Like it or not… Work-Form-Home IS the new norm!
It’s been more than a year since the social restrictions and the imposed Work-From Home arrangements due to the Covid-19 situation here in Singapore.
The way we all work is already adapted and changed to meet these arrangements – not just on a logistical basis but also not forgetting from a psychological and welfare point of view.
Watch this video version of the article, where I share and introduce to you 8 different profiles, the specific difficulties that they might experience with this work-from-home situation.
Managing The Psychology For Working-From-Home
I’ve found that the struggles that many team leaders and managers faced during this period, go beyond just setting aside and putting the work arrangements in place.
But also, it is about taking care of the people in your team, catering to needs and the different ways each individual had in adjusting to these arrangements.
In this article, I share and introduce to you 8 different profiles, the specific difficulties that they might experience with this work-from-home situation.
These may be useful ideas for you as Managers, to figure out how we can best help these members to adjust a little better.
*P.S. These ‘Profiles’, that I’ll be talking about, belong to a Psychological Astrology system I’ve personally developed. They explain different psychological behaviour traits based on the different astrological indicators of the charts. To find out more and to know which profiles you have, click here.
Let’s dive straight in.
1) The Hedonist (Venus-Jupiter)
These people actually really enjoy the social element in the workplace – it’s things like water cooler gossip in the pantry, lunches with the co-workers, or even meeting which it’s a great excuse to have a lot of these social interactions.
Because of the lack of the physical environment, and being in meetings (having bosses constantly listening in) can be quite a boring period for them without the gossip. People with this profile are craving for some kind of non-work interaction.
One way that I’ve seen this work is to introduce lunches on online meetings, where everyone’s eating in front of the cameras but nobody’s allowed to talk about work. Everyone’s free to interact and talk as it was with physical meal times, before the restrictions.
2) The Warrior (Mars-Jupiter)
People with this profile need a lot of activity going on. In a physical workplace, it was easy to find things to do, there were meetings to run to, places to visit clients at.
However, this changed with taking things online. Just emailing their work over once they’re done can be kind of a downer for a lot of these Mars-Jupiter people. Sometimes, what they’re looking for is that physical activity.
What I’ve seen some companies do is to incorporate exercise activities together with the group, especially during those months when lockdown restrictions meant that people can’t go out to the park or the gym to get their exercise. It’s a good way to get together and encourage social interaction.
3) The Builders (Mars-Saturn)
For people with this profile, working with their hands can be very important. An example could be a bartender. This is somebody who needs a high level of physical activity. They’ll need to hold the bottles in their hand, hold the shakers or cut the fruits.
The work-from-home period can be especially tricky as sometimes they’re not even allowed to physically be in the premises. It may be quite difficult and cause them to feel pretty much disengaged.
So some creative ways which companies have done is to get these individuals to list down things like procedures, standard operating steps or creating tutorials through recording in written form or to get them to physically demonstrate the work.
4) The Achiever (Sun-Saturn)
For The Achiever, they are super hardworking people, you won’t have to wonder if they are actually doing their job even when you can’t see them.
However, one of the struggles is that they don’t know if what they’ve done is correct or not. There’s an inherent need for validation and feedback. This becomes a problem when the completed task or assignment is simply being uploaded onto the system, without any feedback.
For a person with this profile, they will start to wonder if they had gotten the work right or whether it was sufficiently good enough. That anxiety creates a lot of stress because of the lack of feedback.
The solution to this is pretty obvious and straightforward. They simply need to be told if the work is sufficiently done or should it require any improvements.
5) The Caretaker (Moon-Saturn)
People with this profile are kind of similar to The Achiever (above) in the sense that they’re really hard-working people, but because the Moon is involved, it will be related to emotions and personal relationships.
The Caretaker wants to make sure that everyone in the team is doing okay, they want to know how everyone is feeling. They want to know that they’re really doing a good job for people.
Similar to the suggestion of having lunches online, it will be useful for individuals with this profile as well, because they do need that emotional connection.
I often find that if you are a team leader, there’s a good chance that you yourself might have Moon-Saturn, and it’s a great way for the people that you lead to be able to give feedback to you if they’re having any difficulties emotionally.
6) The Curator (Venus-Saturn)
People with the Venus-Saturn profile need a tangible result of the action taken, such as a printed completed report. For example, they may be very used to having stacks of paper and folders and files on their tables as a physical outcome of the work they produce.
Of course, with taking work activities online, they are required to have a huge mental adjustment to the way they work. What they don’t realize is that a lot of the value that they create is actually in a digital format – not necessarily needing it in the physical form.
Having a progress bar or a way of displaying what has actually been completed will be very useful for individuals with this profile.
7) The Strategist (Moon-Pluto)
For a person with the Moon-Pluto profile, can often be very sensitive to silence and non-communication. Just like The Achiever and The Caretaker profiles, feedback is very important to them. Additionally, they need emotional social feedback as well.
“Do you still like me?”, “Are we still friends?”, “Are we still good with each other? – these are the common thoughts running through the individual’s mind and can somewhat be a form of emotional insecurity.
Hence, it’s quite important to have those sharing and feedback sessions online. During which no actual work is being done, but rather, for people to express what are some of the insecurities that they are feeling.
8) The Transactor (Venus-Pluto)
Networking and relationship-building is key to the way people with this profile work well with. The kind of working style would be based on the relationship and social connection with people. For this reason, you might find this profile quite present in professions such as salespersons or individuals who are in the insurance or property industry.
With the social restrictions, it might pose a challenge for many people with this profile to meet up with their clients for coffee sessions like they’ve done so in the past. They may find it uncomfortable to provide their services without having built the relationship first.
By looking at the way things are, this idea of building a relationship via digital channels is going to be pretty common from now on. Picking up additional skills such as learning how to build digital relationships or even creating videos may be very crucial for longer-term sustainability.
These 8 profiles are just a random selection of how various people are experiencing WFH in their own unique way.
There are way more profiles and more different ways in which individuals have developed their own styles of working from home – but there’s no time to cover them all!
I hope that covering these have given you ideas on how to best involve your team, to work more effectively alongside your team members and to create better working environments that will be able to engage everyone.
Happy WFH!
Psychological Astrology.
No WOO-WOO & Fluff!
Throughout the years, Astrology has gotten a bad reputation and is known for teenage girls using it to match their next crush, or going on about mystical and superficial fluff.
However, Psychological Astrology takes an entirely different approach. We go deep into psychological behaviour, thought patterns and mindset – identifying the core reasons why individuals face the different challenges and issues that plague them psychologically.
At Selfstrology Academy, the focus is in using astrology as an excellent troubleshooting diagnostic tool – not just to teach just the planets, signs, houses, and the boring technicals of astrology. We go to the root of what it means and how it influences real life, and always applying astrology to a practical context.