As summer turns to fall, exuberance from work from home (WFH) productivity is turning to fatigue and cabin fever. This new phenomenon of WFH fatigue is receiving high profile exposure as spotlighted in recent articles with titles like “Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All” and “Working from Home is Starting to Pall” that have appeared in mainstream publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
What is behind this shift in attitudes? Part of it is related to a loss of personal contact with colleagues. But it’s more than that. A study commissioned by Lenovo, entitled: Technology and the Evolving World of Work found that people are increasingly distracted at home and find themselves doing an inordinate number of remote meetings. All of which cause fatigue and depression.
What can we do? The reality is that WFH isn’t going anywhere soon. A recent WSJ article entitled Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Bosses Better Adjust quotes a CEO from a non-profit organization commenting on the COVID work from home lockdown: “At first, I viewed it as a sprint, then a marathon, then a 100-mile ultramarathon. Now I see it as a hard way of life.” Ouch.
Comfortable and familiar tools are key to bringing remote workers into a productive circle of colleagues. One of the most important success factors is to make it easy for people to be self-sufficient at home. Not being able to reach out to a colleague in the next cubicle or office is a real pain point for workers who are under pressure to get stuff done. Bringing information together from multiple applications is a great start. And two of the most used apps for the home worker are Microsoft Teams and Outlook email. People at home are struggling to connect conversations with partners, suppliers, and customers in email, with internal discussions in Microsoft Teams.
harmon.ie to the Rescue
harmon.ie makes it easy for people at work to connect email with Teams conversations so there is only one discussion to follow, instead of two. We presented practical ways to do this during yesterday’s webinar Strategies for Working from Home with Microsoft Teams. If you missed the webinar, you need to watch it now. During the webinar, you will see understand what is behind the key challenges of bringing email and Teams conversations together, and you will see a demo of how harmon.ie makes it easy to connect email and Teams conversations. Equally important, you will learn how to use new harmon.ie ‘search’ capabilities to find emails and documents quickly, whether they are stored in Teams or in SharePoint locations.
