Making it work Shift to home offices not without its challenges By: Randall King, Frances Koncan, Alan Small and Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, May. 29, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/05/2020 (1974 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Work. It can be a challenge at the best of times.

But in the midst of a pandemic, for people lucky enough to be able to make the shift from the office to home, the nine-to-five presents a whole new set of issues, especially when it comes to creating delineations between your home life and your work life.

We talked to four Winnipeggers about the joys and trials of working from home — or WFH, as it’s become known on social media. Three have had to adapt since our lives were upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. One is a seasoned vet of the home office, with some valuable tips on how to keep working and keep focused when the TV, the bed and a nice relaxing tub are just a few tempting steps away.

Alana Conway: Working… with children

Normally, Alana Conway spends her work days at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Owing to the pandemic, however, the 35-year-old research assistant is now doing her job from much smaller digs: the corner of her bedroom in her West End home. Conway can touch her bed from her desk. Her current officemates? Two young kids.

“A lot of my co-workers in my department do work from home on occasion, but I never did because I have little kids at home,” she says. Her son, Julian, is five and her daughter, Josephine, is two. “My husband’s at home, and I have one kid who’s in kindergarten and another one who’s mostly at home with him.

“We had to figure out where we were going to put this desk because it couldn’t be in the living room, and it couldn’t be in the basement, because these are all family spaces and I’d never get any work done.

“So, we found a location in our bedroom, shoved against the wall,” she says with a laugh. “It’s not bad, but I’d say everything’s tight. My desk touches my nightstand, touches my bed, touches my dresser.”

“I try to get started as early in the day as possible… That way, I have room to buffer if someone’s having a meltdown or needs some special care today because they’re having a bad day.” – Alana Conway

Her bedroom/office brings back memories of her days as a grad student living in a one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa. “It almost seems like a stepping back in time to a life where you did everything at home anyways. I learned through grad school that I definitely like having a nice, clear boundary between where I work and where I live, but right now, it’s just not possible.”

Conway has been working from home since March 16. At the beginning, she says she was more tempted to work from bed, but picking up her monitor and keyboard from her workspace at the CMHR was a game-changer. “It made it so much easier to have a space that kind of mimicked my workspace.”

To that end, Conway also tries to stick to a regular work schedule.

“I try to get started as early in the day as possible. So usually, we wake up, I grab coffee — which now I’ve decided to keep in a thermos because it stays warmer for longer periods of time — and then I start work around 7:30 a.m. That way, I have room to buffer if someone’s having a meltdown or needs some special care today because they’re having a bad day.” Her husband, who is also working from home, handles the child care during the day and they switch off in the evening.

A thermos isn’t her only work-from-home hack: noise-cancelling headphones have been a godsend. “I’ve been listening to white-noise sounds on Spotify, which helps me concentrate more, but also helps drown out the other noises in my house I’m not used to working around — like someone upset about something, or running around and playing.”

While she’s making working from home work for her, Conway is eager to return to the office. “I find that I’m so much more focused when I’m at work, which is kind of odd for some people,” she says. “It’s definitely been an adjustment.”

She even misses the commute, because it allowed her to mentally prepare for the day. But most of all, she misses the interactions with her colleagues.

“Virtual meetings are just not the same as being able to run into someone and ask how their weekend was or how things are going,” she says. “You really have to go out of your way to build that connection with your co-workers when you’re working from home.”

But while you can take the woman out of the museum, you can’t take the museum out of the woman. Conway has brightened up her “office” wall with a gallery of her kids’ paintings, drawings and homework.

“I have that at work, too,” she says. “I’m at home, but I’m not as fully present as I want to be if I was at home with my kids by choice. It keeps them close by, but not too close — but, I mean, they’re going to burst in at least five times a day, anyway.”

— Jen Zoratti

 

Coleen Rajotte: Pro tips

Coleen Rajotte could be permitted a touch of amusement in watching the spectacle of people adjusting to a home workplace in the past few months.

The 52-year-old journalist-filmmaker estimates she has been working from her Wolseley neighbourhood home for the past 20 years, since she left her job in the CBC newsroom to carve her own path.

Working from home made sense. In addition to being the director of the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival, Rajotte is the host and producer of Vitality Gardening, a gardening series that ran on APTN and will soon be airing on the California network FNX (First Nations Experience). Since she uses her entire backyard and most of the front for garden (“My yard is my studio.”), it made sense that she uses rooms in her three-storey house for both editing (a bedroom on the second floor) and writing (on the third floor).

She has learned a lot about how to keep those spaces functional in the past two decades.

“When you work from home, getting distracted is something that’s really easy to do,” she says. “So in the mornings, I smudge my office, I give thanks for the day, and I set an intention.”

Her office space is conducive to positivity, she says.

“I try to have an open space with something beautiful to look at,” she says. “I buy myself flowers.

“I have a vision board in my office where I have cut out different inspirational sayings, or pictures of a vacation spot that I want to go to. I have a picture of an elder up there, Emma Cook, now passed away,” she says. “She was someone that I could always call upon for inspiration or encouragement.”

“Every day when you work at home, make a priority first. It’s usually a thing that you don’t want to do, right? So get that out of the way first.” – Coleen Rajotte

But even the most positive workspace won’t help all that much when it comes to taking on the tasks you want to put off. Rajotte has a trick for that.

“Every day when you work at home, make a priority first,” she says. “It’s usually a thing that you don’t want to do, right? So get that out of the way first.

“If you’re really dreading doing something, just set your stove (timer) for 20 minutes,” she advises. “Shut off your phone, don’t look at Facebook, turn off all your social media and force yourself to work on it for 20 minutes.

“The stove timer will go off and you’ll be right into it. You go shut it off, go back and you’re already well into this task you’ve been putting off and then all of a sudden an hour goes by and you’re almost done.”

Rajotte also tries to set boundaries.

“The main floor is kind of my living space and I don’t do any work on the main floor,” she says of her home/workspace/garden.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

— Randall King

 

Shannon Sampert: Tidy, functional — pick one

The cleanliness of Shannon Sampert’s home is one measure of how effective she is while working from home.

“If my house is immaculate, you’ll know I’m not getting something done,” she says. “When I don’t want to do something, I dust.”

Sampert, 59, was a political science professor at the University of Winnipeg prior to retiring in 2018 to restart a home business she began in her days as a graduate student. She’s also known for being the politics and perspectives editor with the Free Press from 2014 to ’17, when she became the newspaper’s first female opinion page editor.

These days, she runs Media Diva Consulting from her house just off Corydon Avenue, where she writes columns for several publications — including the Free Press — and provides advice on public relations, dealing with the media and editing services.

She’s also in the midst of writing a book with Linda Trimble, a University of Alberta political science professor, focusing on media coverage of female politicians’ campaigns for party leadership, beginning with Rosemary Brown’s bid for the federal NDP’s top job in 1976.

“If my house is immaculate, you’ll know I’m not getting something done. When I don’t want to do something, I dust.” – Shannon Sampert

Sampert got the hang of working from home during her university career, she says. She taught remotely for 10 years at Athabasca University in Alberta — which specializes in distance education — and during her time at the U of W.

She follows the same schedule she began while working on her PhD thesis years ago — get up early, read the newspaper and do her writing and researching in the morning before putting the computer keyboard aside in the mid-afternoon.

“You work from home all the time when you’re a professor,” says Sampert, who found the combination of office and home suited her fine, and that changing scenery was a benefit when she hit a rut at one venue or the other.

“Now that I’m retired, I have an office where I live, but no office to escape to,” she says.

There was certainly no escape from the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has thrown so many people, Sampert included, a work-from-home curveball. Its timing, breaking out during Winnipeg’s early spring mud season, struck out one of her healthy distractions — taking her two dogs for their regular afternoon walk.

“They keep me sane or drive me insane,” Sampert says with a laugh.

“It began to be a drag in Week 3, March and the beginning of April, when it was still yucky outside,” she recalled. “Before I’d go to the library or I’d rent an office for a couple of hours, but they’re both closed now.”

Another working-from-home twist, 2020 style, is the advent of Zoom, a web-based video-conferencing tool that’s become one of the more popular pastimes of the pandemic. Hardly anyone had heard of the program before the COVID-19 started to take hold, but many businesses around the world have since adopted the technology.

Sampert has participated in many Zoom calls, both in business settings and for conversations with far-flung friends. She says a key rule for all meetings — don’t let them drag out — is even more important for web-conference calls.

“If it lasts more than an hour, people start to zoom out,” Sampert says. “Be careful. Like all meetings, they’re being overused.”

— Alan Small

 

Jessica Flynn: The digital teacher

On March 23, a new student joined Jessica Flynn’s classroom late in the semester: Ollie, her dog.

When her school shut down, the 33-year-old early-years teacher had to quickly adapt to teaching online from home. That’s when Ollie joined the class.

“Even if I am not paying attention to her and talking to my students, the dog still thinks I am talking to her and joins all our class meetings,” Flynn says.

Ollie is enjoying having her mom at home all day, but for Flynn, the learning curve of the sudden transition to a digital classroom has been a little more complicated.

“There was a steep learning curve,” she says. “I went from being in my class, working with groups of children, to suddenly having to learn new online forums.”

Flynn says the entire experience has felt like being back in university, having to adapt quickly to new situations and experiences. It has also made her realize a few things, like how much technology has changed over the past decade since she began teaching.

“I have a very good desktop computer at home,” she says. “Or I had a very good desktop computer… 10 years ago, when I bought it.”

And setting up a home office in the middle of a global pandemic hasn’t been the easiest.

“My home setup usually consists of me awkwardly perching at the end of my couch surrounded by my papers with a million windows open on my desktop,” she says. “I am sure I am going to develop back and wrist issues, since this is not the best setup for my posture. But it is the only spot in my house that I can connect to the internet.”

Flynn also lives in the bustling Osborne Village area, where noise — and the occasional strange smell — can be a distraction.

“I live beside a very busy road, a firehall and a construction site,” she says. “So between the constant sirens and my house shaking continuously from the demolition next door, it makes online meetings a little loud.”

The challenges of the shift to a new normal have been lessened thanks to support from her colleagues at school (and Ollie’s perfect attendance record, of course).

“Planning and working together with them has made this whole transition so much easier,” she says. “If I did not have such a supportive base, the transition would have taken longer. We learned together and supported each other.”

She’s also grateful for museums and zoos that have opened their doors with free virtual tours and online learning opportunities that have kept her and her students focused and engaged. Still, she misses being in the classroom with her students.

“I miss watching them learn, hearing them laugh, their questions and their energy.”

It’s been a noisy and complex transition, but Flynn is proud of her students — and of herself — as they navigate their new digital classroom together.

— Frances Koncan