Remote working - Let's stop feeling so isolated and stressed

Non-stop remote working is isolating

I'm writing this entry on the back of two face-to-face sessions in a single week. An internal Trust-wide leadership session on Monday where I met many faces I'd seen virtually every week but hadn't seen in person for 2.5 years. And yesterday, a great event with the Digital Poverty Alliance including people from private, public and voluntary sector. 

In this article, as a digital ambassador I'm going to discuss why talking to your colleagues and peers in virtual meetings all day every day simply isn't enough to satisfy our human needs for social interaction and support. 

I'm not suddenly adjusting the Apollo Guidance Computer from the Moon to Mars, I'm not suggesting we scrap all this digital stuff, start spreading more germs and continue burning up all that CO2 again to achieve the same goals. And I'm not suggesting that digital calls are suitable or even accessible for everyone, digital inclusion is another topic altogether! 

Even if people have the right home working conditions, the internet access, the equipment, the skills and the confidence to work remotely it STILL isn't right to remote work ALL the time as many of us currently are. So many of us that CAN, ARE on back-to-back video calls, and it's time to re-address that balance because it's not good for us, it's isolating. 

We definitely need to do more with hybrid working across our Trust and probably in lots of other organisations too. But we also need to spend more time discussing if we can solve some of the problems we've caused by our rapid digitisation with even more digital features and approaches. Is it a case of digital not being appropriate all the time or is it a case of how we're using digital all of the time that is inappropriate? Are we all jaded through misuse and abuse of this technology?

By the end of this article, I hope you'll be with me on some of these suggestions and bring your own to the table on what we need to be doing to get back to true, personalised and humanised social interaction, enabled by digital.

No matter what people may say, I can 100% verify that from my own personal experience, remote working and talking to people on MS Teams or Zoom or WebEx or Meet Me is isolating. I'm in conversations with more people per day than ever before, it's incredible! Yet in many ways, I've never felt more alone. Sure, I'm interacting, but I'm not actually getting a full 2-way, team wide, collaborative and supportive conversation. 

Here's my take on how this can change.

The status quo

We've digitised! We've responded to COVID-19, we're now more productive and more sustainable. We're not driving as much and we're jumping from one meeting to the next. Reduced CO2 emissions, reduced mileage and expense claims. Bang. bang. bang. Meeting. Meeting. Meeting. We can jump all over the county, all over the country and all over the world without ever leaving our pressure ulcer inducing office chair! Click Join. Click Join. Click Join. 

There's no telling the team in the open plan office to talk a little quieter because you're about to make an important phone call (remember those eruptions of unmuted laughter in the office that could be equally joyful and frustrating depending on what you were working on at the time?). No awkward stumbling around corridors trying to find meeting room 3C. No faffing about trying to find a spare chair as somebody didn't check the meeting room size before trying to cram 15 people into a broom cupboard. There's no opening of windows because it's too stuffy. No complaints of the lingering body odour in the Boardroom from the stressful 3-hour committee meeting you've just followed. No driving between locations to join different sessions or meet different teams in different premises. No time for radio, for podcasts, for quick calls to the family to check-in. It's relentless. 

We're constantly connected. Constantly ON. But in so being, almost horrifyingly, we're actually disconnected. We're isolated. We're beginning to miss people. All spontaneity has gone. All sense of consistent community has been segregated into confined sessions.

Here's why

So, here's why I think the status quo of remote working is creeping up on us, why it's beginning to eat away at our wellbeing and why it feels so good when there's a reason to get up, get out and interact.

When we're remote working constantly...

• There's the "no downtime" scenario of the status quo covered above. But furthermore, when did it become mandatory to eat lunch over your keyboard? This needs to change. Being online doesn't need to mean being permanently available.
• There's limited casual conversation even in virtual team meetings. When there is, a simple 3-minute distraction about the latest Netflix show can begin to feel like it's taking hours and eroding from the precious limited call time remaining to work, work, work!
• Unless it's a really open and well organised team meeting or a dedicated 1-1, it's so tricky to check-in on people and get a sense for how they're feeling. In a team office you could observe and sense how the team were as a collective. If individuals were struggling, under pressure or having a really good week, you'd know. They're sat next to you, opposite you, across the room. You're together, even when working as individuals. When remote working it's too siloed, too stunted. I can't tell how people are feeling or if they're having a good week or a bad week when they're just a floating head on mute, too afraid to interrupt the stunted binary flow of discussion.
• To compound the issue above, some colleagues don't like having their camera on. When people have their camera off that doesn't necessarily mean they're not happy or disengaged either. But what limited chance we might have as a leader, a colleague, or a friend to spot how someone might be feeling is all but stripped away when you can't even see them. Hybrid working helps us foster a more supportive, open culture. We can see body language and an individual's general wellbeing and engagement levels far more readily in person.
• Large digital gatherings can also be challenging. It's great you've got over 100 people joining a call and listening to your update without paying for a giant conference room and a buffet. NOT so great that the audience have all got their camera off and not interacting with the content being presented. In a room full of people you could see if your presentation content was hitting the mark or not. Now imagine that room full of people where the whole audience were wearing face masks that covered their expressions and responses. First and foremost, that would be terrifying, and secondly, it'd be really really difficult to gauge how your content was landing and you couldn't adapt and adjust your approach during your update. Digital updates to rooms full of people without cameras is exactly like this hypothetical scenario, you can't reach out and network with the audience ad-hoc and there's no free buffet.
• Have you noticed that the constant back-to-back virtual meetings make everyone a couple of minutes late (especially myself!). Being only 3 minutes late to a virtual meeting can begin to feel like a lifetime, but 8 minutes or more late? There's been virtual search parties deployed and colleagues speculating if I'm still alive! Back in the days of face-to-face meetings, people wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone strolled into the meeting room 10 minutes late because they "bumped into Nigel in the car park." Everyone in the room was probably still talking about Stranger Things anyway! And because it's face to face, will probably spend the next 5 minutes catching up on how Nigel is.
• Every group meeting is treated like a committee meeting. We're all on mute and patiently taking turns to speak, waiting for that one person to pause for breath in the hope you might get a chance to contribute before you inevitably turn up late for the next meeting that starts in 3 minutes time. Conversations are stilted. After all this time of virtual calls people are still on mute and 2 people still cannot seemingly talk at the same time. In real life this can happen organically without consequences. I'm tired of silently nodding in agreement or gesturing with a thumbs up to my web camera, why can't I say actually say yes aloud? 
• Interruptions when remote working don't come in the form of a smile in the corridor, a wave through your office window or a chance meeting in the staff kitchen. All interruptions can actually feel like unplanned irritations, annoyances, distractions. Don't they know we're in back-to-back meetings? Interruptions or check-ins with colleagues in the remote working world are a bing of an instant message alert. The ring of an incoming call. There's no soft way of interrupting someone or catching up with a colleague spontaneously. 
• When we do go to the office, the buildings appear to be practically empty anyway and we spend all day sat at our desks, talking away on virtual conferences regardless.

• When remote working, we can't simply walk into another team's office area or another department's team meeting anymore and pop in for some advice or to say hello. Remember just popping into the IT offices to see if anyone was around? No more. You don't just hijack a department's virtual team meeting via their calendar link and appear on their screen or invade their private team chat thread. You're on your own.
• There's no easy way outside of a scheduled team meeting, or sporadic instant messaging or Team Channel messaging to consistently see how the team are doing at any given point. When you shared the office you can see and feel the energy in the room, the morale of the team. Virtual meetings removes that almost completely. There's no ongoing sense of how the team are feeling outside of these rather stilted pre-scheduled catch up points amongst your otherwise back-to-back virtual meeting filled day. 
• On-boarding new staff into a fully remote working environment can be a very difficult task. Especially if they're in a leadership role and responsible for large teams or multiple teams. All of the issues listed above become magnified. Their issues on a daily basis are compounded by a lack of organisational knowledge, for not meeting Nigel in the car park, for not sitting with the team in a shared office area and getting to know everyone over a period of time and knowing who needs support and who wants to be left alone. How do new remote working leaders build teamwork, trust, and collaboration across a team of individuals that are only available on a 1-1 basis or a single call of muted, off camera individuals? 

We can actually solve some of this digitally!

So, being a Director of Digital Transformation, I should probably start talking about how we can solve some of these issues that the widespread adoption of remote working technologies has helped create in the first place. I honestly don't believe that the answer is to force everyone back to the offices. I also don't believe it's solved simply by hybrid working or the occasional team conference and free buffet. The technologies we use need to improve too, as well as how we make use of these technologies.

Start using what's available now

• Outlook offers a means to schedule diary invites that are automatically shorter than the 30minutes or full hour. If everyone used this feature, we'd have more time when our meetings end to stretch our legs and more time for ad-hoc calls, instant messaging, and proactive team check-ins.  In Outlook, go to options and the calendar tab...

• Let's be far more relaxed about people arriving a few minutes late. We're all feeling harried and burnt out by back-to-back meetings. Let's give each other a break. If someone hasn't changed their invite settings to shorten those full hour diary invites, share the love and use the settings in the image above! Give people more time. I'm sick of panicking when the clock gets to XX:59 or XX:29. Every minute counts in remote working, it really shouldn't have to.
• Lunch breaks at your keyboard. Digital can't solve this entirely but what we can do is ensure our use of digital doesn't compound this. Say for example we have 7 meetings a day on average. If we end each of those 10mins earlier than we would normally that's 70 minutes back to plan your diary more, to add in some lunch break time and ensuring you're spending some time away from your desk. It makes a difference. Let's start doing it.
• We can avoid those cameras off situations too without forcing people outside of their digital comfort zone. Through use of an upcoming MS Teams feature called Mesh avatars, staff will be able to create a digital version to represent themselves on screen. This will mean the best of both worlds. Staff that prefer cameras off will still get privacy and don't need to worry about their background or their hair or whatever panics some people about being on camera. Presenters, team managers, trainers and colleagues get some form of interaction and response from people that are participating virtually. 

• We need to stop worrying so much about trampling over each other's dialogue. Whether they're team meetings, huddles, daily stand-ups. Let's just try it out. Let's have a few meetings where we trust in the connectivity, we start saying yes out loud if we agree with someone as they're talking and instead of raising a little yellow hand, raise your real hand or ask mid-sentence if you can ask a question about what's just been said. We don't hold up objects in real life to alert others for when we want to discuss, we just start speaking. Let's be less sensitive about cross-chatter on virtual calls and give it a try. It might start making things feel more organic. If you've ever been in a virtual breakout room that has worked well you'll know it's possible. The mute button etiquette seems to disappear and people seem to stop being so apologetic for talking at the same time.
• Now we've got our time management sorted, our meetings shortened, and our lunch breaks planned in, if we want to chat longer than the 50minutes scheduled, than we can! Let's talk about Stranger Things for ten minutes or catch up about why Nigel is always in the car park. In the office before COVID-19, I was always in back to back meetings but somehow, I still found time to catch up about good TV and good books and good films. I miss that. By being less precious and giving each other a break on our virtual time keeping we can do it again.

Things I wish existed

Now many of these features don't exist and I've no idea if they're on any roadmap. But I personally think it'd be great if they were!

• If anyone here is aware of, or has played massive multiplayer online (MMO) games like Second Life or World of Warcraft, they'll have a better understanding of this slightly fantastical suggestion. For Estates departments looking to control heating, ventilation, and lighting of buildings through Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there's the concept of the digital building. The office where you work, turned into a 3D computer world that can be controlled and manipulated remotely without you having to be there.  Building on that concept, (pun intended), why not turn that 3D world into somewhere you can work and "be present" when you're remote working? You can have your desk, your MS Teams Mesh Avatar and be sat in the office you work in, all recreated virtually. You can select your mood which would adjust your Avatars body language to show colleagues how you're feeling, it's visible if you're in a meeting, on a call, or just working away at your desk, you can "walk up" to desks and start impromptu conversations with others you "see in the office". You can pop down the corridor and see if HR are in for a quick chat, or if finance colleagues are online or not.
• Now this doesn't have to be some "game" where you're walking around a 3D world, but it could be a high-level overview of a 3D office environment that you can "pop in" to, or scan from a birds eye view to see who's "in the office", how they're feeling, what they're working on. It virtually re-creates that sense of community and digitally replicates that very real-world ability of just looking up from your desk and seeing how everyone is doing at any point in time. Because that's what's missing right now. Without a message or a meeting we don't know how everyone is, but we used to. This suggestion could help.

Let's take it a step further, individuals actually sat within those offices in real-life (or those where working remotely isn't suitable for their own needs), could update their status to advise that they're actually in the building in real life. You could go full sci-fi and do augmented reality web cams in each identified space where staff consent to their presence being broadcast to colleagues, showing a real time view of real people at real desks and remote worker avatars at virtual desks all within the "same environment."

This approach could potentially recreate that sense of belonging and of community for the remote working and hybrid working Trust. We could replicate virtually that spontaneity that's been missed. Combine this suggestion with the other suggestions above that are available to us right now and we have a real opportunity to bring back that support and social interaction culture that seems to have been chipped away through constant digital remote working since March 2020. 

Having this blended remote world may seem a bit fanciful, and don't get me wrong I'll still but jumping at the chance to meet my colleagues at a face-to-face event whenever I can, but it could genuinely help with a number of the issues with remote working I've raised above, and if it works for you, you're still sat on your sofa in your pyjamas and reducing your carbon footprint!

• I mentioned that being online doesn't mean you have to be permanently available. You can support your colleagues too with the new scheduled send feature coming soon in Ms Teams. Just like in Outlook, if you don't want to be sending emails to your colleagues at 2am on a Sunday morning, schedule send to receive the message when their work hours start. You've still cleared the task off your plate, but you've not adversely affected the wellbeing of your recipient. Just as with emails, start using this feature in Teams as soon as it's ready!
• Digital interruptions can definitely be softened up. Even individuals I love bumping into at work can strike fear into me when I receive an unannounced inbound call with 2 minutes spare before the next meeting and a potential missed opportunity for a loo break. What's broken? What's gone wrong? Who's hurt? That incoming ring tone could be replaced with a voice message as the call is dialling. Imagine the next time you see the following:

• Rather than the ominous inbound ringtone, you get the corridor equivalent voice memo, recorded by the person actually calling you... "Hi Martyn, no rush, just wanted to make you aware I'll be on my lunch break for the next hour if you need anything just give me a bell." or "Help me Martyn, you're my only hope. Help me Martyn, you're my only hope." It could be limited to 20s for the caller to pre-record, it can help people receiving these calls prioritise what gets picked up and what doesn't. And any unanswered calls can have the 20s memo stored in chats to hear back later or a voicemail can be left like usual with more detail if required. Taking that further, you could even replace the wave through the office window approach and do a 20s video recording too. Why not add a smile or a panicked expression to the inbound call so we know how important it is or how you're feeling before we pick up the call?
• Remember when I mentioned that you can't just walk into another department's office and see who's around anymore? Do you want to find someone from Facilities & Estates to help you report a leaky tap but don't know any individual names and the physical office is devoid of any human life? What about virtual lobby areas for non-team members? This is the virtual equivalent of individuals popping their head in the door. It's not to replace call logging systems, far from it. It's just to give people some social interaction options with departments as a whole that aren't simply support requests or reliant on singling out overworked individuals within the team. Have a query for a team? Want to chat with them or join a call you can see in progress? Pop a message in a Team or Channel and see who's about that can answer, support, call you back or signpost you virtually. They may even be able to organise a face to face meet up with you!

Remote Leadership

Remote leadership is a complex issue and I'd love to spend more time exploring this with fellow leaders and people that are impacted by this prolific overuse of digital platforms. 

As we look to address the workforce crisis across the NHS, to address our vacancies and temporary staffing usage, we will start looking to new practices which will only increase the likelihood of remote leadership. We will look to ensure continued flexibility for our workers, we will reduce our vacancy rates through international recruitment from all corners of the world, we will cater more for staff outside of the GMT 9-5. If we're to achieve this, we need to ensure that we're inclusive, we're supportive and we're not misusing technology to socially isolate people. We need consistent means of fostering social interaction and support for remote workers.

Hybrid working is certainly the primary answer. More face-to-face time, more time to breathe, to collaborate, to be offline and connect with colleagues on a social, professional, and supportive level. But there are things we can do here and now to make that work in practice with the digital tools at our disposal. 

If we stop misusing the digital tools we have, if we stop abusing ourselves by accepting back-to-back meetings and scheduling our own virtual meetings into every available minute of the working day, others will surely follow suit and recognise how we need to change to stay connected and to support each other. 

Let me know what you think of my digital things to try now and what you think about my new ideas wish list. What I propose might not be the answer, but I know something has to change. After every face-to-face meet up and in-person conference I feel re-energised, more relaxed, and less stressed quite frankly. It's how I used to feel before I was "on" all the time. 

Reach out and chat to me through Twitter: Martyn Perry (@martyngwperry) / Twitter and LinkedIn: (4) Martyn Perry | LinkedIn

To read more about our approach, take a look at the MPFT Digital Strategy theme for remote and agile working