Working from home -simple tips

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The article in the Age is really worth ready. 

In the home office there must be room for unicorns and biscuits.

BY JENNA PRICE

In pandemic times, our bosses pop into our homes and are confronted with our daily juggle-struggle , unless we are permitted to have cameras off or our partners really do share the load. Last week, in sight of millions, two women showed just how tough it was to manage working-from-home while parenting-at-home .

Associate professor at the London School of Economics Clare Wenham was shown all the grace in the world. The other? Insert desperate eyeroll emoji here.

Let’s deal with the bad behaviour first . Foreign affairs editor for UK Sky News Deborah Haynes was being interviewed by colleague Mark Austin when her kid interrupted to ask for two biscuits. Haynes was negotiating with Biscuit-Boy well while discussing the UK’s newly introduced Hong Kong law, which could mean nearly 3 million people are offered British citizenship. ‘‘ Yes, you can have two biscuits,’’ she said and continued to talk to Austin. Before she could continue, Austin cut her off and said: ‘‘ Yes, we will leave Deborah Haynes in full flow there.’’

Infuriating. Haynes had it under control but Austin and his producers decided the audience couldn’t handle the truth about our pandemic working lives. In contrast, when Clare Wenham was being interviewed on the BBC about COVID-19 lockdowns and daughter Scarlett interrupted, Wenham’s interviewer Christian Fraser engaged the child in a conversation about the role of unicorns in interior decoration. Glorious.

Rae Cooper, professor of gender, work and employment relations at the University of Sydney Business School, says Austin and his team should apologise to Haynes.

‘‘ Nobody has any choice about what might go wrong at home. Privacy and workspace have taken on new meanings and employees don’t have any control over that.’’

Cooper was astonished by Austin’s awkward response. Her message to him? ‘‘ Take a chill pill and recognise the people you are online with are humans talking from their homes with families and lives that aren’t always quiet and perfect. There are kids who interrupt, messy and noisy houses.’’

Cooper, wife and mother to two teenagers, has some recent past experience of interruptions. She was in the middle of teaching a class on Zoom one evening when her husband burnt the chops he was making for the kids. A fire alarm started blaring, interrupted the class, setting off the pets on students’ laps. Mayhem. Lucky for the mute button.

The students were untroubled, says Cooper.

‘‘ We must treat domestic chaos with domestic generosity,’’ she says. What she means is that if people are kind enough to take a call when they are at home, then interviewers should expect some interruptions. ‘‘ Very few people live in mansions or have studies or can or even want to lock their families away,’’ she says.

It’s a point COVID-19 expert Wenham made in a prescient piece she wrote for the British Medical Journal in April this year (and maybe her interviewer read this before the interview). Wenham said some employers have paved the way for change by becoming more flexible because they recognise that when we work from home, we have multiple competing priorities. ‘‘ There is no reason that these [changes] need to end when the outbreak does. We hope that this domestic burden might be recognised more comprehensively, and the post-COVID-19 new world order will account for this ... crisis can be an opportunity for change.’’

And certainly a change to the way Austin and like-minded dinosaurs respond to parents who work from home. President of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia Alexandra Wake says the UK Sky News response was troubling because of the way it diminished Haynes.

‘‘ In terms of interviewing skills, it reveals a need for journalists to have workplace training. Of course, it’s difficult to deal with the interruption, but people are learning to fly with it and to relax into that a bit more.’’

She also says audiences are loving the behind-the-scenes stories of those who appear on our screens. Because even people on our screens have to deal with unicorns and biscuits. And burning chops.

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