My work family and other animals
If that that headline makes no sense you should find the book My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell immediately. It fits brilliantly with what I have to say today. You see, the book is about how everyone in a family unit is different – special, strange, unique, or however you want to put it – but when all put together it works.
That’s what it’s like at Viper IT – if someone’s going through a hard time, we’re all there for them. We laugh together, cry together and grow together – and that’s why we work so well as a team and a business.
But at the moment we can’t have that camaraderie, that pillar of support, because we’re all operating from our separate homes. Sure, we still speak, of course we do – but it isn’t the same.
On a personal level my plans for the future – or at least the next year or so – have been thrown into disarray. I was supposed to get married, for one. And as a business we were thinking of possibly moving to bigger premises, with more space and a bigger set up. But what now?…
Right now we’re in the here and now, living from moment to moment. Because we have to – we all have to just live day to day, week to week, because none of us has any idea what’s going to happen next. We’ve all got friends that will convince us that one thing or another is going to happen, but the truth is nobody knows.
So now, more than ever, we need to operate as a family unit, a team. I mean my actual family, but I also mean my work family. We’ve got to be there for each other now more than ever, to make sure we’re all doing ok.
What we’ll need when we all go back to work is hard to say, beyond each other. Because as a business first and foremost we are a family. The question now is, if we are to stay as a band of brothers (which includes the girls) do we need the office and the chatter or should we save money, forget the office and all work at home? Will it be the same? I am tempted to think not, I think having a communal space is important. But that’s just what I’m thinking right here, right now, and as we all know only too well, what matters now might not tomorrow and our priorities might completely change. Who’s to say?
I’ve got business planning and team support on the mind. My priority is keeping the family together as a unit, but we’ll just have to see what happens in this ‘new normal’ that everyone keeps talking about, and figure it out as we go along, just like we’re doing right now.
Stay Safe.
