I was just relating to a colleague the other day how I find this whole pandemic working from home thing beneficial in certain ways. True, I have more meetings. tiring zoom meetings, than I ever had, but generally outside of my meetings, my time stays mine. People tend to hold things for our meetings, or they deal with things themselves that they might previously have come through my open office door with. There also seems to be a more general awareness that our non-work life is going to intersect with our work life, so there’s less expectation, generally, of immediate email response as well. I’m finding it easier to put my email aside for longer periods of time while I concentrate on a specific task or project without drawing people’s ire.
Open door policies have good intentions and several benefits, but they also have some significant drawbacks. For one, they essentially say that your interruption is more important than my otherwise planned work. All the time – without exception. Yes, you can close your doors at times, or respond to an interruption with a statement that this isn’t a good time, but the general expectation at the office was anyone can go see anyone at any time and get a response right then and there. Not only does that devalue the work of the one interrupted, it can also be disservice to the interrupters who don’t derive the benefits from spending a bit more time on their problems and discovering the solutions themselves. Even in the pre-pandemic world, when someone you wanted help from wasn’t in the office when you needed, you usually went back to your own office, googled for a bit, sketched out some ideas, and generally found the solution you were looking for on your own. Would have it been easier or faster to get the answer from your absent colleague? Yes, perhaps, and in some cases that is indeed the right thing to do. But in other cases, it’s just not.
I think the norms that have arisen around remote work have been good for abating the rise of an unhealthy interruption culture. People don’t interrupt unless they really feel they need to, tending normally to figure out the issue on their own or store it for the next scheduled zoom meeting. This, I think is the intent of the open office policy – I’m here to help when you really need it, but it’s that when you really need it that tended to get lost and people sought others’ help whenever it was convenient, not whenever it was really necessary. I want to hear from you and an open door helps make that possible. I also want you to spend some time with your problems and own your solutions and I have my own work I’d like to complete as well. Open doors don’t help very much with the latter two objectives.
So now, even though I have fewer free hours in a day, I can generally use those hours more effectively than I could in the office. I have time to think; time to do the important, but not urgent; time to get into a state of flow and stay there for a while. None of these things are possible with the usual daily interruptions of an open door in the office.
There are lessons here for the eventual return to office. I’m leaning more towards the concept of office hours rather than open door. I’ve considered that before, but this pandemic experience has really demonstrated the value of that approach. Stop looking for the quick answer that disrupts someone else. Work through the problem on your own, seek help when you really need it, and let others enjoy the same quality time for their work that you have for yours. Supplement this with scheduled time to talk to your colleagues and then really listen. Combined, I think these efforts could bring some of this work from home productivity back to the office.
Working from home, of course, has its own set of distractions and interruptions that don’t apply to the office, but having more occasions for uninterrupted time, even for an hour, is a big enough benefit that Scot would like to find a way to continue this once back in the office.