[POR]: Saúde Mental em tempos de Trabalho Remoto [ENG]: Mental Health in Home Office Times

 PROBLEM: 

This study shows that the mental health problems and psychosocial consequences amid the home office and the pandemic are a global burden, with differences between countries and regions observed. 

Solution 1: Task Boards

Whether it’s a task board from Trello or Jira boards permit users to leave comments and ask questions in a way that promotes asynchronous responses instead of the real-time pull of email and instant messaging.

This transparency puts downward pressure on communication leads associated with reporting and status updates and helps people prioritize their work in a way that’s aligned with longer-term goals. This helps prevent them from falling victim to always heeding the arbitrarily urgent task instead of the important one.

Solution 2: Meetings

Bartleby’s Law posits that meetings waste 80% of the time for 80% of the people in attendance. A 2017 study led by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow lends credence to this idea, with 71% of senior executives saying that meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Given this, and given that the average person spends between 35% and 50% of their time in meetings and is suffering from Zoom fatigue, ending the meeting madness offers us a clear path to liberating people’s time.

To do that, we need to end the indiscriminate booking of time in our colleague’s calendars with little regard for their priorities and commitments. Office hours is a concept that can help to do this, popularized by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work. Essentially, it refers to a period of time that people carve out for meetings on a daily or weekly basis. Ideally, time slots are ring-fenced to no more than 30 minutes, notwithstanding urgent or extraordinary circumstances, and are aligned with people’s preferred work patterns. For example, early birds are best advised to block out their mornings for deep work, whereas night owls are likely to do the same with their afternoons. Tools such as Calendly, x.ai, and others can facilitate booking time slots that don’t sacrifice other people’s priorities and can help to improve meeting efficacy.

Solution 3: Shared Documents

It can empower people to work on the same document asynchronously without bearing the burden of version control. Simple example of this include Google Docs and user interface design tool, Invision, all of which support in-document annotation and team member tagging.

The use of shared documents during real-time calls also ensures that important messages aren’t lost in translation, decreasing the likelihood and cost of rework in the future.

Source: Adapted from Harvard Business Review and Nature.com