It’s all about kit and cohesion!

In this, the latest of our occasional series of blogs submitted by our members, Pamela Mellen, a Project Manager at Kings College London and an old-hand at WFH, discovers that full-time remote working presents new challenges…

As a digitally focused team, we already had significant experience working from home. As standard, team members worked from home once a week – more frequently, if necessary – in order to encourage a good work/life balance. While our experience stood us in good stead, there were still a few bumps and issues that came with the transition to full-time WFH.

A week before the lockdown was announced, we had an initial meeting to plan a transition. We expected to have a week to implement full-time homeworking. The next day, instruction came from the university to start ASAP. Thanks to that meeting we were able to send in only one team member, to tie up a few loose ends – having already rescued a few plants and cleared out the fridge.

There were two key issues we identified early on – equipment and team cohesion.

The equipment concern was significant. A physical set up suitable once a week quickly becomes problematic if used daily for months. Practices such as reserving administrative tasks for working on a small laptop screen, sitting in a dining chair for a day or making backups at work each week were no longer feasible. We had to reassess available equipment, considering health and safety, effective working and security risks.

Given our team is primarily made up of research software engineers – developers, designers, analysts – IT equipment is our ‘flasks and beakers’, to use a comparison to a more traditional physical laboratory. Additionally, like any other team, we had to consider risks around developing DSE related health problems from unsuitable set ups. While we were fortunate to quickly receive permission to use unspent conference budget toward equipment, we were also conscious of the need to be cautious of spending, as the university needs to make savings wherever possible. Each staff member assessed their work space, to identify genuine needs and the most cost-effective way of meeting them. Thankfully, the team was very understanding, returning documentation quickly, keeping their requests reasonable, and taking a second look for less costly alternatives when asked.

The other key concern we flagged early was team cohesion. We had made a practice of the entire team coming in on Mondays, when key meetings are held, which allowed everyone to touch base and have the kind informal chats that help bring a team together.

A key concern around the transition to exclusive homework was the risk of increasing isolation, only seeing each other’s faces during virtual meetings, and losing the sense of camaraderie that is so important to a high-performing team.  To combat this, we implemented a daily ‘water cooler’ meeting. It’s a drop-in session at the end of the day where conversations can range from problem-solving and strategic discussions to the latest news, our efforts to bake bread, garden, homeschool or get to the grocery store.  We’ve kept attendance optional, but everyone makes an effort to come along at least once or twice a week and so far it seems to really help.

We already made heavy use of messaging services, including creating a space for general chat alongside our work-related channels. However, we were concerned that our social channel could be completely overtaken by covid-related conversations and news. There was a real possibility staff then disengaging from it to have a break from constant covid-related updates, and thereby missing out on an important source of team camaraderie. To avoid this, we created a dedicated covid-related messaging channel and asked the team to keep conversations on this topic out of the general space. To keep the covid channel helpful to the team, we’ve agreed to avoid political discussions and focus on sharing positive and informative messages as much as possible. It’s become a good place for people to share interesting links and talk about issues without taking too much time or energy from the working day.

We know we still have plenty of challenges ahead as we continue distance working – possibly for months. We’ll try to anticipate them, but some will undoubtedly take us by surprise. The experience is making us re-evaluate everything about how we work and whether there are any lessons we can learn long-term. One thing we do know – if we want to continue working well under these new pressures, it will be vital to keep the needs of both individual staff and the team as a whole in view, and continue taking those extra steps to check in remotely when we can’t work together physically.

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