Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I'd like to discuss a dilemma that many companies, many project teams, and many employees are facing today. It's the dilemma of is remote work the best option? Should I move back to the physical work, or should I try the hybrid work? And I want to share with you my personal experience on that. I have been working remotely for, I would say, the past maybe nine years, something like eight years. Even during my time at the UN, I used to do a lot of remote work because of travel. And what is important is that remote work is extremely good. It brings you a lot of advantages, but if you do not know how to manage it, it can be extremely painful, and it can be a gigantic trigger of burnout, even more than physical work. So what I want is I want to share with you three things that I think you should keep in your mind and invest some time to think about this balance. And the first thing is that if you are not working inside your office or inside your company, you need to establish clear boundaries because your home, for example, let's suppose you are working from home. It's the place where your life happens. Everything in your life, you know, it's where you eat, where you sleep, where you take a shower, where you meet your children, where you meet your partner or your significant other. So you need to establish clear boundaries, splitting your work life and your personal life. And I don't like to use the word, and you heard me before talking about that.
I don't like the word work-life balance because the work-life balance seems that when you are working, you are not living. And I talked about this all the time work is an intrinsic part of your life, but your life is not only your work. And this is exactly what I'm talking about here. When I want to suggest you create this clear boundary. For example, you should not work wearing pajamas. And it's not because it's socially awkward. No, no. It's just because you need to train your mind that now it's time to work. And when you wear your pajamas, it's time to go to bed. So you need to give your brain these clues of what the brain should prepare it for and these reduce the burnout. Another thing that is very important about these clear boundaries is that you need to put on your boundaries. Also, time to get to know other people. Because if you live, for example, alone, if you do not have a family and you live alone, and you work remotely, it becomes very isolating to work remotely. So this is why, for example, I like very much remote work and I do that, but I like a lot the concept of hybrid, where you work from home, but at the same time you go to the office because this removes the sense of isolation, you know, this sense of that you were alone by yourself all day. The second tip I want to give is the communication side.
Communication in a remote environment, For example, when I'm managing and delivering projects with remote teams, it's different. It's different because most of the non-verbal clues are not very easy for you to highlight in a video conference. Even knowing that people can press the button, clap, press the button hard, press the button, the smile. It's different from the actual smile. It's different from the actual clapping. For example, when I'm delivering a talk remotely, and then I see this, you know, this emoji with the claps, you know, it's different from hearing the sound and the emotion of the people when I'm talking. So you need to understand this, and this is a challenge, so you need to prepare good communication. And the third and last but not least is to embrace flexibility. It's the magic. It's magic when you work remotely, and you can manage the way you want to address your work; for example, you can say, Look at this time; I need to give a phone call to check if my daughter is fine. You know, you need to do that. You need to explore this flexibility. Many times, for example, I have my office during the day. I just go outside in my house and walk in the garden for five. Ten minutes. I have this flexibility of not being, you know, in an office environment all the time with artificial lighting. And this gives flexibility. And this, for me, is one of the key benefits of having this. And I can share with you my own experience.
For me, the magic of being flexible and managing the work from wherever you are. For example, today, I'm recording this podcast from Brazil. I live in Portugal. You know, many times I recorded from a hotel room. And this flexibility for you to continue working and having the flexibility to be in different places, it's priceless. And many jobs today, they can benefit from that. I'm not saying that all the jobs want just to highlight; for example, one of the nicest projects I developed recently was a project that started and ended remotely. And I'm not talking about a tiny one. This was a restructuring of a large company. It was a big, big project. And we did it from the beginning up to the end without a single trip with people from all over the world working remotely due to the COVID crisis. And I learned because, in the beginning, I thought it would not be possible, and it was not only possible, but it also allowed me to develop a new way of working on my projects. Exactly. Using flexibility as the key to. So remember, always, if you know how to establish clear boundaries if you know how to communicate proactively, if you know how to embrace flexibility, you have a winning solution from managing the work from wherever you are and delivering the results of the project. No matter if you are in the office, if you are at home, or if you are in a hotel room, always think about that and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
