How Co-Workers Are Bringing Weird At-Home Habits Back To the Office

Tolerance and patience, colleagues. This too shall pass. JL 

Andrew Kerseley reports in Wired:

First, there are the small things, like napping or not getting fully dressed, that we develop because we’re in the private space of our homes. From public butt scratching or failing to shower in the morning to constant snacking or loudly talking to yourself, the 18 month home-working experiment has created some strange new habits. Now, as more and more people come back to the office, experts say that many of the worst and weirdest WFH habits are likely to come with them. “Organisations need to understand that the workforce coming back is not the same one that left.”

Tom can’t stop walking around in his underpants. Since he started working from home, every time the events marketing manager gets a call from a client he strides around every room of his house, sometimes venturing into the garden. His unofficial pandemic uniform of smart shirts on top and nothing but boxers below may not make it back to the office, but his unconscious pacing will. “I am excited to return to see everyone, but I am a little anxious about adapting back to being around people all day,” he explains. “I can imagine some of my habits will be quicker to lose than others, I can’t see myself walking around in boxers while in the office, but jumping up instantly while on the phone will probably occur for quite a while.”

Tom is far from alone with his concerns about bringing strange new habits back into the office. Sravya, a creative director living in Hong Kong, has become so used to her daily lunchtime nap while working from home that she has been downing multiple coffees at lunch just to keep herself awake during her first week back in the office. At home, she had built a routine around showering and napping in the middle of the day and eating lunch with her family – the return of the dreaded commute has thrown all of that out of the window.

From public butt scratching or failing to shower in the morning to constant snacking or loudly talking to yourself, the 18 month home-working experiment has created some strange new habits. Now, as more and more people come back to the office, experts say that many of the worst and weirdest WFH habits are likely to come with them.

First, there are the small things, like napping or not getting fully dressed, that we develop because we’re in the private space of our homes. Psychologically these also arise because the social context and expectations of that setting is fundamentally different to that of the office. At home, you might work at a desk in your bedroom. In the office, your desk is unlikely a couple of paces away from where you sleep.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) studied what employees liked and disliked about remote working and got some interesting responses. “You did get things like, ‘I can wear my pyjamas, I don’t have to wear a bra, I can shower when I want,’” says Dr Zofia Bajorek, a senior research fellow at the IES. “There’s something about being at home – I call it the snooze pandemic. Workers click their snooze button as much as they want because all that stress about running for a train isn’t there anymore.”

This attitude is the central tenet of Habit Theory, the idea that the way we act is shaped by the social context we are in, and an array of social cues and rewards that arise from that. “The reason these new behaviours have largely emerged is that the context has completely changed. We don’t have social pressures and we don’t have people around us, therefore when we have an itch on our arse, that cue isn’t mediated by our context anymore,” says Max Wiggins, an expert in psychology and neuroscience and insight and innovation lead at VERJ, a human insights agency. “There’s no social embarrassment, there’s no stigma attached to it. It has led to a lot of these behaviours being reinforced.” These habits usually take a few weeks to form, and months of remote working has ingrained them on an even deeper level, he explains.

Confining rude or strange habits to the privacy of home has become difficult because of the general intrusion of work brought about by the pandemic. Most of the reporting and studies on this issue have focused on the damage it has done to work-life balance, as pressure to be constantly ‘on’ while at home has led to increasing rates of burnout.  “We’ve had a lot of anxiety and a lot of change forced upon us, it’s been stressful,” says Paula Allen, an expert in mental health and psychology and senior vice-president of research and total wellbeing at LifeWorks. One study from King’s College London found that anxiety and depression rates among the population sat at 57 per cent and 64 per cent respectively, far higher than the pre-pandemic norm. As a result, Allen explains, there has also been a rise in maladaptive coping behaviours to deal with that mental health impact of the pandemic, like rising rates of alcoholism. One interim IES survey found that 20 per cent of workers reported increased rates of alcohol consumption, while the British Liver Trust has reported a 500 per cent rise in calls to its alcohol addiction helpline since lockdown began in March 2020.

Even for the lightest of problematic habits, the issue might not be the behaviour itself but the reaction from other people in the office, who are likely to be a lot more on edge. Physiologically, office workers are now more likely to lash out at the annoying behaviours around them as prolonged exposure to stress and anxiety during the pandemic pushes the hypothalamus to overproduce adrenaline and cortisol. “There’s this higher level of volatility [as a result],” explains Allen. “Now people are starting to come back to the office, there’s more conflict, more suspicion – people are reacting to any little thing that is stressful in a more stressed out way.” That issue is compounded by the fact that people need to rediscover how to interact with people face-to-face in a professional working environment.

So what can companies do about it? Less serious habits like napping or bad hygiene will probably self-rectify in time. “What we learn we can unlearn relatively quickly as soon as the context changes,” explains Wiggins. After a couple of weeks, or perhaps a month, people will be able to break those habits because of that change in context, he says. Other experts suggest that reminders of workplace policy and HR, and being prepared to act on concerns and cut employees some slack in the intervening period, will help speed that reversal up. Another solution is to slow the transition back to the office itself to give employees time to ease out of their WFH routines and behaviours and into those expected in an office environment.

For other issues even more is needed. “Those more medicalised cognitions and behaviours will be a lot harder to change and that’s where organisations have to step in to help if something of that more serious nature has developed over lockdown,” says Bajorek. Companies need to ensure they use occupational health services, make sure line managers are trained to regularly check in on staff and ensure that staff never face punishments for coming forward to admit that they are struggling. “Organisations need to understand that the workforce coming back is not the same one that left,” says Allen. “If you have that expectation it will only lead to disappointment.”