You’re muted! No, still can’t hear you! Words we’ve heard and said too many times in the past 12 months, whether you’re serious or trying to mess with a colleague (we do it out of love, Mark).
The global pandemic has forced those who are able to shift from office-based working to remote / working from home. Previously traditional industries and people for which working from home was a taboo topic, now forced to embrace the ‘new normal’.
The shift has caused a lot of people to rethink what their lives would be like and how their companies should work. Do employees need to spend 2+ hours a day commuting to the office 5 days a week? Can companies better utilise the thousands spent on rent every month?
Through all of this, the biggest struggles that I’ve seen people have is with trying to figure out their work-life balance, as well as understanding how it is that they can virtually socialise with their colleagues.
Relevant Bits have been remote-first since their inception in 2018. Scattered across Hungary, Canada, Romania, the USA, and the UK, a large majority of us never having met in person, we find that the best way for us to socialise is through an (un)healthy amount of banter. We’ve got a Slack channel for it and we also tend to start all meetings with a good 5-10 minutes of it (sometimes our awesome clients join in too).
We have had goats attend our meetings, FIKA meetings, various ‘drink’ focused meetings and we’ve also attended a Virtual Coffee Tasting event a few months back.
The forced global shift to remote working has had positive and negative impacts across all the industries, both directly and indirectly, but is a shift that’s going to shake up the workforce for years to come. With a number of the previously office-based people now questioning whether they want to go back to being in the office full-time, or at all, employers and those impacted will need to adapt to keep going.
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This piece is part of our 100 Lessons series. When the UX Collective published their annual trends report (100 Design Lessons for 2021), I looked through and wondered what it would be like if members from our team were given one of the statements or questions and asked to write an article around it. So, with little guidance or direction, that’s what we’re doing. Follow along to see if anything interesting comes out of it!
