Below is an edited transcription of the recent podcast episode in which Mike Gardener of The Office Providers speaks with Beth Salt who is an Occupational Therapist.
Their conversation covers topics including work-life balance, the role of an occupational therapist, the role of the office, the return to work and how our working lives may look post-pandemic, as well as others.
The podcast episode can be found here: A TOPS Guest – Beth Salt, Occupational Therapist
The episode was recorded on the 12th November 2020.
Mike Gardener
Hi, Beth, thank you for being our first guest in this makeshift studio during yet another lockdown of 2020. I just wanted to have a chat with you about how you’ve experienced this year, what your role is, how that looked pre-2020, how it feels now and maybe how you feel it will look once all of this is passed and we get back to some form of normality (whatever that might look like).
Mike Gardener
Would you be able to introduce yourself and explain what it is you do?
Beth Salt
Hi, thanks for having me. I’m an occupational therapist by background and it’s been quite ‘different’ this year!
Beth Salt
I was previously doing quite a lot of travel but, for the majority of 2020, I’ve been working from home or at least more remotely. It’s been quite a big shift for me particularly. But I’ve also seen the shift for a lot of other people and I think it’s been like every situation – it’s got pros and cons.
Beth Salt
For some people, it will be very difficult, and for some people, it will be quite a nice relief from being all over the place and having to have a bit of an enforced break from travelling around.
Mike Gardener
So, an occupational therapist – a lot of people have heard of occupational health.
What exactly is the role of an occupational therapist? What would a typical day or week look like for you?
Beth Salt
I think I think it’s one of those professions that maybe is not considered to be quite so mainstream, although it is becoming more mainstream now, I think. People tend to confuse it with occupational health, but I’m not going to be the one assessing you for being OK to go back to work after a period of illness or injury.
We look at all occupations throughout the day. It’s not work focused, though that can be the focus. It’s about anything you do in your daily life being an occupation.
This has been quite, quite an interesting period, if we’re going to look at it objectively, just because a lot of the changes that have taken place over this year have had an impact on people’s occupations, not just from a work perspective.
One of the things that we look at is its work-life balance and balance in general, really.
When you’re in a position where you’re denied the ability to do certain things, however necessary it might be, that does create a shift in the balance of people’s lives. Work-life balance being only one of them.
Mike Gardener
Right. So it’s not about people’s occupation per se. It’s about people, how people use their time on a day-to-day basis – how they create balance in life and how people may live their best lives.
Beth Salt
I consider the role to be sort of a problem-solver, really, but not just problem-solving, but looking at how we use our own strengths to benefit us in areas that we find a bit more tricky.
So for me, working more remotely – I’ve had to generate a different routine to make sure that I’m able to function at the level I was functioning at, with all the distractions of being at home.
Beth Salt
I found it really useful to have a shower and put makeup on in the same way that I would if I was going to the office. It puts me in the work mindset because I’ve kept that part of my daily routine.
I think there’s a lot of people who maybe haven’t been set up so for working from home, and so we’ve been working from the couch or the dining room table.
Beth Salt
I think one of the things that I found useful is creating a workspace where I can be in that moment. I’m in work mode. I’m in the right frame of mind. And then that’s an area that I can shut down at the end of the day and allow myself to switch back into home mode. And I think that’s one of the things that a lot of people are missing because they don’t necessarily have the ability to do that or they have additional distractions at home.
Mike Gardener
I imagine it has been really difficult for a lot of people. I think the people that would have been able to transition into this period of enforced homeworking, they are the people that have done it through choice or their job looked like that pre-2020, they would have been able to almost practice for this.
They would have used trial-and-error and worked out how best to do it. Whereas this year, when it’s been forced upon people, on top of the stresses of being within a global pandemic, and then obviously the schools are shutting so people have had childcare issues and things like that, it would have been difficult.
You’re at the advantage that, I think, you’d done a bit of sort of homework before, but also you appreciate the work-life balance element.
So you can bring in your own personal experience plus your professional experience as well, I guess.
Beth Salt
I have done a bit of homeworking in the past, but not in a sort of structured way. It’s not been enforced. It’s been a bit ad hoc. If I’ve had a large amount of admin to catch up on, being out of the office environment, without the distractions of other people, it’s been easier to do that [in the past].
But I think now having to get into that new way of life, it’s just made me realise that one of the reasons I feel that we all enjoy our home life is because we’re coming back to it from an office.
And so having to have your work life and your home life in the same building is something that I think will impact on people in different ways.
And that’s what I mean when we look at balance, it’s not just balance about work life, it’s the balance of all those things that you enjoy doing or things that you have to do.
But it has demonstrated the importance of working. I guess for me, it’s not just something that you do because you need to pay the bills. I have the luxury of having a job that I love. Which is helpful, anyway.
But if you think about all of those elements being combined, work, home, family, leisure activities, anything that you do, if it’s all within the same four walls, there is a risk of a blurring those boundaries a little bit.
And I think I think lots of people have either found that it’s been very difficult to work from home in order to get into that work mindset because there are other distractions it might even if it’s just pets.
There has been [videos] on social media, hasn’t there, with people speaking on Zoom and the cat has come and joined in.
And so those sorts of distractions or even feeling because I’m at home, maybe I should be put in a little washing on or I should be, you know, running the Hoover around in a lunch break.
All of those things, if you’re outside of the home environment, then you don’t feel the pressure of having to do them.
I think there’s potentially been the risk that people are overestimating what they should be achieving and so I think there’s probably a lot of people who find, well, ‘because I’m at home, I might as well turn the computer on now and just work a bit later because I would be travelling at this time anyway’.
And actually, that travel time in itself, I find is a good time to just put some order to your thoughts.
And so if you’re then absorbing that, what would be travel time, into ‘oh, I feel like I should be put in the computer on’ – that’s not necessarily beneficial for some people.
Beth Salt
But yeah, I think it is much more difficult to find that balance without having a place to go and do your work and be in work mode.
Mike Gardener
It’s been blurred for quite a while hasn’t it, really. I guess since the mid-2000s when people started getting Blackberrys and you could pick up your email on your phone so people might be looking at their emails on the commute into the office or middle of the night, even.
But working from home, doing the same calls, doing your admin, everything, it can create even more of a blur?
I guess when it was just picking up emails on your phone, you could, if you had a work phone, actually just put that away at a certain time. But I guess now with people doing Zoom calls or Teams, Skype or anything like that.
[It can be] almost like an invasion, possibly, where you’ve got your boss is in your living or your employees. I think there are definite advantages, advantages to it.Beth Salt
If nothing else, it makes you keep on top of housework because I see what I can see into your living room!
Mike Gardener
If you’re working from home, you could attend a personal appointment in the middle of the day, whereas if you were actually in the office, you might have to book a bit of time off for that.
But if you start work a little bit earlier from your living room or your bedroom or your home office set-up, that wouldn’t be a problem. But it feels like people have to be even more mindful if they have this sort of cross over, just the mental health issues if nothing else.
People may have found, potentially, that they have become more productive – that that could be a novelty thing? Longer-term, I guess there could be some issues with people burning themselves out in their own homes, potentially?
Beth Salt
I think that’s something that I always, on a personal level, try to strive to achieve – that continued work-life balance. And part of that is about getting into a good morning routine. Keeping it as similar as if I was going into the office. Also, I’ve decided that the time that I would have spent travelling, I use it to go for a walk before the workday starts – I found that beneficial just in terms of, you know, general health and wellbeing.
That’s become part of my morning routine, which is something that I didn’t have the opportunity for before. That’s really benefited me, but I think that’s because I was so determined to go into it thinking, ‘OK, I need to make sure I keep this balanced because, otherwise, I’m either going to be completely burnt out or not achieving what I need to achieve. And so I think I probably work more, but I think I’m able to work smarter
I think from home, because I’ve been able to give myself some boundaries, that’s been really helpful.
It’s interesting that you mentioned mental health because you would think actually being at home and being able to be surrounded by your own things would improve mental health.
But that’s not always the case – sometimes you need to have different zones for different areas. For me, particularly, that’s why that’s what I find.
And it can be easy to slip into lifestyle choices that don’t necessarily benefit you.
And then if you’re not well and you’re not happy and content and have that balance, then ultimately it’s very difficult to provide the level of professionalism that you would want to.
Mike Gardener
In terms of sort of managing or curating your day, you have actually found some real advantages to working from home. And it sounds like you have a good level of autonomy over the type of work that you can do during a day as well. I guess that’s quite unique as to where you are in your career or within your company. But not everyone would actually have that – people who are just starting out say, for instance, if they’re sort of just starting out on their career path – I imagine that would be a little bit tougher.
Beth Salt
I don’t really know necessarily about starting out in a career, you know, from when you first qualified and it was your first job, for example. I’ve not necessarily had that experience, but we have welcomed new team members into work who we’ve met via video calls – organisations are just having to get used to that now.
I don’t know how it would feel for the people coming into a big team, and particularly without that face-to-face meeting.
You want to go into work and feel that you know your colleagues to a certain extent. I think that helps with people’s comfort levels.
That helps with openness and transparency within organisations. And I think those organisations that have embraced the technology, that’s been an easier segway into this new way of working, I imagine it’s been very difficult for organisations who haven’t had that at their fingertips. And they’ve had to not only develop those ways of working but then incorporate them at the same time. That’s probably quite a difficult transition to make.
Mike Gardener
On the sort of new starters – many offices are kind of set up to create sort of social zones, even if it’s just the kitchen areas and breakout areas just for an informal sort of meetup, for just touching down to just run over a project or review something.
Just making a brew for everyone on your pod, that type of thing – it creates that social knitting that you can’t really do via screens?
Beth Salt
As things are at the moment, that’s the only way that you that you’re able to build those connections.
Then there are people there that I feel I know better now because it’s almost easier to just pick up the phone because everyone’s picking up the phone [now].
It almost feels like you just walk over to someone’s desk and just say hi.
Mike Gardener
People are more accessible now.
Beth Salt
I’ve certainly experienced that. And I think as long as that doesn’t get to a point where there’s an expectation to be accessible all the time, then that’s a good thing,
Like I said earlier on, there are pros and cons to any situation and I think it’s all about making sure that you do have boundaries within your life. It depends on your industry as well as to how easy it is to set those boundaries and what your role is within that.
But there’s always going to be times as well where you want to go to a place of work. You can’t have one answer that suits everybody, and so some people may have really benefited from working from home, but I think for the vast majority, as you said, where they want to keep their family life separate or need to keep the family life separate because of the demand of that job [it can be difficult].
We want people to feel successful in all areas of their life and not feel like some part of their life is getting a bit of a raw deal. In 2020, in general, people have been deprived of the opportunity to do a lot of the things they would ordinarily do – holidays, days out, weddings, whatever it might be.
I don’t mean so maliciously, it’s just been a necessary part of the situation.
I’m not personally one of those people who’s always here, there and everywhere, but having experienced a little bit of annual leave during the lockdown and realising the impact of having spontaneity taken away, that had more impact than I thought it would.
Mike Gardener
On your leave, what did you do? Obviously, you couldn’t go anywhere, I take it there was a local lockdown or some form of enforcement at the time?
Beth Salt
There were restrictions in place. I wouldn’t ordinarily plan a lot – if I had some time off, I would just want to see where each day took me. But without that spontaneity, not a lot really!
Yes. And then I really did appreciate the benefits of work more so than just having an income. I just really appreciated the having that purpose.
Mike Gardener
So both the actual time off was appreciated more, potentially. And then also having the role to go back to – you had a different perspective.
Beth Salt
I felt a bit conflicted, in a way, because [I was] still in the same building.
My workspace that I have set up so that is a targeted area – I can still see that. And because I really enjoy my job, there was that bit of draw to it – ‘should I just check my emails, should I check-in and see how things are going’. And it was even more important to not do that.
I think for some people there’s comfort in having at your fingertips the ability to just keep an eye out for anything that’s going on. Yes. I think sometimes the unknown is more stressful than just keeping your eye on your emails.
Mike Gardener
Going on holiday and coming back to eight hundred emails in your inbox, that’s a stress without a doubt.
Beth Salt
Remote working probably means that whether people go back into the office when all this is over is less of an acute issue. It might be that some of those elements stay anyway so that people can manage that kind of anxiety of, ‘what am I going into a Monday morning?’
And so I guess that’s going to be something that would be interesting to see -how this translates when people go back into the office and how that improved connectivity translates back into the office environment. And it might be that that actually has some sort of existential impact on lots of things.
And so it might be that the people embrace this technology – I’ve heard about sort of Zoom Rooms within offices and I think there’s probably going to be quite a shift in people working more flexibly to get a balance of remote working and office life, and it will be interesting to see the shift.
Mike Gardener
We’ve been very lucky that during this lockdown, during this whole period, we have got excellent tech. Everyone that’s got a smartphone, more or less, can be on Zoom or other platforms, the cloud-based storage technology, which, you know, a lot of businesses and employees are really thankful for because they can carry on functioning. It’s difficult to have a general opinion on the whole thing because every industry and every company within the different industries are nuanced.
It’s just interesting to try to look at it from a sort of a general perspective.
On technology, there’s been a lot of talk over the recent years about people actually switching back to flip phones because they find all of the tech on their smartphones just too much. And that’s just on a personal level – that the screen time levels are kind of crazy – that’s having knock-on effects for them.
I wonder whether people will almost downgrade the tech in their homes just to shut off, even though.
Beth Salt
I don’t know, because it just comes back to that balance again. If you spent the day looking at a screen for work purposes. Then would you decide that you wanted to do away with your personal screens, know social media to compensate for that? Possibly not, I don’t know. People might want to keep their own smartphones for their own personal time, social media and that kind of all of that kind of stuff.
Because actually, it might feel too much like in order to make way for the technology that you experience through your work, giving up my own might be too much.
Mike Gardener
I’m in no way an expert, but I know that too much screen time is bad for you – the blue light can mess with people’s circadian rhythms, etc?
It would be interesting to know what people’s average screen times are this year if that if they’re having to do most of their work on a screen during the day where they might be spending eight hours on the screen, nine to five, whereas that could be significantly more than it was when they were working in offices and not home working. And then, when the working day, in inverted commas, finishes, people are still using their screens in the same way that they were when they were in offices.
People’s exposure to screens must be quite a bit higher this year, I imagine?
Beth Salt
I don’t know, because I don’t know enough about it to know whether the people who are experiencing a lot of screen time at home would be experiencing less screen time. If things were, quote-unquote, back to normal, it’s very difficult to measure, isn’t it?
I imagine the people who are able to do their job from home, from a screen are probably the kind of roles that were able to be conducted in that way anyway.
Mike Gardener
I don’t think I asked you what a sort of typical day or week would have looked like and how it will look like, in your view, moving forward.
I believe you did quite a lot of travelling because you had a lot of fieldwork – you would go to people’s homes or workplaces.
Beth Salt
I think I think a lot of that has been able to be mitigated quite well really.
Having embraced technology, I’ve managed to achieve the same sort of functionality. Obviously, it’s nice to go and see people face to face, human contact is really important. And so I hope that moving forward, a kind of middle ground can be found. Because I think in terms of my own work-life balance, I was spending a lot of time in the car.
In terms of physical health and stuff, I didn’t have time to dedicate to my own self-care, really, in the way that I wanted to. So. I think if it can settle into some sort of middle ground, that would be preferable for me.
Mike Gardener
You were spending a lot of time in the car, on the motorway and in service stations etc. but now you’re not really doing much of that. It’s mainly at home, but it’s about finding a new balance.
Beth Salt
I’m a firm believer that it is all about balance. We need to find balance in our lives and in our minds. You know, diet, all of those things.
Beth Salt
Being in a position where you’re denied the majority of the things that benefit you is not good, but equally, one of the reasons we appreciate our leisure pursuits is because it’s offset by things that we do because we have to, even if it’s the housework. I do think it is about finding that balance and not just for people as individuals, but for organisations as well.
Mike Gardener
Interesting on the diet thing as well – you mentioned that while you were out on the road a lot, there are not many healthy food options, I guess. So that’s another advantage to working from home, I guess, is that you can actually cook your own nice, healthy lunch?
Beth Salt
I think, you know, you can still do that.
It’s a choice that you make, isn’t it, not to prepare something to take into work and decide, ‘Oh, I’ll just wing it and go to a cafe stop at the services’.
And this is given me an opportunity to reprioritise, because if I was on the road for many hours a week, and hours of the day on top of my working day, I might not consider it to be a priority to spend the little time I had at home prepping meals.
And so so now, actually, if I found that happy medium, I am able to reprioritse things like that and make sure that I was a bit more prepared or had some better ideas, at least for what I could eat on the hop, as it were.
I think it’s probably made a lot of people consider what their priorities are. How much do they really need some of the aspects of their lifestyle that they had before and those things that they felt that they really didn’t need?
Going into the office and probably on reflection, now reprioritising that and thinking, actually, I do need that, I need that human contact, I need to go in and have a chat with somebody in the office.
Mike Gardener
I think a lot of people would have been under a lot of stress collectively. The whole of society has been in a global pandemic and then there’s obviously stresses over job security. However, the people that have managed to carry on working from home and haven’t had the stresses of job security, they have had that time to reflect and have a look at their whole work-life balance and as you say, their priorities, whether they be health, mind, body, spirit, occupation.
Hopefully, there can be some benefits that have come out of this period.
Beth Salt
As it’s been such a catastrophic event for so many people, it will be difficult to see the positives, initially.
If those positives can be seen, however small they may be, it might give us an opportunity to play to people’s strengths more and think about being more creative and, moving forward, and evolving in that sense.
That could be a benefit that comes out of an otherwise very difficult situation.
Mike Gardener
I think that’s a good note to end on.
I know that you’ve got other Zoom calls and the other appointments today.
Thank you very much for being our first guest.
Beth Salt
Thanks for having me.
Mike Gardener
Not at all. And you’re welcome back at any time – it’d be great to chat further.
This podcast episode was recorded 12th November 2020.
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