Remote working has become the new norm for office workers as countries go into lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The general increase in remote working and its pros and cons have been debated for a long time. Remote working may be a blessing for some and a curse for others, but in the current situation, there is no choice (https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/blog/technology-is-our-ally-against-the-coronavirus).

Some organisations are struggling to apply remote working, attempting to remotely control where and when staff are working. While these practices are not new, the level of remote working during the coronavirus pandemic leads to a more work-intensive and stressful work environment (https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/sites/default/files/wpef18007.pdf). Recent research (https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-five-ways-to-be-a-better-manager-when-working-from-home-134575) has provided tips for managers to be responsive to the challenges their staff are facing.

Our research (https://myimpact.ncl.ac.uk/UploadFiles/237698/5db066e4-e668-4a17-a099-10dadb4cb101.pdf) has highlighted three issues that can help office workers to mitigate the negative effects of remote working in the present circumstances.

(1) Drawing boundaries between work and nonwork

Remote working not only erodes the boundaries between work and nonwork but also makes it particularly difficult to draw the line when people are required to work in their own home. It is so easy to check one’s emails first thing in the morning, last thing at night and all the times in-between, never really switching off work (https://www.workwiseuk.org/blog/2019/5/15/guest-blog-do-you-check-your-email-first-thing-in-the-morning-by-dr-steffanie-reissner-newcastle-university-amp-dr-michal-izak-university-of-roehampton).

As schools and childcare facilities are closed, people with young children are facing additional pressures to juggle work and family demands. ‘Work time’ and ‘family time’ have to be organised in small chunks around children’s attention spans, leading to people working at unsociable hours in a quest to catch up with what they have missed. Such catching up is often in the form of email and compounds the difficulties of switching off work.

Our research has shown that small steps can take off some pressure. For example, if family time over lunch is important, then blocking off one’s work diary for that period can help to spend quality time with the family. Also, in some organisations it has become custom to add a disclaimer at the end of an email making explicit that the sender often works outside normal office hours and does not expect a response outside of the receiver’s normal working hours.

(2) Maintaining interpersonal contact

Work has an important social function in many people’s lives. It is a context in which they spend a large part of their day, interacting in a variety of teams and engaging in everyday banter. Particularly for people living alone work colleagues can be an important source of social interaction, which can be difficult to sustain remotely. In the current situation where people are asked to self-isolate, it can be easy to feel isolated and lonely.

With many people struggling to juggle multiple commitments and/or adapt to remote working, virtual meetings will tend to focus on business issues. After all, work needs to get done to keep operations going as much as possible and satisfy key stakeholders. Yet, our research has shown that there are opportunities to create virtual equivalents of the ‘kitchen chat’ or ‘watercooler conversation’.

For example, colleagues can ‘get together’ in short, regular and informal team meetings to stay in touch with one another. Through such interactions people can share their struggles, worries and successes and attend to the social fabric of the team (https://www.routledge.com/Storytelling-in-Management-Practice-Dynamics-and-Implications-1st-Edition/Reissner-Pagan/p/book/9780415644334). Team colleagues can connect more informally through social messaging services as part of virtual tea breaks to share what is going on in their lives and have a laugh together as an antidote to the stresses of enforced remote working.

(3) Managing visibility concerns

Many organisations continue to operate on the premise that staff present in the office are working and, by inference, those absent from the office are not. A key challenge for people not used to remote working is to show that they are working without being physically present. How will their manager know that they are working? The same applies to line managers not used to managing their staff remotely. How can they know that staff are working?

Given the unprecedented circumstances, normal concerns about productivity may have to take second place behind people coping with additional pressure, loneliness and isolation, while also getting used to a completely new way of working and managing their lives (https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/flexible-working/remote-working-top-tips#73357). However, if worried about being present, office workers can make themselves visible on the organisation’s IT system as logging on remote access servers, participating in virtual online meetings, or using email.

Yet, the current situation may also be a genuine test of trust between employees and employers, the outcome of which may determine relationships between them for the years to come.