I am part of the fortunate workforce who retained jobs and adopted the work-from-home setup during the pandemic. When it was first announced, I was a bit relieved, because a lot of costs will be saved—transportation expense, commuting time, time spent on deciding where to buy lunch, and most of all, sleeping hours for sleep-deprived auditors. The lockdown was started on the most stressful period of audit season. So, it really was a relief. At first thought.
In different perspectives, remote working is a boon or bane. Sure, it was a relief. But, the prolonged deviation from normal made me rethink if this remote work setup actually costs more than it benefits. I'm not cancelling out the benefits, because being employed even in difficult times is indeed a blessing. I'm just rethinking if those benefits are actually over-mystified, because at this point, the very effort to appreciate things is so difficult to grasp.
I hope this doesn't get interpreted as ingratitude. This is merely an honest review of my year so far. I don't know if it's just me or someone else share the same sentiments. This is not a complain. Or maybe it is. But, I know I have to let these thoughts flow out, before they become too heavy to lift myself up.
NOTE: This is lengthy. You can read up as long as you're comfortable.
Work-from-home is a whole different world.
It's not as simple as "just moving your desk from work to home." Time moves at a different pace at home. Even the air we breathe seems different. Not everyone has the conducive lighting and ventilation to work at home. The duration of transitioning is not the same for people. Even companies with all great the money had trouble adapting, either by changing the employee shifts, providing equipment to employees, deciding between cost-cutting methods... what more for ordinary people who don't have much of a choice and just have to accept whatever comes our way. Most of us have jobs which are not naturally flexible for remote working—I mean we can but it's just not the default choice. And most of us have grown comfortable with the normal setup that makes change hard to absorb.
Stress from small tasks accumulate silently.
We are bringing work home, so what needs to adjust is the work, not the home. Let me reword that—work has become like a freeloader suddenly taking up your home's space. Of course, that's home's territory, so it asserts its authority. You have to prepare meals, cook food, wash the plates, wipe the furniture, manually turn on and off whatever appliances you use at home, and a lot of other house chores. I know that we also do these stuff even during the previous setup—in different degrees. Auditors don't really have a lot of liberty in preparing and cooking normal healthy meals, we normally buy food. It's not us being lazy. It's probably because most of us are slaves of the burnout culture. Don't tell me to just continue buying food and all other activities that we used to do at the office. This current world has already robbed a lot from employees and employers alike—we have to be as frugal as we can because survival is our daily struggle. We cannot ignore or complain on these house chores either—I mean, we are bringing an alien (work) to our home, that it's almost disrespect to the air we breathe there, but we don't have a choice. It's even more stressful for the workers with kids and without adequate home dividers or rooms.
Costs accumulate faster than income.
We used to spend most of our time at the office. Air conditioner, electricity and internet used to be provided. Now, we bring those expenses home, and most of us don't get a pay raise for that. We have to keep ventilation working, not for ourselves, but for our laptops and equipment. We install a separate router so that our mobile phones don't overheat from being the internet hotspot. We incur more expenses, but don't really get additional compensation, or might even got salary cut. You're lucky if this is not a problem for you. Again, this is not an attack against companies. This is merely a narration of what really happens at employee-at-home level.
We can't monitor people.
As a control freak, I personally find it hard to, yes, control people. For auditors, teamwork is as important as individual work. Just because tasks have been distributed doesn't mean it's all laissez-faire. Most of the tasks are actually connected with each other, but we cannot assign all related tasks to just one person because it's unfair. One risk or control deficiency identified in one area needs to be timely communicated to all teammates. We have to communicate with each other, now more than ever. I may be an introvert, but I still have a sense of leadership and responsibility. Yes, I'm a control freak, and my anxiety arises from not seeing work unfold before my eyes. I cannot sway the anxiety of not seeing people moving, or not being able to solve problems as they arise. I cannot fix my trust issues that people use convenient excuses—they are possible whether you agree or not. And it doesn't really matter if people actually work—this is just a glimpse of how control freaks think. We don't have the liberty of just tapping on each other at the office as soon as an issue comes up. It's not just about keeping teammates in check, it's also about resolving problems as early as possible.
All work gets delayed.
The nature of our work is dependent on the quality and timeliness of information we receive. It's already stressful even if we hypothetically assume that everything is under our control, which is impossible. However, in reality, all work have been delayed, auditors and clients alike. Remember that businesses have frozen operations for a few months, but no operations doesn't mean that there is no accounting to be done. Especially for small businesses, backlog work has piled up more than what employees can handle. Also, there are a lot of qualitative effects of employee turnover, it's not just the mere headcount that matters here. Our clients are having a hard time attending to audit requests because catching up with their backlogs is already too exhausting. Auditors are employees, too. We have our own backlogs, too. We have our personal issues, too. We are working on multiple projects at the same time, for clients who are all having troubles coping up.
Flow of information is difficult.
During normal audit season, clients provide the documents and we inspect them at their premises. If requests or answers to queries gets unusually delayed, we can even "ambush" the process owners—i.e. sit with them on their posts and occupy their time until we get at that same moment the things we need. But now, we can't simply barge in to their offices and demand information. In reality, it's more than just setting shared folders on Google Drive or Microsoft Teams and the information automatically flows like there's no problem. While everything is digital, everything is also capable of being cyberattacked. There are also issues on unlimited storage or unstable internet connection. There even are issues on insufficient scanners to scan all required documents. Remember that communication should consider both ends—both should properly work. As much as we want to finish on time, and as much as our clients also want to finish on time, there is just so much going on.
Taking breaks seem like a luxury more than it used to be.
Because of the notion that we are "just sitting conveniently at home and being flexible at work setups", it imposes an imaginary guilt on taking breaks, on logging out from work on time, or on not working during the weekends. That notions is so stupid that I want to sPeLL iT tHiS wAy. I don't even know who imposes it, myself or the society. I just know that my anxiety grows from thinking that people think I don't work enough just because I have the privilege to work from home, and I can't help myself. That anxiety grows into overworking, to complaints, to burnout, to apathy—every stage of that sequence is mental fatigue. But still, considering the other points I'm saying here, work can pause but work can't stop, but that line in between seems more blurry more than ever. The length of break we (plan to) take is carefully computed to balance out the level of backlog we can take. But, heavy backlog already exists even before we rest, so what break are we even planning for. We even work for longer hours at night, shortening our lunch breaks, working on weekends to sign off on the Monday. Or not "we", but "I". Is it because I'm not good enough to finish the tasks even if I exert more effort? Or is it because my abilities are depleted more quickly because I work more? They feed of each other. I already lost count of how many times I said I'll take a sick leave but still ended up working until 11pm. It's so frustrating that it makes me cry writing this.
If you think that I'm pathetic for sounding like a loser not offering solutions, consider yourself lucky to be spared from the hassles I discussed. It probably takes one to know one. I'm not even talking about health and distractions here since they are all on our discretions. Whatever solutions you might have, we have probably tried them out. It's not as simple as that—we don't operate on linear direction alone. Even if things get solved, a lot of things have already gone wrong, it's difficult to organize them in thoughts, let alone put them into words.
This blog does not seek resolutions. I merely want to state what I observe are happening.
There, I said what I wanted to say.
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