Beyond the Screen: Mental Health in Remote Work

The Remote Work / Work From Home rose to its prominence at the outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic, taking every industry to a halt for a long term, while bringing enormous fortune for the Software industry & every knowledge workers who could operate from the comfortable lounges of their homes.

Many people who joined companies during the pandemic later switched jobs and ended up never meeting the people they were working with & working for!

Professional relationships have become transactional exchanges of value, as remote work allows individuals to avoid the traffic and expenses associated with IT hubs by staying at home.

While this arrangement offers the benefit of spending more time with family, it also eliminates the learning and networking opportunities which comes just by being at the spot in-person.

4 Years of Engineering, Remotely! Would You?

Remote work is like enrolling in an engineering course and completing all four years from home by only attending online lectures. After all, you joined to learn "engineering," didn’t you?

By doing so, you'd miss out on all the experiences of campus & hostel life, such as managing with limited or shared resources, collaborating with new people, skipping classes for adventurous pursuits, organizing events and hackathons and engaging in chai canteen discussions, appearing exams & clearing backlogs.

You might also miss opportunities to find a co-founder or even a life partner!

These experiences create a holistic learning journey and provide lasting joy to reflect on throughout life. No Zoom call can come close to replicating this richness.

In the context of work, I’d quote Kailash Nadh, who serves as CTO at Zerodha (India's biggest stock broker) who has recently published a detailed piece on it titled The remoteness of remote work, an excerpt of it goes as below:

In the course of our remote work experience, I have observed that discussions and decisions in reams of group text chats and pixelated video calls, over a period of time, become indistinguishable from each other in personal memory. Many in our org concur.

On the other hand, lively group discussions and decisions tend to be remembered and recalled far better thanks to the numerous additional cues—people, faces, emotions, surroundings and environment, spontaneous moments.

Needless to say, quality conversations to aid better recall of personal memory is crucial for inference from the collective institutional memory in decision-making and acts of creativity.

Can we share the Burden, Online?

Many companies have turned remote first, remote only or hybrid to better suit the conditon for employees to pull off their best when it's the demand of the situation. That's the beauty of digitalisation for taking care of the survival.

But here's the twist: When collaborating with new people in remote work or tackling complex tasks we've never faced before, mistakes are inevitable.

Each time something goes wrong and someone gets blamed or criticized harshly, it can deeply affect that person, leaving her feeling isolated.

That sense of insecurity can be draining and it's not something easily shared with family—they're far removed from the corporate world.

Nor can it be easily discussed with colleagues, especially when interactions are only virtual, that too around work & deadlines.

This kind of suffering often leads to self-doubt about one's abilities, yet there's still the need to show up at work the next day, ready to give their best.

Safeguard The Mind, That's all We've!

This dilemma gradually takes a toll on the mental health, acting as a slow poison that erodes one's outlook on work—a topic that is often ignored in the corporate environments.

People report to the hierarchy above them, every single day in a month. Under this context, if their mental health is consistently overlooked or treated as a taboo subject, how can they possibly maintain peak professional performance and drive profits for the organization?

Basic internet search would make someone realise the importance of it & advserse effect in million of people’s lives. An article in BusinessLine, explains it well:

Mental health remains the elephant in the room in the formidable corridors of corporate India.

Of the country’s 1.1 million active registered companies, only 1,000 are estimated to have a structured employee assistance programme for mental health.

This is an open-ended challenge and companies of all sizes need to develop solutions that align with their specific industry and scope of work.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach here. However, many companies are already addressing it in ways that suit their unique needs.

Clarity Over Babysitting!

We firmly believe that the true magic lies within people and everyone is eager to give their best in this knowledge-driven economy.

The days of the industrial revolution, when humans were merely numbers, are far behind us.

People need clarity and consistency at workplace rather than handholding them through everything. For rest matters, could be taken on case to case basis.

Throughout our entrepreneurial journey with Movsta, especially over the past two years, we've encountered numerous ups and downs on the professional front.

These experiences led us to simplify and establish policies aimed at enhancing both our work experience and that of the employees and professionals who will be associated with us.

Our focuses are on keeping the meetings short, less frequent, allowing more time to actually do the work, rather than “talking about the work” to a group of people!

Professionals should be treated with dignity. Afterall machines and CRM systems don’t pay our bills. It's the humanbeings, who do so. Everyone has unique needs and imposing our vision on them might not yield much, unless they themselves wanna be part of it.

Therefore focusing on meeting clients' realistic goals and prioritizing consistency through process-driven work make more sense.

Let's return to the main focus, that is on mental health. We understand that top talent can be found anywhere in the world, so no company can limit themselves to either remote or on-premise work; a hybrid approach might be the way forward.

In this context, we recently experimented with a concept called Async, as mentioned in the above article written by Kailash.

Async (asynchronous) is a key tenet of remote work, especially in software development and engineering. In an async setup, participants do not all have to be online simultaneously and are free to largely work according to their own schedules.

Communication also becomes async, where participants are not expected to respond in realtime to messages. This model works well for collaboration on open-source projects and work that is fundamentally asynchronous.

Above all, People need to be real with their pains & vulnerabilities. The Book ReWork by David Heinemeier Hansson & Jason Fried explains it well:

Nobody Likes Plastic Flowers.

The business world is full of “Professionals” who wear the uniform and try to seem perfect. In truth, they just come off as stiff and Boring. No one can relate to people like that.

Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. It’s why we like real flowers that wilt, not perfect plastic ones that never change.

Don’t worry about how you’re supposed to sound & how you’re suposed to act. Show the world what you’re really like, warts and all.