“I am in the desert”: why self-isolation turned out to be a serious stress for us and what it all resulted in

Everything that does not kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I started writing this article shortly before the New Year holidays, but then I started to twirl, and as a result only the first few paragraphs turned out (I will leave them here as a wonderful reminder of that period). I am completing the text at the end of the second month of self-isolation in an apartment with two children. But the article now turns out not only (and not so much) about working in the world of information security, but about working in modern quarantine conditions. I will try to describe how we survive through this period, through the prism of subjective perception of reality and my specialty, a psychologist that is not quite common for information security.

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So I wrote back in December. Now the “end of the year” can be easily deleted and replaced with a more relevant one: “pandemic”, “self-isolation”, “coronavirus”, “quarantine” (underline as necessary).

Back in March, the Ministry of Industry and Trade compiled a list of backbone companies that should work, despite the pandemic. Rostelecom-Solar was on this list, and we continued to work in the "former" mode. Well, as before ... Changes in monitoring Solar JSOC continued to stand up on duty in full force: someone from the office, someone from home. Everything was complicated by the fact that our branches are in different cities, and the regime of self-isolation everywhere was introduced differently. Engineers on duty shifts, which self-isolation found on a legal weekend, their leader, loading up as a Bukhara merchant, transported monitors home.

In general, the udalenka phenomenon is uncharacteristic for us. The reason for this is both a feature of the work that we perform for customers, and the need for a large number of screens with information critical for us. It turns out that the employees were pulled out of the familiar environment and expect that they will work as before. And in conditions when “operational reports” of the coronavirus are heard from each iron, from which, even cats are said to be dying in batches, working with the same level of involvement and productivity turns into a harsh quest and a constant fight against stress.

Why is stress dangerous?

Let's first decide what stress is. What the majority understands by this term is actually nothing more than nervous tension, not stress. Nervous tension is a deviation resulting from overloads of a psycho-emotional nature. The most common causes of nervous tension in the modern world can be almost anything: unrealized plans, lack of rest, negative emotions, and a bunch more. Stress, on the other hand, is a combination of normal body reactions to external adverse factors. And this is generally never what most people put into this concept.

From the perspective of psychophysiology of the two characteristics of stress - duration and strength - the first is much more important. Short-term strong stress shakes the person, as it were, after which all indicators of the body return to normal. And prolonged, albeit not so strong, stress causes depletion of protective forces, and especially the immune system. With a long exposure to a stressor on a person, changes begin to occur in the body, against which psychosomatic symptoms appear. If stress does not stop, then irreversible pathological changes begin to occur in the body.

Workplace stress

In physiology, there is a section called the "physiology of labor." He studies changes in the functional state of the human body under the influence of his labor activity and methods of organizing the work process to support high productivity and maintain health. We are interested in this section only the part in which mental work is described. By definition, labor intensity is the volume of labor that a person spends per unit of time. The cost of labor in the physiological sense is the expenditure of human resources, leading to a decrease in working capacity and fatigue. Specialists note that various types of unfavorable functional conditions (fatigue, monotony, inadequate reactions under stress, etc.) not only greatly reduce the quality of work,but they also make a person pay an “ultra-high psychophysiological price” for the work done.

Now let's put this theory into practice. When everyone began to work from their little worlds, we began to call up colleagues more often and from each conversation I could only bear the feeling of fatigue and loss. A week later, I asked my colleagues how their emotional state had changed. Everyone felt about the same, and one of them described this condition in the most voluminous and precise way: “I began to feel helpless and hopeless when the right people do not pick up the phone and I can’t get information or clarify anything. Because of this, I also get angrier. Previously, this was more than covered by my business trips and personal communication with colleagues and customers. And now I'm in the desert. ”That's right: a desert in which there are no people and there is no familiar rhythm of life with calls, communication, coffee breaks. At the same time, the amount of work has increased significantly, the speed of information exchange has decreased, and now it takes much more time to solve customer problems. All this causes even more stress, which draws up the remaining forces.

As we took and not gone crazy

We are adult boys and girls who drown for the process approach from the classic PDCA formula. We were able to analyze the results of the first weeks of remote work and draw conclusions.

First of all, it is striking that we have learned to build our working day from home, without conflict with the family. For example, my children learned the coveted abbreviations “VKS” and “AKS” - no more wild sounds at this time. Although at first I had to hear from colleagues: "Does someone have wolves at home?"

Secondly, we brilliantly confirmed the theory of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov about the formation of conditioned reflexes. A habit has developed for VKS, and this format of communication no longer causes rejection. This, of course, will not replace business trips, personal communication and coffee breaks in the office, but it’s already normal.

Well, the business continuity plan worked out in a “combat situation” suggests that we didn’t care where to work - even from Sochi, even from Oymyakon - if only there was a connection. Given the scale of our customers and us as a federal company, this is very important. I would like to believe that in the future this experience will allow Solar JSOC employees to work from home a couple of days a month.

Udalenka led to unexpected changes. Oddly enough, communications in a bunch of supervisor-subordinate have accelerated. Moreover, the head means not a line manager, but the director of the department. Previously, all those who languidly waited under the office door to ask or discuss a question now grab the phone without any hesitation in ringing.

Another paradox: there is time for collective pastime in the format of 150+ people and 5 cities - from Rostov-on-Don to Khabarovsk. It sounds wild, but over the past month in Solar JSOC in the format of a remote game, two games “What? Where? When?".

So we adapted and learned to live in a new reality, not really suffering from communication and coffee with cookies in the office ... Although whom am I kidding? There aren’t enough cookies, but for some reason I can’t buy the exact same ones anywhere. This difficult period (which, however, is still ongoing) showed a very high level of personnel adaptation to radically changing conditions. So, everything that does not kill us makes us.