I love working from home. Like, I LOVE it. And I don’t want to say it’s for everyone and have even gone out of my way to tell people to absolutely not work from home unless it’s conducive to where you are in life and career at any point in time, but for me, it’s the greatest thing ever.
When it’s time to travel for work, I begrudgingly do it, and despite the contradictory nature of admitting, I love being in a shared space with people I work with.
As highly as I value my little tucked away office in the house where I can go without physical interruption (notification dings, I see and silence you for a reason), the value of in-person collaboration is undefeated in human history for a reason.
The good part about St. Louis being the home office for Sunpointe is most of the people didn’t have to travel. But still, 3 of us were on airplanes, a few were on long-ish car rides, and that little extra effort was applied for good measure.
Post-Chicago, my wife and I took the train down. It’s a slow ride with a little less internet access than a Monday work trip probably needed for my sanity’s sake, but we made it, and would definitely do it again. If it takes as long as it would to drive there, and you can get up and move around, while wondering who is getting on or off at Normal, Illinois, that’s a feature and not a bug.
By the time we were all gathered up on Tuesday morning, the feelings were confirmed. I was getting the face-to-face catch-ups. I was getting the interruptions that can only happen via an office pop-in. For a couple days, it’s a glorious throwback. My assistant even got to laugh at me pacing on the phone. “Just like old times!”
And because this was our annual gathering, we had a very structured agenda, but a certain looseness around it. The looseness really has to be there, especially when a normal Tuesday is tightly packed with meetings and calls less of those marginal interactions.
It’s easy to forget, for all the planning and project management and analysis we do, how much serendipity matters. The structure was less structure than usual. I know I’m 50% less productive and efficient in this environment, but that slack has a value.
Between some crazy business owner stories I’d never heard at our Tuesday night dinner, and hearing from colleagues’ significant others at our Wednesday event, the value, much like my efficiency ranking, was 50% (tops!) in the stated agenda. The gaps were where the real value showed up.
I told Val on the day after while we waited in the airport, “I feel so grateful for the people I work with. I like all of them. I care about all of them. They like and care about me.” She gets it. We’ve talked so much about it. Life hasn’t always been like this. You have to high-level design for it, without micromanaging the process. Work used to feel a lot more like work, in competition and separation from who I am. This trip was a reminder how much it doesn’t need to be that way. It meant a lot she was with me to experience it.
I’m grateful I don’t need to work from an office every day anymore, but being reminded of the people you work with and why they matter to you, and your family, is worth seeking out the reminder for.
