Working From Home, 2H 2020

In the second half of 2020, I was part of building a business that turned over £2 million. That sounds like a good number. The context is that everyone involved was working from a bedroom, a spare room, or a kitchen table, in the middle of a pandemic, while their lives were genuinely disrupted.

Remote work had already been a thing before 2020. Something changed when it became compulsory. The camera didn’t lie. You could see people’s flats. You could hear children in the background. You could tell when someone had been crying before the call started.

Managing became different

I had managed people before. In an office there’s a natural buffer — you can read the room, grab someone for a coffee, notice things before they become conversations. That buffer disappeared in the second half of 2020.

Some people were fine. Some people were not fine and didn’t say so. Some people were not fine and had no idea how to ask for help, because the kind of help they needed wasn’t really a work thing.

The most useful thing I could do was make it safe to say “I’m struggling.” Not by making a policy about it. Not by sending a Slack message about wellbeing resources. By saying it myself, when it was true, and not waiting for performance to dip before asking if someone was okay.

Momentum is also a thing

This is the part that doesn’t sit comfortably, and I went back and forth on whether to write it down at all. We needed to deliver. The business had commitments, clients, and a team whose salaries depended on it. I couldn’t stop the year, and I’m not going to pretend that constraint cost the people inside it nothing.

The tension between “we need to keep moving” and “these people are going through something real” doesn’t have a clean resolution. You hold both. You push where you need to push and you leave room where you can. You get it wrong sometimes in both directions — too much pressure on the wrong person at the wrong moment, or not enough urgency when something genuinely needed to happen.

I don’t think there’s a framework for that. I think it’s just what managing people is.

What I’d tell someone starting a remote team now

The pandemic version of this was extreme. But the underlying question isn’t going away. People’s lives are visible in a way they weren’t when everyone commuted to the same building. You will see people’s circumstances — their homes, their kids, their stress — whether you’ve planned for it or not.

That’s not a problem to manage. It’s a fact about what working with people actually is. The managers who handled 2020 well were the ones who already understood that work is a human activity, not a productivity equation.