Editor’s Note: This article is from WeChat WeChat official account’s "Burning Finance" (ID: rancaijing), by Zhao Lei Jin Yan Lijiao, Kong Mingming Tang Yahua Liming Meng Yana Su Qi, edited by Jia Wei and 36Kr.
With the epidemic raging, many companies are still required not to return to work before a specific date after the legal holiday is extended for three days. For this reason, many companies have adopted online office, and white-collar workers in the workplace have experienced a brand-new working mode for a week.
Today, some enterprises have resumed collective work, but in order to minimize risks, more companies still require employees to work from home. For most people who are used to collective work, working from home faces many new challenges.
Temptation is everywhere. Some people haven’t woken up at the morning meeting, some people will hesitate to watch the drama or work first, and some people just want to slap the cat and have no intention to work. Besides, even if they are self-disciplined, some people are tortured by the family environment, the noise of children, the doubts of parents and the trivial things of life, all of which make people collapse.
Everyone has different methods on how to ensure work efficiency and quality in a comfortable environment, how to deal with many interferences such as family members, pets and daily life matters, and how to deal with various attendance reporting regulations implemented by the company to ensure efficiency.
Burning Finance interviewed 11 professionals and listened to their real feelings about working at home. Their common aspiration was: "I want to go to work, like a company!"
Family care affects work efficiency, but you can’t get angry.
Hu Qing is a 28-year-old packaging designer of Internet company.
I do design work and serve Party A. I am busy at ordinary times and have no time to rest. At the end of last year, my health really couldn’t stand it. I took an extra week off and went back to my hometown in advance. I thought, leave some time to spend with my family, pick up what I didn’t have time to do before, and draw some watercolors. I bought a whole set of tableware specially years ago, thinking of going back to Beijing a few days in advance after the year and cooking for myself. It was a good idea.
Results Due to the epidemic situation, the start-up time was extended indefinitely. We officially started work on the 3rd, and I have been working in my hometown since the fifth day, because I still have some unfinished work from years ago. But working from home is very inefficient.
Although affected by the epidemic, the Spring Festival is not allowed to visit, but because mom and dad live with grandparents, the children of grandpa’s brothers still come to worship the New Year in batches. Some people with children are noisy for hours, and they can’t work without talking; Even if there are no guests, the family is basically restless. My dad and grandpa like to provoke each other when they play chess, and then they quarrel. Grandpa likes to read the news one by one, and he likes to talk to himself when watching TV dramas. It’s no use putting on headphones. Grandma comes in every few minutes to deliver snacks. She wants to make sure that the water in my cup is always full and warm. My mother asks me once a day before cooking, what to eat today. It’s obviously love, and you can’t get angry, and I can’t explain the nature of my work clearly.
After staying at home for half a month, I felt that I had reached the limit. I went back to Beijing ahead of time against their wishes. Only after I returned to Beijing did I find that eating became a problem. At home, I eat with my mouth open. When I come back, I have to do everything myself because I can’t order takeout. Before returning to Beijing, my mother was worried that I wouldn’t be able to cook pasta. She prepared dried noodles, steamed bread and various cakes in advance, and bought me two boxes of milk and instant noodles. The food ordered from JD.COM should also be eaten sparingly. The most important thing is that the level is limited, and I don’t want to eat any more after eating a few meals made by myself. One night, I really wanted to eat hot pot, and the e-commerce couldn’t deliver it. I wanted to go to the supermarket and buy it now, but I was finally persuaded by my roommate. In an extraordinary period, a hot pot has become extravagant. The next day, her mother came to cook us a five-color jiaozi to satisfy our hunger.
Five-color jiaozi made by my roommate’s mother Source/Respondent Photo courtesy
I used to complain that I was too busy at work and didn’t have time to exercise my cooking skills. I thought I was a gourmet who was delayed by work, but now I think I may be thinking too much. I miss the days when I ordered takeout with my colleagues and ate and drank with friends after work. ……
After frying all the dishes that can be fried, there is only a quarrel left.
Tangtang 30-year-old media practitioner
My husband and I have been married for more than a year. Usually, we occasionally cook on weekends and flatter each other’s cooking skills, which is quite fun. This epidemic, cooking at home for more than ten days in a row and continuing to work at home, really collapsed.
At first, I fried my own meatballs under the remote guidance of my mother. Up to now, we have compressed it into buying vegetables once every 10 days and eating two meals a day, and usually only one meal is decent, and the other meal is mainly leftovers. If you can’t do it again, quickly freeze jiaozi, stir-fried rice with eggs and cook instant noodles for two meals, and skip dinner for another meal on the grounds of losing weight. Moreover, we often cook when we are hungry, and we are already hungry when we are ready.
Figure/Pexels
We are both media people. Sometimes both of us have jobs and can’t cook. From time to time, we have to stage a decisive battle, waiting for each other to cook first. But the most angry thing is that he came to work several times as soon as the meal arrived. I don’t know if it was coincidence or intentional. And after I finish cooking, he always says, "Don’t wash the dishes, let me do it", but in the end, the dishes of each meal are put into the next one, and only when there is no way to cook can they be washed.
The office environment at home is also very poor. It is quite comfortable to work alone at a table, but two people will fight if they sit on their elbows in rows, and they will also affect each other if they are too close. In the end, I always put my computer on my lap to write in bed. After a few days, my waist and neck ached. In the end, I could only find a table that had not been used for ten thousand years and set up a temporary job. I changed jobs in front of the table.
I want to go back to work, the kind that goes to the company, the kind that can go out for dinner.
It depends on DDL to decompress cats at home every day and improve work efficiency.
Keke is 27 years old and an employee of a public relations company.
I have been working from home for five days. When I first knew that I wanted to work from home, I thought it would be particularly cool, but I may have overestimated my self-discipline. We have a routine meeting every morning, and I can basically guarantee that I am awake during the meeting. But working from home, I feel very insecure, because I can’t see others. Working from home may be half as efficient as before. When you are bored or anxious, and no one talks, it is easy to brush Tik Tok to relieve stress.
I think there is still the biggest challenge in working from home, that is, how to refrain from bothering the cats at home. My cat has been annoyed by me recently and attacks me every day. Moreover, working from home, buying food and eating is also a difficult problem. Since the closed management of the community, it is too much trouble to bring a pass when going out. I tried to order vegetables online, but I couldn’t grab vegetables until noon every day. I simply hoarded a pile of quick-frozen jiaozi and instant noodles and lived on them every day.
Figure/Pexels
Recently, the cat food at home is almost out of ammunition, and the merchant said that it would not be delivered until the tenth. Recently, our cat is always looking out of the window with a worried face, probably wondering if the shovel officer is unemployed, and there is no canned cat to eat anymore.
I feel that after working from home, the communication efficiency within the company has improved, and the boss basically has to be on call when he calls me. But it’s not necessarily when contacting customers. Yesterday, I made an appointment with a customer for a meeting at 2 pm, but I didn’t reply until 6 pm. I think DDL (deadline) is the most useful thing to improve work efficiency.
This morning, the company informed us to continue working at home, and I feel that I can make a quick-frozen dumpling evaluation soon. I really want to go to work
Please be kind to the "cooks" who cook while working.
Ma Ning, 35, vice president of investment in entertainment workshop
Our investment in this line has always required frequent cross-regional audio and video conferences, and I am also a veteran user of many online office software, so I was not caught off guard by the matter of "working from home". However, this time, the large-scale collective work at home in China has made me realize some changes.
First, everyone saves commuting time, and no one has an excuse to be late anymore. If you need to hold a meeting at any time, basically let us know 10 minutes in advance and give you time to prepare briefly, and you can immediately enter the meeting.
Second, the efficiency of the meeting has been greatly improved. Unlike in the past, when people met face to face, we first exchanged pleasantries and chatted gossip, then waited for colleagues who were not here, or ordered a cup of coffee and took a takeaway from time to time. Now, audio and video conferences are straight to the point and only talk about dry goods.
Figure/Pexels
Third, the value of collaborative office and online conference tools has been maximized. In the past, many software users only dabbled in the most basic functions, but now they are using some functions in depth when they have to work from home. I find that the synchronous editing function of document collaboration is both time-saving and clear. Many approvals are moved online, and it is clear where the process has gone, which can encourage everyone to concentrate more and improve efficiency.
But there are also several challenges. First, you need to consider three meals a day. For example, at 11: 30, the company must be in a state of concentrated work, but when working at home, it is necessary to consider preparing lunch, and it is easy to blur the line between work and cooking. Once I cooked soup, and I figured it would take three hours. When I cooked the soup, I went to a conference call. When it was on, the soup pot sounded a warning sound. Working at home, it still needs some challenges to switch the brain between the cook mode and the white-collar mode, so please be kind to the cooks who work and cook at home.
Second, there are many temptations. For example, I’ve been chasing the Taiwanese drama "I want to see you" recently, and when I’m working at home, I wonder if I should watch the two episodes updated last night. Fortunately, the workload during working at home is not very saturated, which can improve work efficiency and save yourself some time to catch up with plays, read books and have some entertainment.
The company is in a dilemma because of the danger of collective office and the trouble of telecommuting.
Feng Chen is a 27-year-old engineer in a chip research and development company.
For us programmers, it is actually very inconvenient to work from home, but in a special period, for safety reasons, the company decided to let us work from home on February 3, but neither the company nor I have ever encountered such a situation before, so I was in a hurry at first, and the efficiency was very low, which might only reach 30%-50% of the collective office.
I especially remember clearly that on the 3rd, our whole department basically didn’t do any substantive work, and the most troublesome thing was to configure the environment. Because we had to work remotely, we needed to connect to the company’s computers. We originally planned to use VPN, but later some colleagues couldn’t connect, so we needed to install a remote desktop software on their computers for operation and maintenance to remotely control the company’s computers. As a result, our company’s operation and maintenance was alone, and the configuration was very slow.
While waiting for the operation and maintenance, the leaders set up several groups to simply assign tasks. If there is any problem, they need to give feedback in the groups. Finally, I waited for the remote connection to the office computer. I copied some codes locally and configured the computer environment, and the first day ended hastily.
Figure/Pexels
Inefficiency is certain. On the one hand, programmers need strong teamwork, online communication efficiency is not as good as collective office, and large companies may be better. Our division of labor is sometimes not clear, and we need to discuss it together when we encounter problems, such as having a look at it together when we encounter bugs, and going to colleagues’ computers when we encounter data operation errors. These are not easy to do; On the other hand, I do get all kinds of interference at home. My mother always chats with me, does all kinds of chores, and is not in the mood to work.
There are two worst things. On Tuesday, I asked an intern on WeChat, which was very important. As a result, he didn’t reply to me until a day later, which was very delayed. If I worked in a group, I would go directly to his workstation to urge him. What’s worse, we are making chips, and there is a process that requires actual hardware operation, otherwise we can’t continue. This chip is in the company, and I have always been responsible for the layout of the program to the chip. In a hurry, I returned to Beijing from home early, and I was delayed on the road all day on Wednesday (February 5). I finally returned to Beijing because of traffic control, black cars and other bad worries. I went to the company on Thursday to get the chip and was advised to go home to work.
So this week is spent in a hurry, the remote environment is not good, and the jam is serious. In order to ensure work efficiency, our weekly newspaper has been changed into a daily newspaper, but the work done at home is simple and the workload is less, so the daily newspapers are written in half and compiled in half. I also happen to be in charge of the daily summary of a project, and it is necessary to integrate several people’s daily newspapers, which is simply an addition.
Fortunately, we will go to the company to work collectively this week, but we will encounter more risks and even have no place to eat. This is also very troublesome. I just hope that the epidemic will pass quickly, otherwise it will be really torture.
The workload is very heavy, and the two children can only concentrate on their work after taking a nap.
Xiaoxue is 35 years old and an employee of a company.
On February 3rd, our company announced that it would not go to the company for the whole of February, and all of them would go online, and it might also be working from home in the next few months. I’m quite comfortable, because I’ve always had the habit of working online. Working from home is actually a state, and everyone is constantly debugging.
In fact, my workload is still quite heavy. On the one hand, I have to do sales business, manage teams, recruit people, and do online activities. But I think the most important thing is time planning.
There are two boys in my family who are brought up by myself. Erbao is just over one year old. She has to nurse, put to sleep, take a bath and cook three meals a day, which consumes a lot of time.
Home office meetings have been disturbed by all kinds of noises from children, and cooking time is too late because of a long meeting. I just explained to my child that it’s working time now. We call it online office, not vacation at home. Everyone has to work, so he is very good at reading next to him now.
Every day from 3 pm to 5 pm, after the children fall asleep, it is a concentrated office time for me. Make a cup of coffee and have a conference call. At this time, our meeting is actually very efficient, and it basically ends in 20 minutes. We named the work group "overtaking in corners", and we wanted to make our team bigger and recruit excellent people quickly in this process.
Figure/Pexels
Online office is actually more efficient, but offline office is easier to go deep. For communication and collaboration, it is definitely better offline. Of course, in this process, new recruits may not be able to feel the corporate culture well. Many people choose the company for team culture and values, and working online is difficult to understand, which is one of the disadvantages.
Personally, I really want to go out, but I don’t particularly want to punch in at the company. The work is like this. If something is forced to be done and there is not so much autonomy, I will be very unhappy. But if there is no KPI, everything is what I want to do, and I can see the progress of my grades, so I will be very motivated.
Collapse with baby, and finally have to isolate themselves.
Xiaoxi 30-year-old employee of a knowledge service MCN organization.
I have been working from home for 7 days. At first, I heard that I was going to work from home. I was super excited. This is my dream way of working. I work in Wangjing but live in Tongzhou. It always takes me three or four hours to go to work every day. I have a child at home, and I want to have more time to accompany him to grow up, so I asked my boss as early as years ago whether I could cooperate in part-time after the year. But the company does not provide insurance and provident fund for part-time employees, and I am very entangled. After the epidemic came, I thought it was all right. I could work at home with peace of mind, and someone would pay the social security provident fund, without delay.
Our company belongs to the knowledge service MCN organization, and working from home hardly affects our business, but many colleagues are now trapped in their hometown. When we have a group conference call, we can always hear all kinds of strange voices inside. One morning, when we held a morning meeting, I heard a chicken crow.
The company doesn’t stipulate that we need to punch in, and the working hours are free, but the working hours have become longer, and we will be called to communicate on the rest day. At the meeting, the boss usually has something to say and will use the company’s economic crisis to stimulate everyone’s enthusiasm for work. Once the boss said in a telephone conference that the company’s cash flow can last for two months, which can ensure that everyone’s wages are paid normally, but after two months, the company’s development depends on everyone’s performance during this period.
Figure/Pexels
I have a 3-year-old baby at home who is always clamoring for my company. I have to say "Mom, you play with me" at least twenty times a day. I can only say to him, wait a minute, you play first. At first, he agreed that I would sit on the ground with him, he would play by himself, and I would use the computer to work. Later, he wouldn’t even let me touch the computer. Although my family understands my work very well and is trying to help me with my children, men have limited patience with their children, and soon they will be at odds, and I have to come out to mediate.
In the end, I can only isolate myself, divide an office boundary for myself, communicate with my family in advance what time I want to work, and don’t disturb my working hours. But when I work alone, I can’t resist the temptation of snacks, and I always want to go to bed. I think working late at night is the most efficient, so I always work at night recently, and black and white are reversed.
Now, I miss working days very much.
Dress up and work at home every day, and urge employees by video conference.
Liu Xin 32-year-old CEO of a startup company
I started working from home in the seventh grade, and I started to let all the employees of the company work from home in the tenth grade. At first, I was lazy, wearing pajamas and slippers every day. Later, I found that there was no working state, so I set aside a relatively independent office space at home as my temporary office and completely entered the working mode.
I think life needs a sense of ceremony, and work needs formality, which has nothing to do with where you work. My daily on-the-job time is from 9: 30 am to 6: 30 pm, which requires all employees of the company to punch in, and I wear formal clothes every day and make up in the morning, just like I usually go to work in the company, so that I can feel that I am really at work, not dawdling. Believe me, when you spend half an hour at home every day putting on makeup, formal clothes and high heels, you can’t even be lazy.
My family doesn’t understand why I have to wear formal clothes at home. I can feel that my mother is looking at me with different eyes every day. Moreover, she always thinks that I am going out to meet people, and she will come to "inspect" from time to time. She pricks up her ears whenever there is any movement in my room, lest I sneak out when she is not looking.
Most of my work is done on the computer, and the arrangement of work is remote command, and I seldom make phone calls. Parents don’t understand. They think you are just watching the computer. One day, my mother came to me and asked me, "You dress like a waiter and sit at home watching the computer every day. What are you doing?"
Figure/Pexels
We hold a video conference for all employees of the company at 10 o’clock every morning. I demand that it must be video, not voice, because then employees will pay attention to it. Otherwise, it’s very likely that everyone is lying in bed and having a meeting with you, so where is the working atmosphere? And only by video conference can I see everyone’s status and better grasp everyone’s work progress.
One of the biggest problems of telecommuting is that communication is difficult to convey emotions. I prefer to communicate face to face. There will be a very embarrassing scene in remote communication: my side is about to explode with anger, but the other party may not know that I am so anxious to drop my mobile phone, but I can only drop my mobile phone when I fall and fall. If it was face-to-face communication, these problems would not exist.
During this period of working at home, I feel that it is because I can work and dress formally every day that I feel that I have not become a eating machine. Otherwise, you really just eat at home every day. I think a mature working woman needs a self-disciplined professional spirit.
Collective office is a ceremony of a working day, which gives life a sense of regularity.
Liang You, 26, founder of Tiaohai Pub.
From the beginning of Chinese New Year’s Day, my girlfriend and I lived such a life: getting up at 10 or 11 in the morning, preparing to cook lunch, eating at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, playing mobile phones, chatting, preparing to cook dinner, eating dinner at 7 or 8 in the evening, watching a movie or playing games, and sleeping. The same life, we have lived to the 16th day.
I was very depressed when I first learned the news of the epidemic, because I was the owner of the main line and I was particularly depressed about not being able to run it.
For me, the biggest challenge of working from home is my state. Because everyone is forced to work at home this time, and the epidemic is so serious, it is easy to be emotionally overloaded, and it is very uncomfortable for me not to go out. The adjustment of mental health is the biggest challenge I am facing at present. Although I also have two dogs, I feel good about the interference of cats and dogs. Many companies also have cats after all.
I think the difference between collective office and home office is mainly in the sense of ceremony. The efficiency of collective office is not necessarily higher than that of home office, but collective office is a ceremony of working day. Getting up and going to the company on time will give you a sense of regularity in your life, similar to Morita therapy. Working in groups is also conducive to cultivating team feelings, and working at home has a feeling of losing contact with the team.
I think working from home is even more efficient than working in groups in specific and planned affairs, but there are some soft things you can’t see, especially working in groups can collide with many new ideas and ideas that are not planned.
Figure/Pexels
The biggest feeling now is that I feel uncomfortable and insecure. I used to feel that all kinds of accidents and disasters were particularly far away from me, but this time it seems to be around me. Besides, I am a very sociable person, and it is really hard for me to stay at home every day. Sometimes in the morning, I take the opportunity to buy food and go out for a walk in the street. There are not many people, and every breath of air makes people feel sweet.
At present, we can’t open the pub offline, so we plan to open it online. There are four shopkeepers in the pub. From the first day of junior high school, each shopkeeper broadcasts live for one hour every week, which makes me feel connected with the outside world again. I am very happy. I think Modern Sky also made a bedroom music festival. Although these can’t be realized, they are all very interesting.
But I think, don’t always think about the difference between working from home and working in groups, just focus on what you want to do, and don’t put too much emphasis on time arrangement, otherwise you will get stuck in that competition and can’t get out.
Work is also a kind of socialization, and it is difficult to find a sense of belonging in telecommuting.
Gong Siying, Chief Strategy Officer of Mor.AI
This period of time, not only work, in fact, the whole life is at home, which is a little different from the usual home office. Last week, we made a special survey of all employees and asked them about working at home. Everyone’s reply was quite interesting.
70%-80% of our company are R&D personnel. In the questionnaire, the average score of telecommuting reached 8.09 (out of a total score of 10), and 5% of employees thought that they even exceeded their goals.
For telecommuting tools, WeChat is mostly used for communication, and nails are used for meetings and punching. Tencent documents and our own internally developed wiki are used for document sharing and information.
To sum up, everyone thinks that the advantages of working from home are that the feedback from daily work meetings is timely, the tasks are clear, and the implementation level is high, which reduces the non-urgent interruption of work and maintains the continuous stability of work. There has also been more internal communication and closer contact with cooperative departments.
Of course, there are also some challenges. For example, we have to test the equipment, but the test equipment can’t be shared, so we can’t reproduce many problems. Online communication is sometimes not as good as face-to-face communication, and the efficiency is reduced, especially for three or five new employees who have just joined the company recently. It is a bit difficult to adapt, and some financial software must be operated by the company’s computer.
Figure/Pexels
There is one thing we have to admit. Few companies in China telecommute. The boss in China prefers to "supervise" what employees are doing, so he has no idea. When you start telecommuting at once, the boss will actually be more anxious than the employees. There are also some remote collaboration tools that are not ready. On the first day of construction, both nails and corporate WeChat collapsed, which is a good proof.
If the tools are not ready, the telecommuting effect will be greatly reduced. For example, nailing, everyone’s version is different, and the function will be different; For another example, offline everyone likes you to write a few strokes when talking about whiteboard, but online this kind of cloud projection and screen collaboration software is rarely used.
Recently, everyone’s life must be relatively monotonous. In fact, mentality is very important at this time. A friend of mine told me that now I feel that my job is 007 and I have to work all the time. I used to be able to do other things, but now I’m locked at home. There’s no reason to refuse the job request. But life still needs to go on. You need to turn life into more than just work, otherwise people will go crazy by the third week or even a month.
In the culture of China, work is also a social activity, and telecommuting makes it difficult for employees to feel a sense of belonging. Many people’s friends come from work partners and colleagues, and telecommuting will reduce this part of communication. So back to the essence, the biggest challenge of telecommuting is not efficiency, but culture.
After sitting at home for half a month, I can finally go to work today.
Shen Xiaoqian, 36, Shanghai Jiangsu Chamber of Commerce
We are a chamber of commerce. Recently, all enterprises are donating money and materials. Every day, information comes from all directions. I basically read mobile phone messages 24 hours a day.
Sadly, I have to finish all these intense work, and I don’t know when my little daughter will jump on my back in the next second. She had a new trick yesterday, spilling yogurt directly on my keyboard. If I usually go to work, I only show up at night and weekends a week. Now suddenly I am at home every day, and she wants to play with me every day.
I still have an eldest daughter at home, and I have to keep an eye on her. Will I go to see the iPad for a while, chat again for a while, and have to keep an eye on her to preview the courses for the second half of the semester? Doing radio exercises, skipping rope, dancing, martial arts and practicing the piano every day, each project needs to be punched online, and the time is full.
Figure/Pexels
Every time, my family calls for dinner, so I can have complete time to do my own thing by sending these two little ones down for dinner.
In addition, there are indeed too many conference calls when working from home. What was originally called face to face has to be said by phone, but it may not be clear. Some things may have just been finished with one person and have to be synchronized with another. In particular, when it comes to donations, everyone is in a hurry. Originally, everyone was resting during the New Year, and they kept calling to urge the progress. I am also a little embarrassed.
I’m going to return to work today (February 10th), and I actually support it. After sitting at home for half a month, there is no New Year’s atmosphere in shopping malls and streets. It’s really depressed. I think it’s better to go back to work. Many chains in the market are interlocking, and enterprises can’t produce until workers are on duty. You have to go out to see how the market is, and you can’t stay at home all the time.
* The title map comes from Pexels. At the request of the interviewees, Hu Qing, Tang Tang, Ke Ke, Xiao Xue, Xiao Xi and Liu Xin are pseudonyms.
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