office yesterday. My musings. 1. Hybrid working means changes to pre-pandemic office layouts - low coffee tables in meeting spaces are not great for laptop calls, v small meeting rooms are less practical, desk-based Teams calls are hard to not eavesdrop upon. /n

2. Office days work best when my schedule isn’t packed. When I had back to back meetings last time, I was closed into a room like a less cosy version of my desk at home. This time I scheduled less, allowing space for impromptu meetings and connections and that was valuable. 2/n

3. That said, I find it pretty hard to avoid scheduling back-to-back Teams calls all day, which has been the homeworking norm for months. Packing in Teams calls is easier to do from home but logistically and psychologically harder to manage in the physical office. 3/n

4. While I love the spontaneous communication that the in-person office theoretically permits, everyone now tends to be wearing headphones and it’s harder than before to guess if they’re interruptable. Better to send a Teams message first - so it’s not that spontaneous. 4/n

5. I did like having conversations with the colleagues who just happened to be lunching at the same time as me. It made me feel more connected than munching a salad alone in my flat. It also took more time than my usual scheduling wanted from me. 5/n

In-person social interactions made me think about how to be inclusive of people in the office and at home. So many months after March 2020, I’m not sure I’ve perfected semi-social interaction in the virtual work context. 6/n

All those months of working on Teams had made me pretty much forget that I have mild prosopagnosia (a difficulty in recognising faces). I remembered that life is harder in person, where people don’t always have their name helpfully floating underneath their face. 7/n

I realised how used to multitasking I am, and how my colleagues and I are not used to having to wait an hour or longer for a response to a Teams message or email. Face-to-face meetings mean I’m extra-attentive to that meeting, but less to other demands (which don’t vanish!). 8/n

Those nice face-to-face meetings meant that when my day felt like it should be about to finish, I had accumulated a big backlog of messages to work through that had come in during my meetings, creating guilt at my later-than-usual responses + guilt re my usual multitasking 🥴9/n

I was impressed to see I’d walked double the number of steps during an office day compared to a home office day - healthy! But I was saddened that none of these steps were taken with my lovely dog who I missed embarrassingly much as my worktime companion. 10/n

And of course, that technical challenge of group calls where some of you are in the office and some are elsewhere. Yesterday people on calls with me sat elsewhere in the office on their own laptops for logistical reasons. Felt mildly dystopian. 11/n

And the anarchy of opportunistic in-person meetings: there is No Pre-Agreed End Time. It might not even start on the hour/half hour. What!? 12/n

I’ll end by saying that I loved the in-person interaction. I felt it enriched me in all sorts of ways. It made me think about my own attention and what I should be doing with it. Same for social interaction. But also highlighted that worklife has changed, probably forever. 13/n

We should think deeply about what we want/need from worklife and its physical and psychosocial settings. This is an opportunity to catalyse positive changes. I was musing that this future will probably be good for us but make for less-good office sitcoms. Not a coincidence. /end