During our latest Centre for Sustainable Healthy Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC) ‘comms’ club meeting, two female colleagues attended the meeting with their young babies bouncing on their laps. This has gotten me so inspired by the naturalness of life, and that the intuitively amazing work-life balance that the two women portrayed boldly and happily should not be let to pass.

My blog celebrates the strength and boldness of Dr. Caryn Abrahams from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Dr Ye Shihua from Nankai University, Tianjin, China. Many thanks to you, Caryn and Shihua, for giving us reason to reinvent ourselves and reboot our workplace culture.

This revelation exposes us to opportunities within what we may initially see as challenges. Indeed, the shift to online working may have just brought us into more meaningful relationships with ourselves, families and colleagues. In the normal working day, parents have to hear crying babies and run through backdoors to escape to work, in order to be on time for that serious meeting. In the context of the developing world, we have always left our ‘babies’ with nannies and babysitters simply because our maternity leave is over, and we will run into trouble with the human resources office if we do not report back to work at a particular time. We leave the house rushing to work, to answer a call of duty and yet, not so many workplaces in our context are mom-friendly - for instance equipped with breastfeeding rooms or childcare stations.

With the Covid-19 restrictions, we are being asked to work from home, and this has direct impacts on our work-life balance as we are experimenting on how to co-exist in our homes. On one hand, who belongs to our home is more than us, or children, right? And they know it. Threatening kids to get them to remain silent while you work doesn’t work at all. And for how long will we keep tucking away our babies (children) in order to attend our serious meetings? Every parent reading this knows how anxious the little ones get when we don’t pay attention to them and ‘pretend’ to be doing some crazy things on laptops or video meetings in our bossy languages. The young ones do not understand any of this. They do not understand what other business we have to do at home other than care for them, and only them. They will instead look for all innovative derailing tactics just to get a parent to focus on them;  if still young they will cry it out, if a little older, they will bang doors or squeak at the top of their voices, for no other reason than just to get their parents or guardians to pay attention to them exclusively. Our children have somehow had enough of the TVs, tablets and phones, since they were probably given excess access to those during lockdowns, so gadgets may no longer be working as a means to occupy children at home so that parents can get some office work done. Children may as well have known that those are just tricks to separate them from reality, which is what gadgets do to us all.

On the other hand, the ‘stay home’ practice has opened our homes and families, albeit virtually, to our colleagues, be it at work or school. Our colleagues now know if we have a noisy dog at home, or live near the road, or what the interiors of our houses look like and above all if we have small children who also need our attention. We may not be seeing each other physically, but we are getting to see a lot more of each other virtually.

Parents have always had to craft ways of stitching together their families and work. Although many still bring their children to online meetings, they will keep the videos off and multitask throughout the session. Hasn’t Zoom taught us the concept of a ‘Zoom suit’? – looking sharp and professional from the waist up. Obviously, the lower half of us can still remain informal and coordinate other domestic chores during a meeting and turning the video off remains the super savior. 

In a world where homeschooling became the norm during the pandemic, older children have also had to attend virtual meetings as their ‘new way of life’ and they probably have gotten an idea of what their parents and guardians are doing on the screen. On a positive note, children became more and more understanding and the inevitable Zoom fatigue and internet hitches have taught them to be patient in life as well. There have also been discussions on instructors’ contact hours versus learners’ screen hours, and these go a long way in shaping our children’s current education and hence their future workplace culture as well. However, on a negative note, the pandemic has also exacerbated existing inequalities owing to both limited and varied access to learning opportunities and resources such as computers, electricity and the internet. This is so because children’s learning during the pandemic largely relies on a household’s social, economic and domestic circumstances, which not only vary from one family to another but can also be dependent on support and resources within the surrounding neighbourhood.

Since the impact of the pandemic has been projected to happen in several waves and varies across contexts, these circumstances keep changing, but the boundary between the workplace and domestic space is expected to get more and more blurred. A real crack in the ceiling of our workplace culture! Indeed, if we take the inspiring example from Caryn and Shihua, we will no longer need to let our ‘conscience’ melt away just because a toddler storms their way into our meetings. Sympathy is an integral part of our lives and there is a limit to how much ‘concealing’ it can materialize. We can own it more, embrace it deeper and work better with it.

Dr Josephine Malonza is a Lecturer at University of Rwanda and a researcher for the Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC).