First published 24 May 2021 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel opened with WFH, working from home, and I asked if he meant WAH. That's what it said on the weekly planner back when I was in corporate. Working at home. Except the people who were in the office every day reckoned it stood for washing and housework.
Nigel's worry is the other way round. Plenty of people working from home end up working longer, and they lose the thinking time on the commute and the chats in the kitchen. And a laptop on the bed in a studio flat might get the job done, but it's doing your body no favours. He misses us recording in the same room too. Coffee breaks, Alfie the dog jumping up and knocking the microphones. Me turning up late, apparently.
Then we got onto trust. Nigel blames the 'male, pale and stale' brigade who want to see everyone at their desks. I pushed back a bit. The biggest micromanager I ever worked with didn't fit that description at all. When I ran a team across four countries we got everyone on Skype every couple of weeks, and one year we did Christmas dinner on a video call with everyone holding a turkey sandwich.
The best bits were about real life getting into calls. A little girl walked into Nigel's session with half a drawing of a cat, her dad went red, and Nigel asked her to come back in 20 minutes with a monkey, an elephant, a lion and a dolphin. My son's graduate scheme told everyone on day one that doorbells and phones will go. Just mute, and turn your camera off if you need to step away.
Nigel finished by plugging Done Beats Perfect while I sat there holding it up, waiting for Zoom to switch the camera to me.
What I'd pass on
- If you trusted someone enough to hire them, trust them to do the work wherever they are.
- Working from home can mean working longer. You lose the commute thinking time and the kitchen chats.
- A laptop on the bed gets the job done but isn't doing your body any good.
- Tell people up front that kids and deliveries will happen. Ask them to mute and switch the camera off when they step away.
If you trusted an individual to hire them, you should trust them enough to get their work done when and wherever they are.
Nigel Risner
And I think in many ways what we've seen over the last year is an acceleration of what was gonna happen over the next 10 anyway.
Neil Martin
