Just because I go into the office five days a week doesn't mean anybody else has to

This is my office at Materion. I spend a lot of time here (and I like it).

Back in December I had a post here about how much I enjoyed my company's hybrid arrangement of working three days in the office and two days at home each week.

Let's pretend I never wrote that.

Actually, I still stand behind every word I said, particularly how smart it is for companies to give their employees flexible working options that make life a little more manageable, at least when compared with the old non-negotiable approach of five days in the office for those of us in the white collar world.

For the last five months, however, I have been coming into the office every day, Monday through Friday, of my own volition.

There have been a couple of exceptions, but the most part, I commute to work five days a week like it's still 2019.

This is completely my choice. I do it for me and not as an attempt to suggest to others that they, too, should be back in the office full time.

They shouldn't be. They should be doing whatever works best for them and their employers.

It's just that, for me, the office is the one place where I am most focused on the task at hand. It's not that I can't be productive from my home office, but that, on balance, I get more done at Materion corporate headquarters than I do working upstairs at 30025 Miller Avenue.

The one person I supervise, Courtney, knows I do this, and more importantly, she knows I don't expect her in any way to follow my lead. She has a little boy at home to take care of. It's just easier and better for everyone involved when she can work from home at least a few days a week.

(It doesn't hurt that she's very smart and talented and would be just as productive if we gave her a laptop, a rechargeable battery and a tent and sent her out in the middle of the woods to work.)

The point is, my Materion office is my favorite place to work. I love it on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when my co-workers are in the office with me and I can collaborate and converse with them, and I love it just as much on Mondays and Fridays when the parking lot is nearly empty and only a few of us are onsite.

My work schedule, my choice. Your results may (and really should) vary.

I don't care what my Zoom background looks like, but should I?

 

(NOTE: Since I wrote this post a few weeks ago, I've taken to coming into the office every day and not working from home at all. I'm sure there will be days when I'll still need to work from home, but who knew I would ever make this kind of switch? I just personally find that I focus better when I'm in the office. Anyway, let's get on with it...)

The headline today would be more accurate if it read, "I don't care what my Teams background looks like, but should I?" At my company we use Microsoft Teams rather than the more popularly known Zoom platform for video conferencing, but it felt like "Zoom" might connect better with potential readers who don't know what "Teams" is.

Anyway, the photo above is what you're going to get if you're on a Teams meeting with me on the occasions when I work from home. I'm sitting in my upstairs office, and you can clearly see some of the stuff I've hung on the wall, my folding closet doors, and a glimpse over my shoulder of one of the two bookshelves in the room.

There's nothing there particularly distracting or embarrassing, as far as I'm concerned. I know a lot of people like to blur their background when they're in a remote work meeting, while others use CGI-like pre-fab backgrounds that either show the company's logo or place them in a fake room in some exotic location.

True story: When I worked at Goodyear, one of my colleagues used a built-in Teams background that made it look to me like she in a nice urban hotel room. The first time I saw it, I figured she was in Brussels or Luxembourg, two places where Goodyear has offices.

When her background stayed the same meeting after meeting over the course of a few weeks, I finally said to her, "I can't believe how long you've been in Europe. This must be quite a business trip!" To which she replied, "What? No, I'm at home. This is a fake background."

Oops. I had no idea, partly because she tended to keep her head very still during meetings. When someone with the artificial background feature turned on moves, you can usually tell the background isn't real by the way it (or their head) distorts.

I'm very open when it comes to sharing details of my personal/home life with co-workers, but I get that others might want to maintain a distinct boundary between the two. They don't necessarily want me to see their living room in the background during a meeting, and that's just fine.

But, conversely, is it any problem for them to see my home office in all its cluttered glory? Like that signed portrait of Sting reflecting the room light and going out of frame on the left side of the picture? I'll tell you about it if you're interested, but my real concern is that it isn't in any way distracting or inappropriate for a work meeting.

I don't think it is, but I'm open to other thoughts.

Here's a promise, though: If for any reason my laptop ever ends up in the bathroom with me, you will never know. As far you'll be concerned, judging from the background, I'll be on a Hawaiian beach.

Even I have my limits.