WEBINAR: Covid-19 – working remotely

South Africa’s 21-day lockdown has turned working remotely into a hot topic. Biznews founder Alec Hogg hosted a webinar on the subject with author and relationship expert Paula Quinsee and Henley SA Dean Jon Foster-Pedley. It’s a diverse discussion ranging from the impact the lockdown has on relationships, to practical tips when taking your company remote. – Stuart Lowman

Hello, and good to be with you in what’s now Day 6 of the lockup. I’m Alec Hogg from Biznews and it’s my privilege and pleasure to welcome Paula Quinsee, who will be  taking us through a short presentation. We’ll also have Jon Foster-Pedley, the Dean of Henley Business School with us later. Paula, we know that people are trying to adjust to the lockdown and sometimes it’s a little challenging when you have your personal space invaded by your significant other but on the other hand, it’s also an opportunity. Maybe you can just take us through and just tell us about the relationship lockdown.

Thanks for having me. Couples and relationships are being tested right now with being in lockdown. Linked to that are other emotions that we’re going through on a personal level, family dynamics and a workplace perspective. What we’re finding is that a lot of couples have gone from being busy i.e. from a work point of view. People go to work and escape the home environment, so to speak. It gives them some distance between each other, time away from each other, where they can reflect or focus on other things before they come back to the home environment. Now, being in such a confined space, we’re finding that people are going from busy, to having a lot of time on their hands because normal day-to-day routine has been disrupted. It’s ‘how do I make the best of my time from a work deliverable point as well as from managing the general household daily routine such as washing, cooking, cleaning and on top of that, kids as well if you happen to have children, and managing the dynamics around home-school or self-study and making sure that they’re still doing what needs to be done. On top of that, if you are both having to work from home, you are now in each other’s spaces.

You’re both trying to manage with work stress and deliverables, get to grips with a new normal in terms of a routine of working remotely, and just basically surviving on a normal day-to-day situation. We need to start off with, “How can I take care of myself first in terms of self-care”. We often hear on the airlines, “Put your own mask on first” because you can’t take care of others if you’re not taking care of yourself first. Understanding where you are emotionally, what you’re feeling, what you’re experiencing and how you share this with your partner, how you can be completely honest with each other and say, “This is the support that I need from you right now. This is what I’m going through right now and this is how I need you to be there for me”, so that we can be there for each other as a couple/as a relationship.

How do we manage the family dynamics and keep in contact with family whether they be close by or whether there be somewhere else in the world that is also being impacted by what’s going on in the world right now? As well as Friends and social groups, these are important because they all provide a sense of support and support structures that can either impact us in terms of adding to our stress or there can actually help us get through the current situation.

People that are living on their own, single parents as an example – may not have the help of a partner to help with kids. This is where you can tap into friends and social groups as a support structure to get you through, whether it’s friends or work colleagues and people in the workplace. Relationships are critical now, particularly when it comes to human skills, where it’s about checking in with our employees and our people in our work environment.

How are they coping? What are they going through?

There is the added stress of the financial impact. I’ve heard of some companies where they’ve had to implement salary cuts or asked to take compulsory leave and unpaid leave. There’s the risk of companies closing down, retrenchments and people losing their jobs, there’s a lot of stress that we are dealing with. When it comes to remote work and working with colleagues, some of the things that you need to put in place to help you get through this is how do you structure your day that it seems some kind of normal, try and stick to your same daily routine as much as possible.

This gives you a sense of control over your day and over your environment as opposed to feeling like the world is coming at you, it’s complete chaos, and you have no control. This is equally important if you have children because children pick up on our anxiety and stress levels and it gives them a sense of uncertainty and instability. They will potentially start acting out what they’re experiencing and what they’re feeling. It depends on your kids’ ages and emotional maturity and whether they are able to give context to what’s going on in their worlds but the younger they don’t necessarily have that emotional vocabulary to express what they’re feeling and what they’re going through, which can add more friction to relationships.

It’s very important for couples to understand and expect friction, it is going to happen. Sit down and discuss as a couple, ‘how are we going to deal with getting through the next couple of days/weeks’. As a couple, how do we manage the friction? Sit down and discuss with each other, ‘we know we’re going to get into each other’s spaces and faces. How do we manage that in a healthy way versus a toxic way?’ An example would be, ‘well we’re not going to become volatile,’ in other words we’re not going to name, blame, shame, or swear at each other, etc.

Agree on how you’re going to manage the conflict and the confrontation and give each other some time to cool off. If you are able, find dedicated areas in the house if you both have to work from home so that you’re not speaking and working over each other. Take turns to schedule and manage the kids. If you have key deliverables that you both have to achieve within the day, try to manage your schedule around each other, take turns with the kids allowing the other time to get on to do what they need to do. Agree on how you’re going to manage your household chores and so that it feels like it’s a shared responsibility, because this can cause more frustration and it can also result in resentment being built up.

Communication is key, sharing how you’re feeling and what you’re anxious. Have that serious conversation, ‘ how will we cope if one of us does happen to get the virus, how will we self-quarantine, medication, health care’. It is a very big reality that one is potentially going to get it. This is a time where couples can turn towards each other and use the time as a positive to invest in their relationship and each other.

There are three key questions that couples can ask themselves during this period:

What’s working for us right now as a relationship and as a couple?

What are some areas that we can improve on?

How can we be better partners for each other and for our children?

From an individual point, what keeps you grounded, keeps your own emotions in check and what helps you to cope? Whether it’s spirituality or from a faith. Look at going from the head to the heart and running back human connection and bringing back the emotional level. This is where human skills and human relationships are key at the moment.

We’ve seen reports coming out of China that since they’ve come out of lockdown that their divorce rate has increased. Reports coming out of France that domestic violence has increased by 30%. Which is a very big concern here in our country with being in confined spaces particularly where your relationships are toxic and volatile already.

There is the looming loneliness epidemic and the risk of depression and we’ve seen that chronic loneliness can have an impact on our immune systems to the same degree that it is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If people are feeling that they’re not coping and they can tap into our national resources and national support centres. Please reach out for help if you don’t have access to your employee wellness and well-being support structures, reach out to the national support centres and get help. Don’t feel that you are alone. If anybody is needing any help along these lines, you’re welcome to reach out to me as well. I’m able to assist you or refer you to the various networks and forums that I’m involved in.

Thanks for giving us that background. 

Jon, I had a fascinating chat yesterday with Dr Alexandra Samuel. She wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal, which was the top-read story of the past week all about working from home. She’s done it for 22 years and it was very interesting what Paula was saying because four years ago, her husband also started working from home and there were some real challenges. Her off-the-cuff kind of response to this is when you have other people in the house, make sure -if you’re working from home or spending time at home – that you all have noise-reducing headphones which is a little difficult to access if you don’t have them yet, but again aligns with what Paula was saying, “Find your own space.”

Yes, I can totally empathise with that. I remember going to a Nickelback concert a while ago, and I chewed up my ticket to stick in my ears. The noise was so loud, so I don’t recommend that, but you do need to do something. I have to watch what I say, my wife Carla’s listening, so I just have to be very measured in what I say. I’d like to say – quickly – she’s doing a great job.

I’ve got a comment, more around routine, Paula. Hanno Bekker says, “What I find works for me is to focus on the family during the day and work from 9:00pm to about 2:00am daily. That gives me about five hours to focus uninterrupted.”

A good friend of mine, Gus Silber who is a full-time writer, first started working from home years ago. I phoned him and said ‘how do you do this freelance stuff’. He said that the secret to this is to work within the times that make sense for you and in his case, it was something similar to what Hanno has just said now. It’s an interesting point. Paula?

Absolutely, and this is where it does come down to personal choice and what does work for you and to put that routine in place. However, in saying that, lack of sleep can also add to irritability and mood swings and can contribute to conflict in the household so just be aware that you are getting enough sleep as well and to manage your energy levels.

Jon?

It’s one of the most important things under these circumstances. Try and carve out enough space. Research has shown that the optimal space, if you’re working alone at home, is 30m2 – so five by six. Not everyone’s got that but if you can carve out that sort of space, it gives you sufficient separation to be able to be yourself and if you can use noise cancelling devices I think that’s a great idea. People need a little bit of space under lockdown so if you can find ways in which to give you that space to begin with, that’s a start. The next stage is about how you establish some form of routine or regularity, in a relatively chaotic situation. Find points of constancy and structure that give you a sense of groundedness. If you add chaos on chaos, you’ve just got anarchy. So much has changed so many routines have changed so your work routine to remote and family. Your mind and emotions are stretched tremendously, so try and find those elements of structure, routine, pattern, and space to allow yourself to go and recover.

Interesting point that Hanno made, that he worked for five hours, that was also the point that was made by Dr Samuel when she said that when you work from home your five hours are usually equivalent to eight hours in the office because you don’t have interruptions. You don’t have the watercooler conversations, stop feeling guilty that you aren’t putting in a full 8-hour shift as it were. I think it talks to what you were saying, Paula, about getting your balance and getting your relationships working better.

The risk with some people there is that you can blur the lines between work and home life and you can get caught up in just working longer and longer hours. End the day or begin the day whichever it might be for you and your schedule. Schedule end of day catch ups with people, take some time out outside, catch up with some friends or family members online and just have that mental break.

How can you cope with blended families during this time, when children and attention can become a contentious issue and I suppose with Covid-19, it is an extreme situation because kids are usually at school during the day.

This is where you can involve the kids, by sitting down with them and saying right and let’s come up with ideas collectively, and give each person a turn to come up with an idea of how we can handle this as a family. This is really going to test your team-building skills, this is your team at home and every child has unique different needs. It’s important to do things collectively as a family unit, but also individually one-on-one with each parent and child to build that individual relationship with the kids, too.

“Why is so much emphasis focused on the norm when it comes to routine, it’s no longer the norm? So, surely routine must adapt to the new world of working. Are we not just looking for comfort or regularity?

One of the things I set in my life is complexity theory which is becoming quite interesting this moment, where you can try and put rigid routines in place and that’s fine if you can foresee a future that’s going to be stable. We are working in complex environments where we are ‘sense-making’. Suddenly, everyone’s thrown into a home where we’ve got to make sense of this thing. You can get very regimental about it and say that’s how it’s going to work, but it’s not going to work in a flexible family invented environment which is when you’ve got the kids there, you’ve got your family working. My wife’s a family doctor. She works from home consulting online, I work from home and think it’s important that you do try some of the structure. In the very early days you’ve got to be pretty merciful to yourself and you’ve got to understand and begin with your experimenting.

We told our kids ‘look we don’t know how this is gonna pan out. Work out what you want to do. Work out some routine that doesn’t involve being on the iPad too much and do some self-invention and self-discovery’. It’s probably the first time in their life they’ve had the freedom to try and create their own structures, their own lifestyle, and their own way of living they’d like for a while. It is fascinating to see how everyone adapts around each other. I think if one maintains a sense of experimentation, calm, and sense of humour you’ll find unusual patterns emerging which can be quite creative and interesting.

We’ve been running a remote company at Biznews literally since we started. We have an office that we work in in normal conditions but we’ve had the privilege of having a little space in our home where that’s our working space. To make it work properly, you’ve got to have self-disciplined. It does bring all kinds of other opportunities too, when the commuting is out of the way you do have more time to walk the dogs, spend the conversations with your family, and so on. Stu, you and I worked together for a long time and you have little kids, how have you managed the conflict there between working from home and having children around?

The issue on routine is key with the kids. They are three and seven, so we’ve had to build a routine that at least one of us is off whether it be an hour or so to entertain and then that’s when the other one can focus purely on work. I’m an early bird and a late owl so that’s where a lot of time is spent for work as well, but routine on our side is key and sticking to a routine just to help kids.

More questions?

A comment from Bernard who says, a way of giving yourself your own space is by keeping fit and healthy. His garden is a reasonable size that his wife can do about two to five kilometres a day.

Paula, it looks like you do exercise quite a lot.

I can relate to that because I have been running loops around my garden to keep me sane. That was part of our routine before we went into lockdown, we were early bird risers. We went off to the gym or we did some form of exercise early in the morning and for me I just find that it helps set the tone of my day. It puts me in a positive frame of mind. I feel energised and I can then get stuck into my work and I think it’s whatever works for you that gives you that time out to connect with yourself to re-energize yourself whether it’s meditating, whether it’s sitting quietly on the balcony or the garden sipping a cup of tea.

Jon what’s your thoughts on making time for exercise?

It’s absolutely critical. There’s so much available now, online gym sessions, which are relatively cheap. Carla does that every morning and they’re really amazingly engaging. They’re able to energise, run up the camera, and be crazy. It’s really fun and if you’ve got a little bit of space… If you’re privileged to have a tennis court, you can walk around them in a sort of meditative state rather than just playing tennis. It’s really important to get the body moving even if you do 20 minutes of reasonable walking, it’s better than nothing. If you do an hour, you need very small spaces, this is a time for creativity. It’s enormously important to stay grounded and to settle the mind because it’s under quite a lot of stress.

A friend of ours Sally Flanagan who has a yoga studio, which shut down before the lockdown just because of the spread. She’s now gone online and all of her teachers are doing live yoga sessions including hot yoga which, if you’ve got a heater, you heat up the room and away you go and it’s just like being in the studio. So much creativity and innovation from businesses is now being put into the marketplace and there’s a very good example with gyms and yoga studios and so on. Maybe, when we come out of this, the world will be different and they might have found new revenue streams.

I think that’s absolutely true. Just have a look at our business, which is a business school which is typically being catered mainly on face-to-face interaction. That’s the belief, that it is the only way you can do it. We switched over ten days before the lockdown, so we were in full virtual mode with a range of very interesting creative facilitators. Independent people who’ve done a whole range of things whether they’re creatives or therapists or educators. It was unbelievable the amount of energy and engagement they had with reinventing what they were doing. What’s interesting about the virtual world, when you’re engaging like when you look at the class for an audience, they’re quite distant, and when you’ve got the right kids and a big monitor or two you see everyone’s faces really up-close. You can really emote with people and you can really have quite the engagements with people through the screen. We know that because we watch films, don’t we? We watch social media and we watch these little videos that people make. They make us laugh. They make us cry so it’s fully possible to have not only an intellectual engagement through screens but a very emotive and very personal one as well. I can only imagine that that capability and technology’s going to increase. I think we will have shifted through this in a way that probably we should have done or could have done before.

Barbara says, “With my office having worked remotely for years we have decided to put ourselves in the headspace of our clients and customers who are doing it for the first time. We’ve split the time into three blocks. The first week, we are used to catching up on our own and then our customers get into a rhythm, and so we’re not bothering them much. Later this week, we’ll move into a connection phase of ‘can we have a quick video chat’ and the third week will be more preparation for operating as before and generating momentum for sales.

That’s great because it shows you know that they’ve put some structure as in mapping out what they’re focusing on over the next couple of weeks and it depends on the type of profile or personality you are. Some people may not be that disciplined and that structured in terms of the way they like to work. They may be more big-picture orientated and that’s the thing; it’s coming back to understanding your type of personality and what works best for you. If you’re the kind of person that needs structure and routine and discipline, put that in place for you. If you’re the kind of big-picture person, then maybe it’s just about allocating specific tasks that you want to accomplish through this period of lockdown.

From an exercise point of view, one thing that I have been seeing and hearing a lot of is people are using the time to declutter not only mentally but physically as well and that’s also a good form of exercise so if you want to clean out all your cupboards and your garage and everything that’s also going to give you a good workout.

John Wilkinson is asking for some suggestions for the right kit for remote work so probably more practical ideas around working remotely.

We’ve been doing it for so long, I can tell you that first of all Apple computers are a must because the whole ecosystem talks to each other. We also use quite a few apps. Stuart and I are communicating on Slack while we’re going through this webinar to just make sure that things go smoothly but our whole team has got different channels on select. The most popular of the video conferencing calls is Zoom but we find that ‘Go to Webinar’ and ‘Go to Meeting’ works very well. Then you’ve also got Google Hangouts, which is very useful and free but you need to have a Google account or a Gmail account. Stu, what are the other tools that we apply aggressively?

Google drive, which is a great one because you can house all documents in either locked drives or allow everyone to access them. It’s just communication as you say. Find the right communication tool for your team and it allows you open communication – sort of no-holds-barred. Have different channels, and have your water-cooler channels so that it’s not all work, there is a bit of light-heartedness that runs around the team.

We’re very fortunate as well to have WhatsApp. It’s almost ubiquitous within South Africa so that’s a good way of communicating and talking when you’re on the move.

Loom is another platform that I’ve heard of and played with very briefly where you can pre-record stuff so for example instructional videos. If you’re wanting to take an employee or somebody through a process or something you want them to do, you can screenshot your screen, pre-record it, and then send it back to them.

What’s key on our side is not just practical. We do talk about a chief happiness officer, somebody who actually manages the team from a different focus, which is key because you find out someone who’s touching base with the employees and seeing what’s on their minds, how they’re feeling – stuff that you don’t necessarily see via a video conference etc. I think that’s key as well in terms of building a team remotely.

That’s critical and we’re very fortunate to have a chief happiness officer from day one and her role literally is to keep people engaged because the easiest thing when you don’t have contact is disengagement. We know how hard that is to maintain without connections. Something else: another app that you can add to your arsenal there is a house party. It’s really taking off in North America and the reason for that is because it’s almost like having a virtual party so that’s something else to play with.

I’d just like to reinforce your comment on Zoom, it’s not only useful and relatively low bandwidth and high quality, but there’s an enormous amount of supporting material and interesting instructional stuff out there on their website. It’s how to work from home and how to transform to digital. One of the big things people are having to do quickly is transform their businesses to digital and that’s not as easy. The interesting discovery is that it’s more possible to make money out of this than perhaps people thought. We were able to have a series of Zoom meetings, which don’t involve any travel time, which as long as you have a structure and somebody to coordinate them and call out the names of who’s talking it’s a bizarre thing. You need quite a strong control most of the time to let people have their say. Once you do that, you can have many more meetings but the big gap is when you’re running a company when you’re a CEO or a senior manager, your job normally isn’t just sitting in an office working on your own. It’s walking around engaging people, checking the sense of what’s going on, building a pattern of the behaviour in the business, and trying to engage people. That becomes quite difficult to do remotely so it’s really worth practicing one’s ability to be video-genic and that doesn’t mean smiling at the mirror and all that. It’s just making eye contact with the camera, staying relaxed, being authentic, and not getting panicky if you made mistakes. Everybody does. Interesting, I think that you can have a more human element through the camera than people think. That allows you to keep people engaged so there’s a number of them, not just apps. but methodologies that we’re practicing now and I think that in two or three months’ time, we’re gonna have a whole new set of people who are not only media personalities but able to engage in new ways and less formal ways – in ways that really fit a flexible agile sort of economy which is what we need to build.

Yes. In our case, for years now, we’ve had a stuck meeting time at 1:15 in the afternoon. It works with our content flow where our colleagues in Edinburgh, Cape Town, London occasionally Dublin, and of course here in Johannesburg all get together in one meeting room and we all look forward to it and we have jokes and fun and it really is that contact when you’re in a remote team that you work as a team and I think the chief happiness officer is a big part way of ensuring that you are still a team rather than as individuals just doing your own thing.

Dave has a question around corporate antibodies. He says do you believe this will force companies not previously used to remote to remote learning to buy into this concept? Trust and control seem to be the hurdles.

Yes, absolutely. It’s fascinating, we’ve gone virtual and what we’re discovering is that even in academic rigor you can still maintain academic rigor in these ways. There are different ways of handling it. You can still have the criteria to make sure people are in thinking mode. You can actually do more. You can produce short videos; which everyone can access anytime they want. You can produce material and guidance. You can have large coaching sessions at any time with no traveling time so the multiple advantages are that people are discovering this as well and also more on demand. So instead of having to sit in the classroom all day, you might be able to come to two or three hours to do the rest of the stuff around your time in a more flexible way. We know we’re never going to go back to the old normal.

In fact, the old normal: most institutions would understand that that was well outdated anyway. What was missing was the impetus to invent and what’s happening is that we are finding that it’s really possible to do engaging education online. Stuff that gets people intellectually stimulated and coaches them at the same time, and gives them a range of material that’s sometimes of lesser cost and also allows them to live a life and apply it at the same time in a sort of virtual environment. So, while there are some times you need to really sit and focus and engage with people and get into a deep conversation – a deep argument – which the classic case study room is best for and we’re finding that virtual learning is what it’s all about.

Our whole lives now are about learning and adapting in real time all the time so part of all our jobs is to keep up to date and train our minds and ourselves. These methods are perfectly adapted to that so I think we’re in for a powerful and much more effective learning future through these than we were before.

Those corporate antibodies – the question that was raised there – isn’t that something also to take account of or do you think because it is outdated and because we are moving to a new world really that they’re just going to be swept away it’s almost like a tidal wave?

I’ve been teaching MBAs for about 30 years or so. I remember in year one people would say, “Oh but the company will never adapt. They’re so change resistant.” And it’s the same story forever. The reality is that this is just the nature of us in our minds. We learn something. We embed it into a habit. The habit becomes efficient and allows us to make money and we rely on it but with all that’s been happening, the context is gone. Life, corporate life, our own lives and quite often, our own psychology is this constant battle between our habits of mind and the habits of action – an adaptation to the new reality.

You don’t have to be gloomily serious and autocratically controlling to manage large amounts of money and create huge amounts of value for people. You’ve got to be responsible but you also need to reflect or be creative which requires a certain sort of leading sense of play, so I think we’re looking at a different way of doing it. So, these corporate antibodies stories: they’re always there and our job is to maintain a certain activist spirit in ourselves especially as leaders otherwise you will be swept away by the people who are looking at you as the antibody.

Shirley’s got a comment just on that, “Our personal and professional lives as well as ways of work will have shifted significantly post Corona. The learning here is to be more human centric and more deeply mindful of our connectedness.”

Paula, that was what you were focusing on to a large degree in your presentation.

This whole work-life balance thing is actually a myth that doesn’t exist. It’s about work-life integration and finding a balance that works for me and that makes sense to me and my lifestyle and how I want to live my life. It’s about corporates being able to build that into their corporate culture and allowing employees to be able to find their own sense of balance and I think as John was saying earlier this is where the creativity and the innovation and all of that is going to come in and being some kind of flexible and adaptable, or as some people like to call it, the agile way of working, so that we can all live the lives that we feel are fulfilling to us and that have a purpose behind it.

I love that. Often when we get new members of our team in a few of the companies that I’ve had over the last few decades, we always make the point to them that we’re not acquiring a slice of your brain which says the time that you are in the office when you then focus on us. We know that your whole brain is integrating with the rest of your life – your work philosophies etc. We try to then tap into that as a team/as a unit and it really works well if you can get it right.

Johnny Black’s got a nice quote on trust from John Wooden. He says it’s better to trust and be disappointed once in a while than to mistrust and be miserable all of the time.

Was it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?

There’s an interesting one from Nadia, “I’m a tour guide” and my work has now come to a total stop. I’ve now registered to do some free and paid online courses to upgrade my skills. A question here, “ what does it cost an individual more or less to work from home and are there guidelines for compensation?” I think that’s the question.

Yes, from our side, what we believe on being a remote company is that we give our colleagues all the tools possible to work from home so just because you are now working from home doesn’t mean that you have to use a bad computer or you don’t have the same tools that you would have if you were in an office. John, do you have any thoughts on how Nadia could invest her time given Warren Buffett’s wonderful saying that the best investment you can ever make is in yourself?

Yes, that’s so true because there’s another angle to this. I’d be very tempted to give you a litany of things about entrepreneurship. It’s a brilliant time to learn about digital capabilities and the good thing about that is it’s so much of it out there, the bad thing about it is there’s so much of it out there. How do you filter your way through? We’re going to run this series – not on that – a series of free programs on helping small and medium enterprises do digital transition because we’re going through it as well. We’re going to pull people in from overseas and so that’s something anyone can look into, to help. Our minds are so busy today and so preoccupied in the target-driven stuff we’re doing that we very rarely get time to un-boot them and reboot them. It can be quite often, difficult to maintain a broader vision or a sense of purpose. If you just walk around and just focus on what’s there and ignore what your mind’s saying, do mindfulness techniques or follow your breath and don’t try and get an outcome. Just let that work on you. What one starts to see happening is you’re relaxed but then your mind goes into place, you often stopped it from going out of fear or a sense of propriety or you’re trying to maintain an image. Let it go there for a while. Your mind it’s not going to kill you. It’s actually going to take you to interesting and different insights and a broader perspective. I used to be a pilot and if you’re a pilot there’s no good staring at your instruments all the time.

You’ve got to take your head out, understand the terrain, the clouds, the environment and the whole thing you’re flying through and just observe it and see where you are and all that way you should go. This gives you that sense of time and a lot of the things we believe about ourselves are so critically necessary for identity art and you might just find that you discover bigger better things in yourself that are aching to come out with our business hasn’t allowed it to so I think that’s a good opportunity.

Paula, I know that you focus a lot on the ‘many of us are busy getting busy’ or ‘busy staying busy’ and I guess this is also a little bit of a detox opportunity.

We get caught up in that hamster wheel of life and we ‘do, do, do’ and we don’t know how to be anymore and this is giving us a perfect opportunity to take some step back and to just be and to let those creative juices flow. I like to use mind-maps, put your name in the middle and then do mind-maps in terms of ‘what are my skills, what am I experienced in, what are my passions, what are my interests, what are my hobbies, what are the things I’ve always wanted to do on my bucket-list and create a mind-map and go wild. Then slowly, narrow down into little pockets of different themes or areas of commonality and then work with those and see if something can come from there that can potentially spark some new way of working for some new career shifts for yourself.

I’m so pleased to hear that. Many years ago I met Tony Buzan. It was the most extraordinary experience because it was at the World Economic Forum and they have these press conferences with people – it must mean 20 years ago – and I was the only one who pitched at the press conference so I had Tony Buzan to myself for an hour, the inventor of mind-maps. You can imagine what an impact that makes on one subsequent to that and it’s also something that I’ve used ever since. It’s an incredible as a tool to find the way that you should be going forward so I’m really pleased that you pulled that one up.

A few comments from Tracy Kriek, which is working for them so far, home-screen adds another dimension to working from home. You need to keep to schedules. I’m working in one area, my husband in another and the children in their classroom in another area in the house. Our business working schedule now is within the school day timetables and we have coffee breaks and lunch at those times.

Karen says, “I have an issue that I’m working two jobs (both remotely) and I do have autonomy to take a break or lay down or work longer if needed but my partner talks to me every time he walks past and then gets very disapproving if I take a break but I can’t work from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. at two different jobs without a break.

Paula, what does she do?

This is where we may need to put boundaries down when it comes to what works for us and what we need and the support we need from our partner. They obviously have very different perspectives on ways of working and what is being efficient and productive and one thing isn’t necessarily the same for the other. There’s no one-size-fits-all so sit down and explain why is it important that you need this kind of structure and why it works for you and how can he potentially respect that and vice versa.

Thanks, Paula. Norman says he’s been working from home for the last 15 years. He finds that making sure that you have your proper space and your non-office space is essential so for example he’s busy writing a memoir and when he works on the book, he writes somewhere else in the house, not in his workspace. When I’m writing professionally, I write in my workspace. My wife also works at home much of the time and she has her own workspace. She tends to overflow into our shared home space and when that happens it results in a measure of conflict because of rigid commitments. I work hard to avoid working on a Saturday. I’m not sure if there’s anything you can help there with, Paula.

Yes, it’s really around how we respect each other’s spaces and ways of working. At the same time, despite all of this now, working on top of each other and there are children involved, how do we find time for each other in this as a couple? Just because we’re in lockdown and confinement doesn’t mean that we can’t have quality time together to build our relationship and to really connect with each other on a deeper level in just the day-to-day chores and kids and work so for example you know if your kids are young enough and they have a routine and they go to bed at 8 o’clock at night then perhaps have a date night. Have dinner on the patio and a glass of wine and just really connect on a deeper level so that you don’t miss each other at the same time.

This is from Eric. He says that on the funny side, I’ve had comments from numerous colleagues on Zoom calls that they can hear my dogs snoring in the background.

Snoring?

I think that’s more the new normal. It was a couple of years ago when the guy saw his kid run in, but that’s the new norm with this whole remote concept. I’m not sure what anyone else thinks.

Yes, definitely.

We’ve noticed that in your families too, pretty often. Your thoughts?

I think there are two things. One is obviously how we adapt, how we manage our patterns, etc. but there’s a slightly tougher reality that we’re facing, which is Covid-19 and the consequence it will have so we are going to struggle. We’re going to get through quite a tricky time. That’s obvious. We’ll have economic challenges as well. A number of companies will be struggling and a couple of individuals will be struggling and then we’ll come out at the end of it with our economy in not such good shape obviously and we need to recover so I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the old normal and I don’t think this is in any way a possibility. The really important reality, I’m sorry to say but it’s quite tough, is we have to engage really hard at retooling ourselves and building not only our businesses but helping everyone get business up and running.

This is probably the first time in my life that I can remember that the need for absolute collaboration and interdependence is so stark – not just a disease, which in a sense is making us realise that we are all the same – but also, the need for us to work together to understand that we cannot come out into a destroyed economy. We have to lay the groundwork to have an economic recovery at the end of this. We’ve got an obligation to work and work hard, I’m sorry to say.

Paula, last words?

I agree with Jon in terms of collaboration, not only from a business point of view but also at a community level, a family level, and a relationship level so that we can come out of this intact as couples, as families, as communities, and also as businesses in the nation at large.

Well, thanks to Jon Foster-Pedley, the Dean of Henley Business School and to Paula Quinsee.

Paula Quinsee’s ebook with tips on surviving Covid-19: