As project managers, many of us are in the fortunate position of being able to work from home right now. But for some of us, working from home full-time has completely erased the boundary between work and home life—home offices have popped up on our kitchen tables, break room shop talk has been replaced with sorting laundry, and winding down before bed now includes one last read-through of tomorrow’s client pitch deck. Knowing when to turn different parts of ourselves on an off has never been less clear. As a result, productivity porn is everywhere, providing a steady stream of content about the importance of establishing a daily routine, that one weird trick for setting up a productive home workspace, and why you should continue to wear pants. Juggling very different parts of our lives while living and working in a single physical space can be hard, but there’s more to the story.
We’re not just working remotely. We’re working remotely against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s threatening our health and safety, limiting our mobility, and isolating us from one another. Moreover, Covid-19 isn’t a singular catastrophe that we experience all at once. It’s a rolling wave of uncertainty where we’re not sure what’s coming tomorrow, next week, or next year. For me, this turmoil and ambiguity are feeding a constant, low-level dose of stress into almost everything I do, every day.
It feels subtle, but I’ve noticed that I’m a little less considered than usual, a little quicker to respond, a little less willing to listen. Yet as much as this stress is starting to suppress my regular, non-pandemic behaviour, it also feels familiar. I cut my teeth as a project manager coordinating remote and isolated scientific research teams in the Canadian Arctic, and although that project wasn’t managed during a viral outbreak and near-total economic collapse, I’m seeing some similarities.
My experiences in the North have informed my perspective on how isolated teams work together remotely, and what I can expect from myself, while under duress. I’ve seen organized, high-performing teams devolve into dysfunction while dealing with isolation in a hostile environment, and I’ve learned how isolation is capable of eroding my own ability to empathize and think clearly. I don’t have a go-to list of tips and tricks for combatting the effects of isolation, but I would like to share a couple of experiences that might resonate with what you’re going through as you manage yourself and your teams in these weird times.
Us vs them
Projects live and die by the quality of their communications. Even with in-person interactions, keeping teams aligned, clients engaged, and management informed can be a big challenge. When I’ve worked with people who are not only remote but also working in isolation and under stressful conditions, I’ve noticed I can have a hard time managing my expectations about the quality and quantity of communications I give and receive.
During each field season that I spent in the Arctic, my boss and I had to coordinate travel and accommodations for over 100 people and thousands of pounds of cargo to, from, and within the Arctic over a two-month span. This required interfacing with commercial airlines, charter operators, the US Air National Guard, and the Canadian government. My boss and I would be stationed 165km apart on separate islands—almost the same distance between Seattle and Vancouver—with only a flaky satellite phone link and extremely limited internet access (by today’s standards) to connect us. This was before smartphones existed, and before video calls became commonplace.
I loved living and working at the government facility where I was stationed in Resolute Bay because it was so functional—everything and everyone there had a clear purpose. But it didn’t take long for that environment to start changing me. I was working seven days a week, from when I woke up to when I went to bed. The sun never set, so it was easy for the end of the day to pass me by unnoticed—11:30pm looked a lot like 10 am. Entertainment options were pretty much limited to the few books and DVDs I had packed for the trip, and hikes weren’t as often as I would have liked because of things like limited emergency support (if something went wrong), and the risk of running into a polar bear (a small risk, but an unnerving one). There were other people around, but most of them cycled through the facility quickly and weren’t working on the same project as me.
To recap: I had a limited variety of things to do, saw the same people, had the same conversations, in the same physical space for weeks on end. The isolation-induced fatigue that set in felt a lot like permanent jet-lag.
Instead of continuing to feed our frustrations, we could have chosen to understand that we were probably experiencing stresses that weren’t visible to each other
Due to extremely temperamental weather, it wasn’t uncommon for aircraft to be grounded for days at a time, punctuated with short windows of viable flying weather. My boss and I were aware of the logistical challenges ahead of us, so we worked out a tight communications plan for coordinating flights before we parted ways. We scheduled two satphone check-ins per day, one in the morning and one in the evening, and we agreed to keep each other updated in between by email. The plan was simple, clear, and began to fall apart within a couple of weeks.
My boss frequently missed our check-in times. When we did connect, the details that he shared with me would often be out of date by the time I had to act on them, which was a problem for all of our logistics partners—they couldn’t plan properly if they didn’t have timely, accurate information. An “Us versus Them” mentality between my boss and I grew. I remember thinking: How hard is it to be available at 6 pm for a phone call? Why isn’t he taking this as seriously as I am? The dulling effects of my daily routine, of not having meaningful contact with my family and friends who were located thousands of kilometres away, of having to be mindful of safety hazards when I just wanted a walk to clear my head all began to erode my ability to empathize.
The crackly, long-distance conversations between my boss and I became increasingly heated—it turned out my boss had his own stress-fueled laundry list of complaints about me, too: among other things, I wasn’t providing him with updates about last-minute changes. I didn’t think that trekking all the way from a logistics partner’s office back to the corner of my room that got decent WiFi so I could write an email was worth the hassle. Even though my boss and I were both solid communicators, the mental hurdles we were both facing made it easier to see each other as adversaries than to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
To paraphrase Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance. In this case, it wasn’t my boss’ ignorance but my own. Based only on tiny snippets of visibility into his day, it was easy to tell myself a story about his negligence. And it was easier for my boss to think up stories about my negligence rather than take my WiFi situation seriously. But instead of continuing to feed our frustrations, we could have chosen to understand that we were probably experiencing stresses that weren’t visible to each other. After all, we were only able to speak to each other for a few minutes every day—who knows what we were dealing with the rest of the time? I couldn’t comprehend that everything that was happening to me wasn’t actually about me, especially when I was taking up so much room in my little isolated world.
These days, when I wonder why a co-worker isn’t responding to my Slack message about what branch the most recent version of the code is on (and I can see them posting gifs in #random), or why a client hasn’t responded in over a week to my email about the SOW revisions (while reading their liked posts on LinkedIn), I force myself to practice resilience and try to remember that there’s probably a reason. It’s not that they’re not good at their job or that they don’t like me. Maybe they’re overwhelmed juggling work and full-time care for their kids. Maybe they’re stressed out about their parents who are living in a care home on the other side of the country. Maybe they’re just not in the right headspace to get back to me at this moment. The pandemic is affecting everyone differently, and we can’t assume that someone else’s experience of it is the same as ours.
When we’re not at our best, it’s easy to assume the worst. Our teams, our managers, and our clients are not our adversaries.
Red alert
The pandemic is also reminding me of how the effects of isolation can take a part-time micromanagement hobbyist and turn them into a self-styled, full-blown firefighter. I learned this lesson one day in the main office tent of our project’s research station. After over a month that felt like one long day without seeing the sun go down, talking to the same people all day every day, and slowly making my way through our DVD library until my remaining option was Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the team was still functional but it was definitely harder to keep our minds fresh. As I sat at my desk, cold and uninspired, the radio crackled to life to report an injury in the field.
Our science team was reporting that an ATV had tipped over, injuring the driver’s foot. They were about five kilometres away from the station, they couldn’t get the ATV started again, and although the driver’s injury wasn’t serious, he wasn’t in shape to walk home. Suddenly, our sleepy office jumped into overdrive—there’s something to do! We were all on our feet. Opinions were flying hard and fast. Some pointed at maps, almost knowingly, as our emergency response crept forward. Because we were tired, cold, and crabby from under-stimulation, we felt like we needed a win. All of us wanted to help, and none of us thought to do the one thing that would actually be helpful: ask John what to do.
John was our base camp manager. He’s also been the lead field guide for the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program for longer than I’ve been alive. He’s soft-spoken and unassuming, but hard-nosed and gritty in all the ways you’d want someone to be if you ever needed someone to save your life. He’s recovered more meteorites while exploring the Antarctic than anyone else in history, not that he’d tell you that himself. This was the guy none of us looked to when we needed to rescue an injured scientist in the Arctic.
While the rest of us debated the pros and cons of emergency action plans that we didn’t have the wherewithal to implement, John quietly gathered the supplies he needed, plunked a helmet on his head, fired up his ATV, and took off for the site of the accident. He didn’t need to consult a map because he made it his business to know where the science team was headed before they left and where they were now based on their radio call-ins. He was calm. He was deliberate. He knew what to do.
I like to remember this story with a project manager cast in the role of the Arctic Hero—the PM taking cool, decisive action with steely resolve while everyone else flails around uncontrollably. Right now, project stakeholders are going to be under a lot of stress for a variety of reasons, and the PM will often be one of the very few people who know enough about a project’s nuances to be able to formulate a plan and execute. So if a project’s schedule starts teetering toward the danger zone, expect your management to step in more forcefully with “ideas” than they otherwise might. If a client starts pushing back hard in your change request negotiation, don’t be surprised if an engineering lead starts over-promising. If you find out your account manager has already reached out to the client about that outstanding invoice after you just sent your follow-up, remember to stay calm. Instead of waiving your RACI table at them, try to demonstrate kindness and resilience. You can either choose to believe that these people don’t think you can do your job, or that they’re just trying to help and they’re looking for a win wherever they can find one right now.
But I’m also having to remember that the PM isn’t always the hero, much like I wasn’t that day in the Arctic. Sometimes a fire isn’t actually a fire. Other times it is, but I might not be the best person to put it out no matter how good my intentions are. Whenever I feel that rush of excitement teasing me out of my isolation-induced fog, I need to think back to John and take a moment to sort myself out.
Stop, breathe, think. Then act.
Silver lining
This is a challenging time for everyone. We’re all operating at less than our full capacity in some way right now due to reduced social interactions, risks to our health and safety, and confinement to our homes. We might be bored, anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed. It might be difficult to work through those feelings, but we need to be kind and patient with our co-workers and with ourselves. I’m reminding myself that co-workers aren’t adversaries, to be patient with the firefighters, to pump the breaks a little bit when I feel a call to jump into the fray, and to remember that what’s happening to me might not be about me.
When we’re on the other side of the Covid-19 crisis, whatever that might look like, we’ll be different people. I hope that we take whatever we might be learning right now about the people involved in our projects and in our lives, and emerge being able to offer more kindness and more resilience, even when the stakes aren’t quite as high.
