Iāve been quite positive at home and at work for almost the year, but I had a little bit of a drop at the turn of the year.
When we first went into lockdown, as with most tech companies we moved to 100% remote working. My band couldnāt meet up but we would still meet up over Zoom.
In the early days of remote working, especially for my team it was important that we organised time to just chat. So we would have a weekly chat about anything other than work and it was going well and giving people a lot of relief and fun. For my band our weekly Zoom calls we would play along to youtube videos of the music we were practicing and follow that up with a 30 min chat.
However in the last couple of months, my team wasnāt so chatty and especially in the latest lockdown. The same went for my band, the āhow is everyoneā was being met with silence and I felt a lot of responsibility as the team leader and āpositiveā guy to keep peoples spirits up. But I was starting to notice this year that it was just me talking and started to become paranoid wondering if the problem was actually me.So I started to feel the burden a bit.
The good thing was I talked to individuals on a 121 basis, to try and identify the problem and found a consistent theme. They were so low about the lack of personal activities that working/music was their release from that. They really didnāt want to be talking about what are they doing for the weekend because there was nothing to talk about. So that instantly gave me some relief identifying the problem and gave me the energy to keep going, and rather than avoid work in our social chats, embrace it.
It reminded me, for work even if youāre a lead you can talk to your team and colleagues if youāre feeling low and get help. For my band, I just keep the music going, post my own videos, buy my own music and in our Zoom calls talk more about the music to engage people.