Challenging the holy vacations becames the latest digital sin

What CIO and CTO were sometimes pushing for years, COVID did it in a week. The pandemic aligned in a blink business needs, regulation agencies, companies management and users with one immediate objective: allows companies to survive and therefor work from anywhere became popular even for the most conservatives CTO.

2020 home becomes a huge post-it holderThe concept of work from anywhere is far from new. While its adoption by large companies have been slow, smaller structure were more agile and embraced it for a while. Sales teams, traveling teams, as well as consulting first used to have their flotte of ressources able to work on the road. Furthermore every publication of IT priorities lists highlighted since a while 5G in priorities for CIO. It was in the air, but not implemented. And for 5G... not really available.

The strange week of March pushed the world to move to remote working. The world woke up with a surprise, it was possible to send everyone home, and it change how we behave, how we work.

While organization were able to cope with the distance, the work habit evolved a little but relied on established relationship among workers and team. How the renewal of the workforce will work with remote setup. How teams will bound over a video-call on zoom, web-ex or meet?

"Work culture is facing a schisme between physical workers and digital contributors" 

We are maybe going to see a schisme between the generation of workers requiring physical interactions to build network and connections and the new generation with the ability to be as efficient without this old dashing physical meetings.

One aspect of the Work from Anywhere shared by all is the evolution of the daily routine. Meeting can start earlier since nobody has transit time anymore. who did not start the day with a conf-call in pyjamas ?emails are one clic away, easy to finish something during nights and week ends.

The confinement fostered the change. I remember one week working on the beginning of a crisis, I was willing to escalate to the next level of on-call teams to manage a growing crisis when one of my managers said "dont feel bad, worst case scenario, they will have to move from the kitchen to the computer". It was during the first confinement. A new era was starting.

"Work from Home appears to be far from the panacea of the work life balance"

Teams available during night and week-ends could have been a dream of some managers. But it has a cost on the humain being. Surprising everyone, Work from Home appears to be far from the panacea of the work life balance dreamed by all HR departments.

After few month of remote work, the reality is catching up. Setup at home need to at minimum catch-up with office setup. But promoting collaboration and innovation from home requires additional transformation on both humain capital but also technology. White-boarding tools are mandatory but too often missing. Double sharing scree is never seen. Techno enabled the work from anywhere but needs now to catchup with new foundational needs that were not address since years.

Slowly the toll on work life balance is changing the long standing situation of week-ends and vacations. Many companies have to push their employees to take their vacations. Either because of the slow down of the economy or also because in this new situation the summer has not been the quite expected quarter. Remote workers had to cope with the workload of all the workforce and the workload of a busy time. 

"5 centuries of holly break are challenged by the new digital world"

The status-quo coming from the biblical time is being challenged. Week End was already mentioned in the bible with the introduction of the Sabbath, a weekly break for all. 2 major vacations were already defined around fall and spring in the Judaism and Christianisme. Human has respected the same worked/vacation framework since 3 to 5 centuries. This balance is definitely evolving, the challenge faced by the organization is to keep the teams in a good dynamic to work efficiently in those new conditions. Burnout are around the corner and hiding behind the cloud. 

Is challenging the holly vacations going to be the latest digital sin ?

Think encore !