Hey everyone, welcome back to another week of Recruiting Reality, the show where we pair up hot topics in the entertainment industry with some helpful recruiting tips. This week we’re going to talk all about boundaries, especially in the remote work setting. And although this may not be the current entertainment topic, we’re going back and we’re talking about the Devil Wears Prada.
So Liz, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the show? Absolutely. So we’re throwing it back to 2006, Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep. If you haven’t seen it, it is a good movie. And essentially it follows the journey of a gal who gets into the fashion industry, supporting a very demanding editor. And, it delves very deeply into blurred lines between work and personal life and setting boundaries, and we thought this would be the perfect segue into talking about setting boundaries at work, in a remote work environment.
Shania, what do you think? It’s definitely harder in a remote work environment to shut off the computer, shut off your phone, shut off your notifications. I do a terrible job at this. I feel like any, even all my candidates, I’m like, “Oh, I’m pretty available. Like shoot me a text whenever, even if it’s this evening.” And as soon as I get any message, whether that’s a Gmail notification, a G chat notification, I try to respond to it no matter what I’m doing. Whether I’m at dinner with my family and my husband, or whether I’m sitting watching a TV show to wind down at the end of the night.
I do not have good boundaries when it comes to this. So I’m learning, I’m trying to follow the tips that others have given me. But has this been a struggle for you as well, turning off work mode, going into life mode? A thousand percent. I think too, just having our office space in our home, we’re constantly seeing it.
And there is this idea of flexibility versus availability. And what does that look like? Yes, being in a remote work environment offers a lot of flexibility, but it also gives this perceived notion of I am available 100% of the time. And we’re not like we have to remember to take time for ourselves.
And some of the tips we’ve seen that, you know, we’d love to share with you all and that Shania and I promise we will try to employ ourselves. No guarantees. I’ve seen people suggest, you know, physically actually shutting their laptop down. Kind of imagine you’re in an office and you literally close your laptop.
Close your computer and say I’m leaving for the day. Do not go back. You know, once it’s closed, it is closed for good. Changing your outfit when you log off of work, so it’s like you go from work mode to now I’m in my home mode. I know you had a really good one we were talking about earlier when it came to notifications.
Yeah. Yeah. So at Hirewell, we use the Google suite. So I got told to set my Gmail and G chat notifications to be off at five so that it’s not tempting. Like there’s no notification that’s going to pop up on my phone to make me be like, “Oh, I can just respond to that real quick,” which is also really, it’s really hard to do so and let that go.
And like I said, I’m not good at it. I don’t do it right now. But I do think that’s a great tip for people who want to try to go about it, and I really do want to get better at it, but it’s such a work in process, like you said, the flexibility versus availability thing and-
Yeah. All of that, it’s, I want to be a good teammate, and to me a lot of that in my brain is alignment to getting back to people fast, but-
Being available all the time, yeah.
I don’t need to get back to them at 8:00PM at night, but in my head I’m like, “Oh, I can do it real quick.” So it’s just, something I’m working on. Yes, we are going to keep working on it. I think one final tip we’ll leave you with is just set clear expectations. Yes. If you’re going to be out of the office with your teammates, like you can even put on your calendar not taking calls at this time.
So set clear expectations. Don’t be afraid to abide by those expectations. And if you have any tips to share with us, please put ’em in the comments and we will try them out for y’all.
