This is the second of a two-part story on the shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on northern Nevada companies and workers.
It’s been eight months since Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered non-essential businesses to close their doors as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread throughout Nevada. For many, the closures resulted in job loss as the companies they worked for went under. For some fortunate others, it meant a transition to working from home—a new reality that may persist beyond the pandemic for a good number of them.
Earlier this week, This Is Reno published a story in which business executives spoke about the logistics of keeping their workforces employed while also sending them home. But what has the experience been like for the people whose work and home lives now exist under a single roof?
Creating space for work and life
Kambrya Blake-Levy is a media strategist for marketing and design firm The Abbi Agency, which began sending workers home a few days prior to Sisolak’s non-essential business closure order.
“I think, as far as this whole situation goes, I’m very fortunate,” she said. “I already had a home office set up because I was working on my master’s degree. I graduated with that in May, so I had a pretty cushy setup as far as a home desk and things like that. But I do know after talking with a lot of my co-workers, it was a bit of a mad scramble to get to the office and pack up their desks and bring their chairs home and their computers and all of that.”
Blake-Levy shares her home with her boyfriend, who also works remotely these days. He works in an office upstairs in their home, while her office has been set up in what was a dining room. Its central location in the house, close to the kitchen, presents some challenges.
“If I’m on a client call or an internal [call] and [he] needs to get in the kitchen and cook lunch or do laundry or my dog needs to go out and go to the bathroom, there’s no way for me to tune out that noise,” she said.
She said, luckily, her boyfriend is conscientious of these things.
“Obviously, animals aren’t as considerate about those types of things,” Blake-Levy said with a laugh. She’d begun the phone interview with This Is Reno with a disclaimer that her dog would likely start howling or barking at some point. It’s the type of reality in which she knows she’s not alone.
“It’s been my experience, too, just being on calls with so many media partners and clients that everybody is kind of going through the same thing,” she said. “So, it’s easier to just kind of laugh and shrug it off if you hear kids screaming in the background or dogs howling. It’s been nice because I feel like there’s been more compassion. We’re all doing this, and we all know what the difficulties are.”
For Zazzle Content Management Team member Adriana Hernandez, whose job it is to look over and polish designs submitted to the company before they’re printed on products, distractions come in another form.
“I live with a roommate who has two kids,” she said. “They’re not my kids, but the baby—who’s a little over a year old—kind of loves me. I’ve been there his whole life, and he just kind of loves me and always tries to get my attention… so, I definitely get distracted a lot.”
Hernandez used her bedroom as a workspace for a while but found this created problems of its own.
“I used to have my computer in my bedroom,” she said. “I had to move it into my living room because I ended up resenting my bedroom because I was in there all the time. If I wanted to be by myself or had work, I ended up being in my bedroom for, like, 12 hours a day, conscious.”
Now, Hernandez’s battle is to stay focused while in the living room space by avoiding shared things like the television as well as personal things like her phone and the distractions it presents. Still, both she and Blake-Levy say their productivity has improved during the months of working remotely.
Productivity required
For Melissa Taylor, executive director of Reno Little Theater (RLT), productivity has sky-rocketed—in part because she’s been doing all the work of what used to be a five-person staff since the theater closed, but also because she’s found her mothering duties increasing with kids who are also at home.
“So, I have three kids—and two of them are going to school online full-time right now,” Taylor said. “I have a 12-year-old who’s in seventh grade and a 9-year-old who’s in fourth grade. And then I have a 2-year-old. So, the biggest challenge for me is being able to continue to juggle the everyday realities of motherhood with work.”
“I actually feel like I have more work to do and feel more pressure now that [RLT is] shut down to make sure that we survive this. So, I feel like both my mothering and my work schedule have increased, and it’s just a really busy day every day.”
Taylor said she’s grateful for the flexibility provided by dealing with all of these things within the confines of her home but added, “I think what that tends to mean is that I haven’t taken a day off in several weeks. It’s a lot of just really kind of constantly going.”
Staying connected with the people who would normally patronize or support the theater in other ways takes up a fair amount of her time.
“I think the other part that can be really tricky for me—and maybe this is part of the non-profit side of it—is that I work with a lot of volunteers,” Taylor said. “So, we still have a board and some committees and people who are really graciously giving of their time—and I have to work around their schedules too.”
Staying in touch from a distance
To keep in touch with the theater community and theatergoers, Taylor and the leadership at two other local theaters—Good Luck Macbeth and Bruka—have created a collaborative group called Ghost Light TV that has helped provide theater content online to keep that arts community connected.
“We just launched a fundraising campaign called ‘I Saved Theater,’ where we’re collectively selling things like sweatshirts and masks and beanies,” Taylor said. “And we also just launched a video campaign where folks from the community are sharing their stories about how theater saved them, sort of so we can show people that when you’re continuing to support us even though we’re closed, you’re actually impacting real… people who get a lot from the theater.”
Taylor is currently a team of one trying to stay in touch with the broader community that supports her business. For others, there exists the challenge of maintaining cohesiveness within their work teams.
At The Abbi Agency, where Blake-Levy has worked for more than two years, this has been a company priority.
“We try to have, at least once a month, a company Zoom happy hour,” Blake-Levy said. “Abbi and Ty [Whitaker], our CEOs, will actually pay for us to have drinks. So, we’ll go and pick up pre-mixed cocktails from places like Craft.”
Hernandez said Zazzle has similar online gatherings—though not cocktail hours—but that she still feels the effects of not having in-person collaboration with her co-workers.
“We’ll do a weekly, in-camera talk for 20 minutes where we all can just be kind of silly and say, ‘Hi, I miss seeing everyone face to face’ and say happy things,” Hernandez said, but she added that getting to know new hires still presents challenges.
“That’s something I’ve thought about just when I work,” she said. “I’m like, there’s these new people coming in… and I have no idea what they know or what they could help me with. And I wish I did because, you know, I don’t know who to reach out to. It’s hard to learn from each other when we’re all apart like this because we don’t know what each other knows and what we can help each other with.”
Or, forming new bonds from a distance
For workers who are the new hires, this challenge can be exacerbated.
Steve Fine started his job as the communication director of the Nevada Cancer Coalition just days before Sisolak issued his business shutdown order in March.
“I saw my office—what would have been my office—on the interview, but then I didn’t see it again for several months,” Fine said. “We’d pop in, but we definitely did not organize together as a team for, gosh, a couple of months.”
Image: Eric Marks
While Fine was prepared for working from home, having run a home-based business with his spouse for four years prior to taking his current position, he found he still needed to adapt to working from home for a company in which he wasn’t the only new employee because the Nevada Cancer Coalition had doubled the size of its small staff in the months prior to the onset of the pandemic.
“In January, there were only three people,” Fine said. “And then we hired myself and two other employees. The first one came in and was able to work in her office for a couple of weeks. The second one came in for several days. And then, of course, I never came in.”
Nonetheless, he said, bonds have been formed between the coworkers during their months of working from home.
“Over the months, the three of us really did become quite close because we’re on Zooms quite a bit,” Fine said. “We have Zoom, and then we also have Microsoft Teams, and, so, we found ourselves taking… several hours a week that we would spend going back and forth, looking at each other, talking with each other—and it got to the point that we were comfortable just buzzing somebody without even asking if they could talk.”
While Fine said he misses an office environment in which he would have been able to interact face-to-face and pop his head into someone’s office for a conversation and be able to see “the nuances of the facial expressions” of his colleagues to know if he was “perhaps on the right track or not,” he nonetheless thinks of his new normal as largely a positive. And that’s something with which the remote workers who spoke to This Is Reno agree.
Balancing the bad with the good
Jen Eastwood is the director of public relations for another local marketing company, Foundry, where she’s worked for six years. She, like the others, has been working at home throughout the pandemic. A big change for Eastwood has been not overseeing regular events managed by the company.
“Where we saw the biggest change was this summer, where we [normally] represent some of the area’s largest events—so not having the Reno Rodeo and being in the photo pit and the media trailer with all of my friends,” she said. “That was tough. We didn’t do the Reno Air Races. We did do the Barracuda Championship [Professional Golf Association tour]; it was without fans, but we did still have a media presence up there—so that was kind of our little glimmer of normalcy in a summer that’s usually jam-packed with events.”
But, to Eastwood’s mind, there have still been a good number of upsides to working from home.
“I feel like I’ve adjusted pretty well,” she said. “A lot of what I do is writing, so it’s nice to have the quiet ability to get into deep thought… Even before the pandemic, if I did have a project where I needed to really concentrate, I would often work from home because the office can be distracting in that way.”
She added, “I think there’s aspects like that that I enjoy. I do miss seeing some faces around the office. I do miss that collaboration and just kind of the random chatter around the water cooler type of thing.”
In addition to using Zoom and Google chat and other things to stay connected, Eastwood said Foundry is doing its best to maintain a sense of camaraderie among its employees, especially as the holiday season approaches.
“We’re looking at fun ways for how we can stay engaged over the holiday season when we’re normally doing things like gingerbread house contests and different things where we’re all getting together,” she said.
So, too, are the companies for which Blake-Levy, Hernandez and Fine work.
At The Abbi Agency, Blake-Levy said, “They bought us all pumpkins, so we could carve those for Halloween. So, it’s just trying to find those little, personal connections. I think that’s really paramount to keeping everything afloat because it’s easy when you’re all disconnected to forget what it’s really like to collaborate and be outside of your own mental bubble.”
There are also more pragmatic benefits of which these workers are aware.
For Hernandez, these include not having to worry about the logistics of a daily commute via the public bus system.
“Not having to deal with the bus has been a true blessing—so, I punch in on time more often,” she said, adding, “I don’t have to worry so much about what I’m wearing. I can wear the same pants for three days in a row. That’s always a plus.”
For Fine, one of the benefits has also been avoiding a commute and the associated wear and tear and gas costs that come with operating his vehicle. He’s also pleased by what he sees as the natural time-savings and health benefits.
“You’re not driving an hour to work or [taking] an hour for lunch and getting all filled up on a stupid burger and coming back, and then you feel like you want to fall asleep by 2 o’clock if you’re sitting down,” he said. “That doesn’t exist when you’re at home because you’re eating more sensibly.”
For Fine—as well as Eastwood, Taylor, Blake-Levy and Hernandez—the future looks like it will continue to include working from home, at least for the time being. And, at the moment, all five say they’re happy to continue doing so.
Nonetheless, Fine said, “There’s all of these cultural things that are shifting where I think the long-term verdict is out… I would say let’s do a follow-up in six months to see how rosy that lens still is because we’re still in this honeymoon phase of working from home and all of this stuff. I would say the verdict is still out whether it’s positive or negative.”
