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How to be happy with hybrid

Paul Crabtree

21 May 2021

Preparing for hybrid working Working from home and working from the office present very different challenges. The social side, the collaborations, the banter, the informal glances and serendipity all are tough to accomplish when we work remotely. But after a year of lockdown, I’ve noticed several behaviours we’ve adopted that will help all of us achieve balance in life, and craft great work. You are not chained to your desk When we work from home, our domestic life is quite literally next door. It’s easy to feel guilty and that it’s expected for you to always be at your desk and be constantly available. The boundaries blur when it comes to carving out time for lunch, those coffee shops runs and what time your day actually ends. Without realising it, you feel chained to the desk; living at work, rather than working from home. And yet when we were office-based, you wouldn’t think twice about chatting at the kettle, getting together in a meeting room, sitting on a sofa or having those informal chats in passing. This is normal. Sitting at your desk for hours is not normal. No one should feel guilty about taking breaks. When working from home, popping out into the garden or outside or for a walk around the block is equally as important as the work you do at your desk. Bake something into your routine and do it. Everyday. Constant notifications prevent deep thought Beep, chimes, vibrations and more compete for our attention constantly; Skype, email, WhatsApp, phone calls, diary alerts and more are all constant distractions, breaking our concentration. Email or Skype previews are the devil’s work, visually interrupting so that our attention is constantly drawn away from the task at hand. If it is urgent, the protagonist will call. Deep thought needs concentration. At Velo, we encourage everyone to switch off their notifications and take back control when they need to do some deep thinking. This might be once a day for a few hours, it might be once a week, but you’ll find without them on you’ll concentrate more, improving the quality of your work and the pride in what you produce will lift. Switch them all off and see which ones you miss. What did we do before web conferencing by appointment? A strange habit has formed around web conferencing. We ask for an appointment in advance, book it in at an allotted time and every conversation seems to take a multiple of 15 minutes. In the past, you’d call on the phone (voice only, remember those days!) you’d exchange pleasantries, ask your questions and achieve your aims in minutes.  You wouldn’t wait for the allotted time you wouldn’t spend time organising the scheduled slots and you wouldn’t always take exactly the time that it’s gone into the diary for. Email and messaging are also on the rise, with individual messages getting shorter and shorter and taking the place of conversation. At Velo, we encourage our team to go back to what we used to do first – pick up the phone and have a chat. Yes, web conferencing has a part to play, but phone calls often get the job done more quickly and have the added benefit that you can get up from that desk and walk around your garden or the park.

Paul Crabtree

Managing Director

An IDM-qualified senior sales and marketing professional who has held board positions in various marketing agencies since 2005. Although he claims not to look old enough, the emerging silver locks tell a different story. As MD, founder and owner of Velo, his role is to lead the agency maintaining our quality standards to be the level that means we continue to be built on recommendation. He has a particular focus on new business, overseeing all our client relationships and leading our strategy function to make sure that our team has the skills and capabilities that our clients need, so we continue always craft great work to be proud of. Find him on LinkedIn here.

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