Working From Home: Episode 1 – Forced to work from home due to quarantine – with Rob Jones
In this first episode of Working From Home, host Nelson Jordan sits down virtually with B2B PR Director, Rob Jones, to discuss how quarantine is changing our relationship to work. Topics of conversation include: the future of work in a post COVID world, the pros and cons of traditional work and remote work, how offering remote positions can make a business more competitive, and other topics.
Timestamps
[1:19] – Rob gives an overview of his career path in the PR industry and discusses his transition to working from home
[5:22] – Rob describes how having a child led him to work from home more frequently, and why this experience made the option to work from home a requirement for his next job.
[8:50] – The best work environment is flexible and finds a way to provide options for in-person team collaboration, as well as remote work.
[13:00] – Remote work is not the ultimate answer, but is great for “deep work”.
[21:56] – Changes that we are seeing within organizations as a result of quarantine.
[27:39] – What is the future of work moving forward?
[31:57] – How working from home increases our ability to find talent and empowers people who are not able to work regular 9-5 jobs, such as new moms.
[42:16] – What have been the downsides of working from home?
[54:17] – Creative differences between the home and office environments.
[57:20] – A new desire for a variety of workspace experiences, and how this can mitigate the downsides of both remote and office work.
[1:02:34] – Challenges with receiving feedback on your work as a freelancer.
Transcript
00:26
Nelson: Hello, and welcome to the ‘Working From Home’ podcast with your host me, Nelson Jordan. Today, I’m absolutely delighted to be welcoming an old friend and colleague, Rob Jones, who is a b2b pr director.
00:42
Nelson: Hi, Rob. Thanks for joining us.
00:44
Rob: Hello. Thanks for having me.
00:45
Nelson: Quite welcome. How are you today?
00:47
Rob: Yeah, very well. Thank you. Not too bad at all. Weather’s…weather’s good today and close to the weekend so no complaints at all.
00:54
Nelson: Perfect. Rob’s in the same country as I am, which is obviously the UK judging from my accent. And so we always mention the weather here, because it’s a really rare thing that it’s nice. Thanks for that, Rob. Rob has been gracious enough to join me today. We’re going to be talking about working from home, his particular experiences and how he’s found it. So hopefully, for everybody working from home, that’s you: entrepreneurs, freelancers, remote workers, online business owners. Hopefully, we’ll have some something to pull out and some helpful advice for you. So Rob, if you’d just be gracious enough to talk through your career to date probably from your time when I first kind of knew you onwards to what you’re doing today? That’d be really great.
01:52
Rob: Yeah, sure. So I, I joined the PR industry straight out of university. Graduated in 2009, got a job as a graduate account executive agency called WPR in Birmingham. And essentially specialized in, well it does what it says on the tin really, specialized in in PR, so your sort of traditional press releases content, media relations, that side of things. As my career progressed, and as my experience grew, and as the agency grew as well, I’d say my skill-set developed. And I guess the agency’s credentials developed as well in terms of more of an integrated proposition in terms of PR, social, search, and creative as well. So in the nine years, I was I was with WPR, I progressed from a graduate account executive, all the way up to a divisional director. I oversaw a lot of what the b2b team did at the agency. And like I say, fully integrated proposition. My role really was to, to manage the team, but also to make sure that our clients, who range from plumbing and heating brands, to construction product manufacturers, and everything in between, really. My job is to make sure that their objectives were served using the best possible combination of expertise that we had, essentially. So we always used to say, you know, ‘It was for us to make sure our clients are able to shop down the right aisles,’ to use a sort of slightly tiresome supermarket analogy. And so yeah, I progressed to divisional director at WPR and then about five months ago, I moved to Brand Eight PR who are in Leeds. So a geographical change for me there; family circumstances, personal circumstances led myself and my wife and our little boy to relocate to Yorkshire. And I took a role with a with a new agency called Brand Eight, who are PR and content marketing really, and so not dissimilar to the agency I was I was working for before. Quite a lot of emphasis on b2b and which has suited me down to the ground so far. A smaller agency but still with the same core capabilities in terms of PR content, social and search. So again, whilst my sort of background and core skill-set in terms of PR and content comes in very useful. I’m still in that position where I can bring in expertise from a social and search perspective to aid the clients that I’m working with.
04:48
Nelson: Awesome, that’s great. Thanks, Rob. Um, just to clarify for our listeners, am I right in thinking that up to you know, very, very recently, you’d always been working in an office?
05:02
Rob: Yeah. And I’d say yeah, 95% of the time, actually, yeah. So the whole time I was at WPR, really, which as I said was for, you know, getting on for 10 years, I was office-based. I say office based, obviously, there was a lot of going out to see clients and that kind of thing, but just in terms of your time at your desk was generally spent in the office, in a very sort of very open plan office. What I would describe as a typical agency environment.
05:35
Nelson: Okay, and when did that change?
05:39
Rob: So that I mean, I guess to sort of rewind slightly, for me, I’d always say always, probably for the last couple years, I’ve always had one eye on, like, you know, more remote working. And I think, quite common my circumstance and the reasons for that, and the motivations behind that. I had a little boy, just shy of two years ago. And I think just that I’m not naive enough to think that you can, you can pretend that you’re going to do a full working day, and also look after a one year old for that whole time. But equally at the same time, the idea of flexible working did always appeal to me, because of just things like losing the commute from the start and the end of the day, and having your lunch break and being at home, potentially be able to you know, take a little one out to the park or pick him up from nursery and that kind of thing. So yeah, at WPR my colleagues and the sort of senior management team who were very, very open to, to me personally been able to work a bit more flexibly, but it never really got to the point where it was a formalized thing. It was still very much an ad hoc, ‘Okay, you need to pick, you know, you need to pick your little boy up from nursery, there’s plenty of flexibility there for you to do that’, which is great. And I think I then started to think, Well, you know, if I do change roles, my next role, I would like to have that bit more flexibility as a standard, essentially. And, you know, it goes without saying that we work in digital marketing a lot of the time, everything that we do really can be done remotely. Arguably with the exception of some of the more collaborative things. Yeah, I do agree with the idea that brainstormed meetings, that kind of thing can be hampered slightly by distance birthing, I’d say 75-80% of the of the role, I would say can be done remotely with the exception sort of people management stuff, a lot of that I think you find being in people’s company, being face to face, or at least having the opportunity to be face to face does really help with that sort of people management and professional development side of things as well.
08:04
Nelson: Sure. So in your particular situation, in this particular industry, when we’re essentially under the broad umbrella of marketing, so one of the things that I’ve heard the kind of pushback against remote, and probably what agency owners have struggled, kind of getting their heads around, I suppose, and finding good operational processes to actually put this in place, things like brainstorms, how do we ensure that everybody’s ideas, and that creativity that kind of agencies are famed for isn’t lost? Which is, I think, a very valid concern, and also for things like training, in particular, when you’re a graduate executive, and all the way maybe to senior exec account manager, I think there’s still a lot of learning that takes place just by being around people. How have you kind of found that? Have you had any kind of execs, that you needed to, that you felt it was almost kind of hampered by this remote work?
09:14
Rob: I think the ‘remote working’ for me, I think it’s a case of fine margins a lot of the time. Ultimately, I think marketing is a very collaborative industry, and a very collaborative discipline a lot of the time as well. And I think sometimes it’s silly little things that actually you don’t think, you probably don’t think matter from time to time, but simple stuff like choosing one word over another for the title of a press release or a piece of content, for example, that can make a massive difference actually, in terms of the how well that content is received by a client. Yet I think when you’re working remotely, I think it takes that bit extra to collaborate. I think it takes a bit of extra effort, and a bit of extra motivation almost. And it’s convenient a lot of time as well. If you’re sat there by yourself at home mulling over the choice of wording for a sentence, or as I said before, the word you may use for the title of a piece of content. If you’re in the office, and I’m big for this, you know, I’ll do this without thinking about it, if I’m in the office, I’ll say, ‘I’m just trying to work out, which is the best word, you know, what do people think? Should I choose warehouse or distribution center’, for example, something as daft as that. Whereas I think if you’re stuck at home, are you going to ring your colleague on Teams, or set up a Zoom call to quickly ask that question in a similar way as you would be able to here in an open plan office? Probably not. So it sounds very silly using an example like that, but I think if you if you sort accumulate those examples over the course of a typical working day, or a typical working week, you probably find there’s actually quite a lot of things that you need to collaborate on.
Nelson: Sure.
Rob: And I think in turn, to sort of wind that back to the question that you asked about execs, and sort of the development of more junior members of the team, I think sometimes, giving those people access to an environment where that sort of vocal, oral communication, oral collaboration takes place, I think that’s quite a healthy environment to be in. Now, I appreciate this almost me arguing against remote working, which of course, is sort of goes against the point I mentioned a few minutes ago, but I think we’ll probably come on to, over the course of this conversation is there’s a time and a place for both. I think if you work for an organization, which is happy to be flexible, I think it’s about putting structures and expectations in place whereby you’re neither one nor the other, you don’t have to be chained to your desk in an office: nine to five, Monday to Friday. Nor do you have to feel isolated working from home: nine to five, Monday to Friday. There is scope for there to be quite a large gray area in the middle and you know, gray area often has negative connotations. But I think in this case, that the flexibility that that brings is very beneficial in a lot of ways.
12:21
Nelson: Um, so one of the things that I think about and you’re 100%, right, in terms of there being obviously very visible positives and negatives to this with our particular industry, marketing, I think it’s actually more visible than, than a lot of others. And by nature, I think we attract quite a lot of people that almost feed on the energy of others, and the inspiration. And build on each other’s ideas and creativity. And brainstorms are a really, really good examples for that, where somebody will just say something, and that morphs, you know, that takes on a different meaning depending on who’s there and what mood they’re in. And that’s a really kind of nice way of accessing ideas. And I don’t think, given that we’re almost at the beginning of, you know, this almost remote work revolution, we don’t necessarily have all the tools or the processes or even the thinking, to be able to counter this. I don’t think anybody is served by us pretending that remote work, as it is now, is the ultimate answer. Because, like, I’d laugh at you basically, I just don’t, I just don’t think it is, um, in terms of you mentioned software there and the ease of just being able to talk to somebody and ask about a word choice, which you don’t have, if you’re necessarily using Teams or even Slack because… well, that also has, on the flip side, though positives, because you’re able to do what we call ‘deep work’ without people interrupting you, there’s some work that you and I well know that when we needed to get done before, especially being in an open plan office, we would actually have to find a quiet space to sit down and actually attack that work and do it for an hour, two hours, whatever it took, really, that we just wouldn’t get done with, you know, somebody asking us for, you know, that their word choice. So definitely pros and cons. And I think, you know, the software that you mentioned there, how do you counter that for word choice, okay, you might be able to put it as you know, on Slack, you might be able to put it on like a Facebook poll, on workplace: ‘Do you prefer a or b?’ But the tools just aren’t there yet to get that immediate reaction without losing something in the interaction as well. But just talking about your specific situation and how it came about during COVID, what was the decision that was made? Did you go into work for a little while? Or was it very much, as soon as it was clear there was a problem you, you were able to reduce the amount of time you worked. Talk me through that.
15:19
Rob: Yeah, I mean, my particular set of circumstances, very, very unique in the sense that I started at brand eight, week commencing the 16th of March now for those that can cast their memories back to around that time, that was actually the week that
15:38
lockdown measures are put in place, essentially.
15:42
Nelson: Wow, what a time to start a new job.
15:43
Rob: Yeah, exactly, exactly. What would I do it again, with the benefit of hindsight? I’m not sure. But then, you know, none of us have the benefit of you know, we all wish we could have the benefit of hindsight and foresight, I suppose, in terms of seeing what was what was about to come. But yeah, so I started my new job on the 16th of March, and had always planned to, you know, obviously, I sort of bedding in period planned where I’d be working from the office to begin with anyway, because I’ve got, you know, a new teams to settle into, people to get to know, processes to get to grips with as well. And what basically happened was, I had started on a Monday, I think, by the Tuesday, possibly the Wednesday, people have been told ‘Look, if you know, this, this is starting to look serious. If you’re more comfortable working from home, then you’re very welcome to go and work from home. And, and this is from a business that I think it would be fair to say, historically not dissimilar to my previous agency, actually, historically, there was an expectation that people would work from the office the majority of the time, so, yeah. But having said that, it was the sort of directive from our managing director is very much, you know, you choose what you feel comfortable doing. If you feel comfortable coming into the office, carry on coming into the office, if you don’t feel comfortable coming into the office, feel free to work from home, and you know, that’s not going to be an issue at all, we’ve got all the processes in place to make that work. So me being me, me being the new kid on the block, I stuck it out for that full week. Despite the fact there were, you know, I was well aware there were friends or former colleagues who, who were by this point already working from home and indefinitely in light of the pandemic. So, come the following Monday, it was, to be honest, things had escalated to such an extent that it was a case of driving in to pick up my keyboard and mouse. And that was that really, it was a case of them setting up camp at home indefinitely. I suppose the other thing I should add at this point is home isn’t actually home for me at the moment because we were between houses. So we were selling our house in Birmingham, and buying a new house in South Yorkshire. And in the interim, we were living with my in-laws, my wife’s parents. And lo and behold, we’re still here, because of the circumstances in our house move collapsing. So, again, it was it was sort of very topsy turvy time. Not you know, not necessarily a major issue we’ve got I’ve got enough space and a desk and so on to be able to work from, but yeah, at the same time, but as it has been for a lot of people quite an unsettling period I think it’s fair to say. So, despite me starting this conversation talking about how I had a desire to work from home more, I sort of went from 0 to 60 within the space of no time really and before I knew it, it was full time working from home indefinitely.
19:01
Nelson: So our situations had some sort of almost a bit of a mirror image weren’t they because my wife and I have just moved from Valencia in Spain, you know, three and a half weeks ago. And now we find ourselves that our parent in laws before our long-term rental becomes available. So I’m very much aware of what it’s like, kind of working in somebody else’s house, trying to get your routine down and in place and still perform obviously to the best of your ability, and in kind of less than ideal circumstances, and it’s just such a change for so many people, especially your clients as well. I think that’s what we forget sometimes that yes, you’re working from home but they probably are as well in a lot of ways and they probably also have screaming toddlers and naughty pets and things to deal with as well.
20:02
Rob: Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. It’s important to realize that isn’t it is that you, it’s easy when you’re working from home and you, you quite naturally can feel, it can be can be isolating at times. But, you know, within that isolation, I guess you have to appreciate the fact that there’s a lot of people, particularly in the current circumstances, there are a lot of other people in that situation as well. But yeah, I found actually, it was quite handy in a way getting to know new clients for me at the time, because actually, it’s like that, you know, the cliches aren’t they about you start off the conversation talking about the weather, as we do here in in the UK quite a lot. I mean, the sort of common ground is the pandemic, the remote working, the, you know ‘How is it in lockdown? How’s your routine going?’, you know, ‘Are you managing to stay productive? Are you managing to get out and do exercise?’, all that sort of the obvious stuff that we’re all talking about before the novelty completely wore off. But for me personally, at that time, it was actually quite handy inroad into a conversation with someone that I was speaking to for the first time. So yeah, in many ways, it probably was a good thing for me.
21:18
Nelson: And obviously, you won’t be able to answer this in terms of the new agency, because you weren’t necessarily aware of what was going on before. But how do you think processes that kind of agencies in general, or specific to the new one, if you are aware of that have changed because of this, either on a short term basis, or the long term?
21:43
Rob: And I think, just a sort of very broad level, I think, what I can only speak like, like you say, I can only speak from the, you know, my perspective within the one agency that I work for, but I think what’s probably happened across the board is more structured, and I guess more, probably a more a more structured internal meetings arrangement. And what I mean by that is, because you don’t have that opportunity to go ‘Right, when everyone arrives at the start of the working day, you might have a bit of a sort of briefing session to kind of get up to speed. The start the working week is probably a better, a more realistic example where you might all gather and kind of go ‘Right, what have we got on this week? Any deadlines you’ve got to hit?
22:35
Nelson: Are there any sell-ins that are happening?
22:35
Rob: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There could be pitches, there could be proposals that need doing all that kind of stuff. As well as the, you know, the softer stuff, like how’s your weekend, and, and all the rest of it. And I think, from my experience, what’s happened is, the agency hasn’t wanted to lose that, and quite rightly, so you almost have to create a forum for that, remotely. So in our case, we were having, to begin with, we were having a Team’s call every other morning. So we do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, where we’d all just sort of gather virtually, and talk through priorities, deadlines, sort of almost a bit of a sort of, yeah, a bit of a work in progress kind of update, really. And that did sort of slide towards becoming more of a once a week thing. But I think that was largely not, not because we’d got lazy with it, or we lost interest in doing it or anything like that. It was just because as we got used to remote working, and the ways that you can collaborate via Teams, Zoom, and so on, we’re finding that those sorts of conversations were happening more organically anyway. So it was just a case of us not needing to force it three times a week, we do it once a week. And then invariably, you know, you’d speak to someone and have a conversation with someone on your team, along those lines, sort of at varying intervals throughout the week. And in some respects, I think that that was almost potentially better from productivity point of view, because it meant that you were setting up those conversations and having those calls when you needed to have them rather than ‘Right ok it’s Wednesday, it’s 10 o’clock, we’ve got our sort of alternate day to catch up’ without really thinking whether you need it or not. So I think in that respect, the level of familiarity we all had with certain processes kind of helped us to become a bit more flexible, but still maintaining that dialogue throughout the week.
24:46
Nelson: I guess it meant that you didn’t have to predict what you might be thinking about three or four days in advance.
24:55
Rob: Yeah, I think as well as there’s a danger when you force these kind of things. You do become less productive, because ultimately you’re kind of having a meeting because the meeting is there in your diary rather than setting up a conversation or a meeting, because there’s a set number of important things that you need to talk about in that kind of environment. So like I say it’s one of those, isn’t it, we’ve all had to sort of feel our way through this process and getting used to remote working and that’s kind of one of the things that I found we eased ourselves into as time as time went on.
25:31
Nelson: So you, you mentioned Teams a couple of times in the conversation so far, is that kind of what you were using for that immediate kind of feedback from people as well as the meetings or were you using something else?
25:45
Rob: Yeah, to be honest we have been using Teams very heavily, I’d say. So Teams, we were originally using just for the meeting functionality; being able to do conference calls, video conferences, and that kind of thing. But I actually found as time went on, that this sort of chat functionality came into its own as well. So I’ve always had never really been one for that sort of flippant, off the cuff short for message to a to a colleague, when you could just I mean, obviously, in the good old days when we weren’t under lockdown, and you get up off your desk and go walk 10 yards to go speak to a colleague about something.
26:32
Nelson: Use it as an excuse for a cup of tea.
26:34
Rob: Yeah, in the old, like water cooler chat. So I think, you know, the sort of chat function in Teams became the equivalent to that, really, so just the sort of, yeah, I don’t know, quick notes. ‘Just so you know, I’ve done x’, or ‘When do you think you’ll have this thing ready by?’ so it doesn’t lend itself to picking up the phone or dialing into a conference, but you can just fire off quick message to someone and get that quick update, really.
27:06
Nelson: So if if I had to push you, what would you say kind of the best thing about this remote working as you’ve experienced it so far? Obviously, with the caveat that this isn’t necessarily what you had in mind when you first wanted to move into remote working.
27:26
Rob: I think for me, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve learned that you can be productive working from home. In some respects, I’ve learned in certain cases, you can actually be more productive because your sort of by the very nature of working from home, you are more isolated than you would be if you’re in an open plan office. So for certain types of work, as you’ve alluded to earlier, certain types of work where you just want to get your head down. Actually, I think I would prefer to do that from home or prefer to do that in a sort of more isolated environment than I would in open plan office. And but in terms of in terms of other things, I think trust actually is quite a big one as well. One of the things I think is quite important to consider when we think about in the marketing industry, in the sort of agency environment is it attracts a young demographic. So a lot of agencies will you know, that the majority of the sort of workforce within an agency will be a guess sort of average mid to late 20s. And within that, you probably have a sizable proportion of your workforce who are in their first or second job in their early 20s, sort of getting to grips with the professional world as well as, as well as, you know, as well as their career in marketing. I think one of the main things that I think has been great is that lockdown has kind of forced businesses to do, is to trust their staff. Because I think that that’s been a big barrier. The thing is, right. Okay, so we’ve always done this, you know, we’ve always worked in an office, nine to five, Monday to Friday. And I’m not sure you know, as a sort of director or a sort of a manager within an agency environment. I think there’s always been a slight reluctance, not reluctant to trust people, but a reluctance to try it, and essentially see if it can work on quite a large scale. So yeah, you know, there’s a lot of businesses out there and the two businesses that I’ve worked for where I think it’d be fair to say both are very open to remote work and have been very open to remote working but was there an inclination to let people essentially choose their working environment and the days they wanted to come into the office in the days they wanted to work from home? Probably not to that extent, I think the fact that we’ve had that forced upon us has made, a lot of businesses realize that actually we can be productive. The job can get done, client needs can be met. I’m not saying that that’s been completely flawless at all. And I know there’s agencies out there as well, that really, they’re probably really struggled to serve certain client demands during this time. But ultimately, I think from what I hear and sort of friends and colleagues and former colleagues who I speak to, I think the consensus seems to be that people have got on with it. And I’ve actually thought that this, this sort of, I was really reluctant to use the phrase ‘new normal’, because you hear it said so often now, and it’s became a cliche, yeah. But that, you know, normality moving forward, probably isn’t going to be nine to five, Monday to Friday working in office. And I think that’s a real opportunity for businesses and for the staff that they employ. I think you can look at this from one of a number of different ways, can’t you in terms of, if you’re an agency with a massive office, could you potentially downsize your office and reduce your overheads by applying this more flexible way of working to your to your staff? From a talent perspective, could you attract staff from a wider talent pool? Because actually, you don’t need people who live within a, you know, half an hour commute of your office anymore? If they’re only going to come in once, maybe twice a week, or even three times a week?
31:41
Rob: Do they need to be living on the doorstep? Probably not.
31:44
Nelson: I’d like to jump in there, Rob, if I can, just because I think that is one of the largest things that I hope companies will take advantage of now. They’ve almost been forced to, you used the ‘new normal’, so I get a cliche as well, ‘Think outside the box’. And think, ‘Okay, well, do we actually need this workforce. So far, we’ve been limited by basically, who fits the bill and can also commute to us, you know, who lives here than that commutable distance’. Now, I’ve thought for a long time, that there are a bunch of people that haven’t, you know, necessarily suited that traditional nine to five, work. Not necessarily because of their personality, but because of their personal circumstances. And I think, in particular, the one the one I’m thinking of are new mums or mums looking to get back into the workforce, and I don’t want to exclusively say mums, I mean, parents, but, you know, most kind of stay at home parents do still tend to be moms. And I just think that there’s like a gaping, gaping opportunity for women in the workforce to become involved in some shape or form, whether that’s, you know, on half days or a few hours, and particularly with some of the things that we do, right, where you’re working on different clients at different times anyway, so it’s not like you’re just focused on one thing throughout the whole day. It’s a case of, okay, you might be employed, working across, you know, five to 10 accounts, depending on the size, or maybe even one or two accounts, right. But you could just as easily employ somebody, you know, who’s perhaps left the workforce, to have a child, for example, and just have them working on one client, and that’s their only client, and they get all the work done over a couple of days. And if the client needs them, somebody else on the team will pick it up if they’re not available. And I think that’s, you know, massive. I think it’s not, it’s probably in my head, not on the same level, as, you know, women joining the workforce, to join in with the with the war efforts, and First World War and then second world war in a much larger way. And then obviously, when women stayed in the workforce, and then there were fewer men around because unfortunately, they’d been they’ve been lost to the war. Those women then retained that place in the workplace and had already shown their value. It’s, it doesn’t feel like you know, from what I’ve read in history books, the same sort of momentous kind of occasion to for women to step up, but it still feels pretty big to me, in terms of what could potentially happen when there’s just more equality given to you know, staying at home and still getting the work done.
34:58
Nelson: I was obviously With you, WPR, and some of the most productive people there were women who had young children, and were only working two or three days a week. And they tended to come in, absolutely smash it for a couple of days, and then leave again because they knew they’re on such a tight deadlines to just get things done. And so I think there’s definitely going to be more calls for that. And particularly at the senior levels, in particular, if we talk about demographic changes, and you’ve got more women waiting longer than ever before, to have children. By that time, particularly in our industry, it’s a very young industry, then we tend to lose people at about the account director level, when they start to have children and perhaps go down to a couple of days, and maybe they reenter the workforce at some point, maybe they don’t. And that’s a massive, like talent drain gone, so much knowledge that just almost evaporates and the agencies can’t use anymore. And I think, I hope this isn’t the case but I think it probably is, when more women probably get to that sort of age where people are kind of eyeing them and saying, and I think this about both male and women, male and female employers, they probably start to think, should I put that person on this new account, this big account that we’ve won as a chance that they’ll be leaving in the next six months, a year or something to have children? And like you’d like to think that doesn’t happen? But we I think we all know full well, that it probably does. And I’m hoping changes like this we’ll hope to kind of mitigate that slightly. Do you think that’s like a reasonable expectation at all?
36:48
Rob: I think there’s definitely a validity in a lot of what you’ve said. And it resonates with me actually. My wife, she works in PR and marketing as well. And part of what you’ve just said there is described her sort of career direction and career change in the sense that she worked her way up to camp director level within a marketing agency. And then we had our little boy and she decided after maternity leave, that she didn’t want to go back into that environment, she wanted to set up as a freelancer. And so that’s what she’s done. And, you know, touch word and, and all the rest of it. She’s worked very hard. And it’s been a success so far. But I know exactly what you mean, in the sense that I’ve heard you know, there are numerous examples, even within my network of former colleagues, or friends or sort of acquaintances of mine who have followed a similar path. And you do kind of wonder had there been more openness towards flexible working from the agency’s point of view, would those individuals feel like they, they would prefer to go freelance and essentially go it alone? Because, you know, and again, this is purely speaking from our own my perspective and my family’s perspective. But my wife did set up as a freelancer purely because of the flexibility and the ability to spend more time with our little boy and to take on the vast majority of the childcare duties, and it’s worked a treat, but you do kind of look at it sometimes and go could there have ever been an option for you to have stayed within your agency environment before and still had the benefits of that, that flexibility? Almost certainly, I would guess, agencies will be more willing to do that now after experience in the last few months, than they would have been again before it was it was forced upon.
38:54
Nelson: Yeah, I think from my perspective, I think a lot of women in particular, who have children tend to set up as freelancers because they felt there was no other option if they still wanted to use their skill set, and still make money in the same way and obviously have that flexibility. That’s not to say all of them. Obviously, lots of us, like myself, have chosen to be a freelancer when I had plenty of other options but just that was what I wanted to do because it suited me. But I think there’s probably some people out there that picked it because it was like the least bad option, I suppose. And like being a freelancer isn’t, you know, it’s not all great. It comes with I think kind of added pressure. Because the main thing for me is like if you don’t win your clients, you don’t have any clients. And that kind of pitching or showcasing your work or trying to build a network, so you have inbound leads, that isn’t for everybody. And you know that doesn’t make their skill set less legitimate, it quite often just comes down to preference, I think. And so there’s something to be said, right? If you can remain working for an agency, and you don’t particularly want to do everything, like accounting and invoicing, and, you know, managing your own deadlines and winning business and that sort of thing. Having an agency there who are effectively handing you your clients at the beginning of every month, and then same clients as last month, plus new projects. And also, you’ve got a guaranteed wage coming in, which obviously isn’t the case, for kind of any freelancers, really. So, I would just like to see more agencies in particular, because this kind of the industry that we’re talking about, at the moment, kind of adapt to that and realize that, hey, like this could be as an agency, our competitive advantage, if other agencies are really reluctant to take people that have been out of the workforce, like, I’m not, we’re gonna jump on those people. Because not only do they have really valuable skill sets, and a ton of experience, they’ve also got a massive network that they’ve made over 10-15 years of potential clients, as well as potential people in the industry that that you can use to your advantage. So I think there’s a lot of value, is my understanding, a lot of value going missing at the moment. And I’m kind of hoping that that that changes that we can recognize those people that traditionally have missed out and have been undervalued and underserved. That’s personally what I hope is the biggest thing that comes out of this for me. So we talked obviously, about some of the some of the good things. What have you not been so keen on? Obviously, because you originally wanted to, to kind of maybe was it like two or three days that you wanted originally? And like routinely?
42:18
Rob: Yeah, I mean, I’m not quite necessarily put a figure on it. I think I’d sort of worked on the basis that and my current agency, sort of conversation I’d had leading up to join in was a day a week working from home. Over time, maybe this scope to do more, it may be that there’s certain weeks that I would actually feel the benefit of working from the office for that whole week, for example. So I’ve been quite so sort of prescriptive with that and had a clear idea in my mind. In terms of your question about some of the negative, some of the challenges is probably the better word, we work in marketing to try and use constructive language.
43:04
Nelson: You’ve always been a lot better, better at being diplomatic than I have.
43:11
Rob: Well I try my best. Yeah, into some of the challenges that I’ve found. I think, in the early the early stages of lockdown, were really challenging. I think probably without us all realizing it, to be completely honest. I think we were all so limited in terms of what we’re actually able to do, almost legally that I found myself in a position where while I was trying to leave the house and go for a walk or you know, take my little boy out for a walk over lunchtime or whatever. Occasionally, if you had something to do with work and you decided maybe to take a shorter lunch or dinner or not necessarily take a lunch that day. Before you know it, you’ve done three or four days solid without leaving the house. And you’re kind of sat there going ‘This can’t be good for me’. I appreciate that. Yeah, this isn’t the norm in terms of just remote work in generally. That wouldn’t be a normal situation to be in but it did make me realize that yes, you’re working from home and there is flexibility that comes with that. You need to take advantage of that flexibility don’t you? You know if I if I was in an office, I wouldn’t stay in the office from the minute I arrived till the minute I leave. I would probably go out go over lunchtime for a walk or to go to pick up sandwich from the nearby shop or whatever. So I think that sort of getting up and about, stretching your legs, sounds really obvious, doesn’t it but just getting some fresh air. That that can be quite challenging. I think the main one for me if I’m being honest, I actually didn’t realize I’d sort of struggled with until I went back into the office which is about two weeks ago and that was the commute. That sounds stupid, because I’ve obviously said, you know, one of the reasons why I’ve always wanted to work from home is, is because, to me this idea that (I don’t know what the actual figure is), but you know, 80-90% of the British population or travel into urban centers to work at nine o’clock in the morning and all travel out of them again, at sort of five 5.30 in the evening just seems mad in terms of productivity. We’re all stuck in traffic for longer than we need to be. And you sort of go, ‘Even if I’m not putting that time towards work, and I could be putting that time towards just finding a bit more headspace relaxing, just something better than sitting in a car in traffic frankly’. But then on the flip side of that, what I realized when we went back into work, and I have the commute, again, was that I actually really missed that barrier between home and work. So, you know, to begin with this idea that I could be playing with Dinosaurs with my little boy at five to nine in the morning.
46:13
Nelson: Let’s not pretend your little boy is with you when you’re playing dinosaurs. Rob.
46:17
Rob: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, building my Duplo, set, five to nine in the morning. But yeah, this idea that I could be in parent mode, home mode, at five to nine, and then be on a conference call at nine o’clock, you kind of go, ‘Oh, that’s brilliant. That’s, that’s, you know, flexible work in its finest, it’s making the most of your time because you’re not stuck in a car between now quarter past eight, half past eight and nine o’clock’. But actually, what I think I hadn’t realized I’ve missed is the sort of getting your head in the in the right zone. So the switching off from home and being a parent or, you know, being a husband or partner, whatever it might be, to being a director or a PR agency, or whatever it might be. And so I think the big thing that I’ve learned, and that isn’t me saying as well, I feel like I’ve said a lot of things that are almost positives about being in the office and negatives about working from home. But I think actually, what it’s taught me is, if you’re working from home, you still need to do something to sort of activate work mode and something to deactivate work mode at the end of the day, because it can take a lot of time to switch on and switch off again.
47:38
Nelson: I think that’s so key. And like that is probably the thing that I find hardest and I probably have more experience than the average person that was kind of forced into this working from home situation and that I’ve been a freelancer but in only for the last year and a half. But I work in my home, especially at the moment I’m in somebody else’s home, my wife’s parents house, and I work in a room that they’ve been kind enough to kind of vacate for me. So it’s got a Sofa in, but you know, I spend all day in this room. And you know, it’s the same room that I relax in at night. And my laptop is just almost staring at me saying like, ‘open me Nelson, open a lie to this email or pitch another client or write another blog post’ or something. Not that weird voice but you know, maybe even weirder.
48:39
Rob: Definitely in a weird voice.
48:41
Nelson: Definitely in the weird voice. Um, but that kind of ritual has got something to be said for it, leaving the house closing the door, gang in your car or popping on the bus or subway, whatever. And popping in your headphones or putting your radio on and listening to, you know, songs or podcasts. podcasts are a good one, by the way, shout out to working from home podcast. Anyway, there’s that sort of separation via this ritual that you do every day that almost programs your brain to be like, ‘Okay, I’ve gone from home, this is something else. And this is work’. And then reverse when you’re leaving work at the end of the day. You know, that is work done for the day, we’re going to have this ritual. And when I get home, I’m then into home mode. And when you’re working at home all the time. You’re almost stuck into this, you know you’re in the same environment all the time. And you almost need to create some sort of artificial ritual. I think to break you out of that mindset. I haven’t mastered this yet. I’m not even close. I’ve worked a ridiculous amount in July, six or seven days a week, you know, 10 to 14 hours a day, it was pretty savage. But I’m just trying to build up my, my freelance copywriting business at the moment, and I’m not definitely planning on that being the same going forward. Um, but this is the thing that I’m trying to grapple with at the moment, like, how do I create that break? Or that firewall in between the two parts of my life? Have you got anything that you’ve been able to do?
50:36
Rob: It’s been, it’s been difficult because of the because the circumstances I think, and just to sort of build on the point that you mentioned there actually now so that, you know, there’s people I’ve spoken to, my mum being one actually who really haven’t taken well, I think it’s fair to say, to the remote work in sort of enforcement. In the sense of what it’s essentially done is it’s forged associations, and not always good associations, with sort of certain areas of the hat, which to the home, I should say. And the, you know, the connotations involved with work. So, I know numerous people who may be working quite high pressure environment, or maybe work with a sort of manager or a boss who’s very, very sort of demanding.
51:29
Nelson: You’re so diplomatic, Rob. I just admire that about you. Demanding manager is what we’re calling a boss from hell.
51:38
Rob: Basically, yeah, yeah, I’m not I’m yeah, I’m not naming, there’s no, not necessarily individuals, I’ve got in mind. You’re aware of these situations happening where people go into work and they like to go into work, they do their job, they come away from work at the end of the day and that that is that. And that’s a certain type of job as well, it allows you to do that. But I think when you combine a job like that, with the home, which is where you’re supposed to, you know, relax, that’s where you spend your downtime, and so on. That that can create some real problems, I think. And there’s, you know, there’s definitely examples out there of people who kind of almost, and again, I use my mom, as an example, actually, she referred to a certain period of lockdown, where she almost didn’t want to go into a certain room in the house that she’d been working from, because she’d started associated with work. So you kind of look at that and go that has therefore created a problem rather than opportunity. And so there’s there’s sort of, there’s a lot of fine tuning, I think that needs to go on in terms of, you know, those people who are looking to work from home more or likely to be forced to work from home, or I think there’s still a lot of fine tuning to be done.
53:06
Rob: I haven’t got a magic bullet that I would say is the solution to this. But I think people have got to look at ways I think, to separate work and home life for want of a better phrase, I think there’s that’s really, really, really important. Because otherwise, you’re in that position where you find it really, really difficult to switch off, you’re working really, really long hours, which, in some respects, you may not even need to but as you said before your laptop to there. So if I just spend another 20 minutes on that job I was doing earlier, then it’ll make tomorrow a more relaxing day. But before you know it, you spent two and a half hours, three hours at your laptop and you haven’t had an evening to yourself. So there’s, you know, one sort of little sort of intention, I think can lead into something that starts be all encompassing.
54:00
Nelson: Yeah, like 100%, you’ve, you’ve got a really weird situation where it’s almost kind of like the creativity stuff that we talked about before and being in person to have brainstorms, you could counter that by saying, actually, for something that does require that creativity, like being in an office nine to five probably isn’t the optimal way to achieve that. Kind of forcing people to, to go through this, like slog or routine, and, you know, probably isn’t optimal for creativity. But at the same time, if you’re going to be doing as I did in July, and working all hours under the sun, that’s not great for creativity either. Regardless of whether you’re spending the time commuting or sat there, looking at your laptop. Wishing like the power go out just to give you an excuse to stop. So I think there’s some awareness and probably more people, hopefully scientists, business leaders, policymakers changemakers, that sort of thing will be paying more attention to this stuff. And I think remote working isn’t going away. There’ll be certain industries and certain employers that wish that it would. And in my eyes, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s going to become more prolific as the years go on. And as technology kind of improves to keep pace. Technologists, all the technologists that I’ve come across have this unfortunate and probably naive, pollyannish assumption that technology is going to be the savior of everything. Make the argument that as much problems have been caused by technologies as, (I wouldn’t go that far) but I could always point out a counter case for that.
Rob: Yeah.
Nelson: And I don’t think it’s necessarily some sort of technology, that’s going to be the answer here to that change to that separation that we were talking about, I think it’s going to be an awareness of human behavior, psychology, and probably biology as well. Like how our brains actually cope with this amount of screen time. And this kind of almost merging of what used to be two completely separate environments. You used to have a home and you used to have work, and they were two completely different places, like in terms of geo location. And I think there was some psychological element, which let you separate the two in your brain as well.
56:53
Rob: Yeah, I think that’s a really valid point, I think the other thing we have to remember, and again, this may be me speaking from the perspective of someone who works for a, you know, a PR or marketing agency, but I think variety is what can be very motivating. And yeah, from my perspective, why did I decide that I wanted to work for a PR agency, it was, frankly, because of the variety, you get to work on different clients in different industries, you get to work with different types of people, you get to go to meetings in different types of environment, and all that kind of stuff. And that, for me has always been very motivating. So when I talk about my desire to do more remote work in, in a sense, I think it’s fed by that need for variety, where I don’t want to be glued to a desk in an office, nine to five, Monday to Friday, nor do I want to be glued to my desk at home nine to five, Monday to Friday. So it’s about finding that happy medium, and thinking right, okay, so it may be that you, you decide that you’re working from home one or two days a week, it allows you to plan your week and go well on those one or two days, let’s do the stuff that I know I can do really, really well in that kind of environment. And then conversely, on the days when you’re in an office environment, again, it’s a case of right, OK, we’re in the office on these days, what are the things that I need to get out of being in this environment. Of course, it’s not as black and white is that and there’s going to be times when you’ll be in the office, and you’ll find yourself needing to do that sort of deep concentration type work where you really have to get your head down. But I think, again, it’s it the flexibility and the variety, at least gives you the option of being able to segregate your work and be able to do the parts of your job that lend themselves to a particular type of environment and vice versa.
58:54
Nelson: No, that’s a really interesting way to think I think, there’s so as you say the thing that’s kind of keeps coming to the forefront for me is that there are pros and cons of both. And that variety kind of allows you to almost mitigate the negatives of both to some degree, definitely not 100%. But, you know, you get almost the best of both worlds when you are able to combine, um, you know, the good points of working from home, ie, the flexibility and the amount of hours not spent traveling. Um, but they’re also really great points of working and being part of a community and having an actual face to face discussions. One of the things that that I found from a personal level, and especially being in Spain for the last three years where, you know, my Spanish is passible, I suppose, providing you don’t ever ask me…
Rob: Go on…
Nelson: no, that’s the same in Spanish. But I also found that that was a bit of a barrier for me in terms of going out and communicating with people given that I was working from home. Whereas if I had been in an English-speaking office, I’d at least have, you know, that sort of communication on a daily level and then outside it wouldn’t have been so isolating, I suppose, I found, you know, being in isolation, in particular, on top of being a freelancer, very, very lonely at points, um, you know, I felt like, ‘man, I would, I would love to just see somebody face to face’ that as much as I love her, my wife, and she’ll say the same thing about me, but 100 times more, just somebody different to engage with in a different way, you have a different relationship with them, you talk about different things, you act a different way with them. And like, as a freelancer, I think that that is what for me, one of the biggest negatives. And I think that’s why so many people do these, like meet-ups and in person groups to find ways around that. I’m not sure they counted them as well as they could do.
1:01:21
Rob: Yeah, I think to be honest, like that, that’s raised an interesting point. And almost a question I have for you actually, as well, which is, how do you find the sort of lack of validation for what you’re doing? Because I think one of the other things that I did find difficult to begin with as well is when you’re not in that environment, where you’re sort of in a room with people. That sort of opportunity for your colleagues, (and this is going to make me sound really needy now I’m afraid), but which I think I’m not, but it that sort of that lack of someone just going ‘yeah that’s a really good point, actually, you’ve just made’ or ‘That piece of work that you’ve just printed off? It looks, you know, I really like what you’ve done with the title or’ those kind of little throwaway comments that actually again, it goes back to what I’ve said earlier, are you going to bring someone on Teams to give that feedback? Probably not, because it’s just a quite a flippant, off the cuff remark. But actually, I think I think it’s really, really important that people still get that. And I think it’s something that I certainly felt that was missed in the early days, where you kind of you feel like there’s a lot of work to be done, and you’re doing the work and you sort of hoping that it’s hitting the spot, and you’re hoping and even when you’re confident you’re delivering to a high standard, there’s no substitute for someone just going ‘yeah, that’s really good or thanks doing that,’ or, you know, ‘Oh you’ve made a really good fist of that’, and you as a freelancer must find that lockdown or no lockdown. That’s a sort of a dynamic that you don’t have instant access to at all, right?
1:03:03
Nelson: Yeah. I mean, I’ve I found that and not just, you know, in the needy, please compliment me way…
Rob: It’s just me…
Nelson: Yes, it’s just you Rob…from the negative critiques. And not negative is in somebody’s trying to put you down, but somebody’s genuinely trying to improve your work. And, you know, none of us do this kind of work in isolation, we can’t produce absolute masterpieces at the frequency that we work for different clients. Um, you know, I was very much used to working at an agency where one person would have an idea, and then other people would build on it. And you’d be kind of almost having this organic, unforced back and forth, to arrive at the finished product. As a freelancer, you don’t get that. Particularly whenever you’re working in an industry and you get hired by somebody who has a very low base of knowledge for what you’re doing, which is, I think that is primarily a lot of the time why we get hired in the first place, right? Because a business owner wants to just get on and do the things that they’re really good at: running the business. Whether that’s bringing in new clients or handling the operation side or managing their employees, they don’t want to get involved for somebody like your case to do PR. Or from for my case, they don’t want to get involved in the copywriting. They’re not going to produce their own websites, their own sales pages, email funnels, whatever it is. So when I produce a piece of work, and, you know, hand it back to the client and say, ‘Okay, this is, you know, draft one, this is the direction I think we should take it’, I basically don’t get feedback on the quality of my work ever, I get feedback on whether they like the work or not. And it’s quite hard to explain, but I think you’ll get it but those aren’t the same thing. Clients feeling about the writing, that I do, isn’t necessarily based on how well that writing is actually going to accomplish its job. You know, if I’m work writing website copy, let’s say a sales page for a course, for example, and it’s written with conversion in mind, and to take people from top of the funnel like cold traffic, top of the funnel all the way down and almost convert them by the end of the page. You know, I’ve had clients come back and be like, ‘We really don’t like long form sales pages’. And my response is like, ‘I can definitely do you short form sales page as well. But I’m telling you, the long form sales page will convert significantly better, and we can run tests, you know, just to prove this hypothesis’. And the client has come back to me not on the quality of the work there, or how well it’s going to accomplish the goal but just they came and said, ‘I don’t like this’. So this is about the type of feedback you get like that my clients will always give me feedback.
1:06:29
Nelson: But it’s your hundred percent, right, it’s missing that kind of expert I, from colleagues who know who have kind of similar base to you, right? Who can say, ‘Actually, you’ve missed a really good opportunity for a call-to-action in there. And your tone of voice isn’t quite right, you’ve not really hit the mark, that’s doesn’t flow with the structure that you’ve picked as well as it should do’. And I basically don’t have a decent answer for that, like a complete answer. One of the things that I found, you know, incredibly valuable, is being part of an online community. Because then you can reach people in your, area of expertise all over the world. And, you know, some of them are incredibly, incredibly experienced, and just engage with these communities for the joy of it. But that way that you can actually get feedback from people who know what they’re talking about, and can steer you in the right direction, pointing you in the right resources, give you the right training, and change your mindset a little bit about how you’re even approaching the project, is absolutely invaluable. So my answer, I guess, would be like to try and find the communities of where those sort of people are hanging out. And there’ll be different ones that work in different ways. There are Facebook groups, and there are Slack groups or forums, there are YouTube channels, where experts kind of film over the shoulder kind of tutorials to what they’re doing. And you can kind of almost unpick it and reverse engineer it, there’s still nothing that I’ve found that comes close to what we were talking about at the beginning of the call, like sitting next to somebody and saying, ‘What do you think of that?’ Because there’s so many things that fall in between the levels of importance. Um, which by that I mean, it’s important enough that I’m curious about what somebody thinks about this, but not important enough for me to bother them, whether that’s email or putting a message to a community or something like that. There’s still these little things that are almost falling in between the cracks, and I don’t have an answer.
1:08:57
Rob: No, I think I think that’s the big challenge to overcome, isn’t it for, for the sort of, you know, this this generation of professional people who are trying to navigate through this new way of working potentially is those things always feel very minor in isolation. So ‘What do you think of this, or would you use this word or that word? Or can you just look over my shoulder and just check that this sentence that I put in my email doesn’t come across as too passive aggressive?’, or whatever it might be, because you don’t have the option of doing that, you lose the benefit of collaboration a little bit because really it takes an extra step when you’re not sat in that environment around people. So for you to go ‘Oh do mind just proofreading this email before I send it?’ is very different, it doesn’t sound it but I think in the moment it feels very different. So you just go ‘Oh just come over here, mate, and just have a look at this and tell me what your think’.
Nelson: Even if the person changes nothing, it’s that reassurance that like you are along the right lines..
Rob: And that’s what I was saying before that it’s a form of validation, isn’t it? It’s that sort of you, you then feel in, people don’t need to come over to you and go, ‘That email is the best email I’ve ever seen’. But if there was a nagging doubt in your mind, and someone’s come over and gone ‘No I agree with that, that’s exactly how I would have done it, or I don’t see an issue with that at all’. That in itself is quite…it’s validation of what you’re doing it’s sort of reassurance it’s all those sort of good things that we feed off in terms of like emotional behavior. I’m no psychologist, but just that’s how it feels. That those positive connotations that come with that you, you feel the benefit of?
1:10:53
Nelson: Definitely. So I think that’s probably a really good place to leave our conversation for today. Basically, we’ve just decided that we’re both incredibly needy, and just need constant validation. So why not leave it there? Rob, thank you so much for spending the time. Thank you, everybody, as well, that has listened today on the ‘Working From Home’ podcast. And we’ll see you very soon. Anything you’d like to finish with Rob?
1:11:23
Rob: No I think that’s all for me, I think. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think it’s a really interesting topic. I think it’s interesting actually to talk this through and realize that there really is benefits of both, isn’t there? I think what we’re what we’re saying here is that, that the skill, and the sort of the goal really for all of us is to try and find the benefit of both whether in my case, I think what I’ve realized today, talking to through with you is that what I strive for is variety. That’s what that’s what makes me tick. For other people will be different. But I think knowing that then allows you to place your own strengths and get the most from remote work in the same way as you get the most from office working. So yeah, no interesting, very interesting. And it’s been great to talk to you today so thanks for having me on.
1:12:11
Nelson: And that’s it for today. You’ve been listening to the ‘Working From Home’ podcast, with me, Nelson Jordan. We’ve been talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of remote work. Thanks so much for listening, and I really hope you’ve enjoyed the time you spent with us today. If you’d like to discuss the podcast, you want to make a new friend or you’re interested in working with me on a copywriting or digital marketing project. Then visit nelson-jordan.com, that’s nelson-jordan.com where you can also sign up to my newsletter to hear about this podcast and other exciting projects. Until next week, goodbye.