When the Office Disappeared

Monday the 23rd, the Prime Minister announced we'd move to Level 4 in 48 hours. By Tuesday morning we had a plan. By Tuesday evening we'd shipped laptops, monitors, and keyboards to everyone's homes. John set up VPN access and tested remote connectivity to every client environment we needed. Rainui grabbed design assets off the shared drives. I sent clients an email that said, essentially: we're still here, nothing changes except the address.

That email was optimistic. Plenty was about to change.

The first standup happened over video at 9am. Everyone was there, on time, cameras on. The energy was a mix of nervous and determined. We ran through the active projects. Edison Health had a release due in two weeks. trev had a feature sprint in progress. Two other client projects were mid-delivery.

Nobody suggested pausing. The work was there. The clients needed it. In some cases, our clients were health and essential services organisations who needed their software more than ever.

The first day was oddly productive. Everyone was running on adrenaline. The novelty of working from home, the focus of proving it could work, the shared sense of "we're in this together" that comes from a national crisis.

The adrenaline wore off fast. By Wednesday, the cracks were showing. Not in the work. The work was fine. In the people.

One of our developers lives alone. By day three he'd gone from "this is fine" to visibly flat on camera. Not struggling with the code. Struggling with the silence. Enterprise developers are used to the ambient presence of a team. The overheard conversations. The tap on the shoulder. The coffee run that turns into a fifteen-minute technical discussion. All of that was gone.

We started doing a daily check-in that had nothing to do with work. Ten minutes at the start of each day where the only question was "how are you actually doing?" Some days the answer was "fine." Some days it wasn't. The point was asking.

Spontaneous communication died. The hallway conversation, the quick question across the desk, the "hey, come look at this" moment. All gone. Replaced by scheduled calls and Slack messages that feel heavier than a casual comment ever did.

Context switching got worse. In the office, switching between tasks has natural punctuation. You walk to a different desk. You grab a coffee. You change your physical context. At home, every task happens in the same chair, at the same desk, staring at the same screen. The blur between tasks, between work and not-work, was immediate.

Client communication needed recalibration. Some clients adjusted immediately. Others wanted more reassurance than usual, which meant more calls, more updates, more visibility into progress. That's reasonable. It also takes time we hadn't budgeted for.

The delivery processes worked. Our sprint rituals, our code review process, our deployment pipeline. All of it functioned remotely without modification. This wasn't luck. We'd invested in asynchronous-friendly processes for years because we had team members in different locations occasionally. That investment paid off overnight.

Trust held. We've always managed on outcomes, not hours. Nobody tracks when people start or stop working. The question is whether the work gets done, and done well. That philosophy didn't need to change for remote work. It was already built for it.

The team held. Nobody quit. Nobody checked out. Nobody stopped caring. If anything, people worked harder than usual in the first week, which created its own problem. We had to actively tell people to stop working at 6pm. When your office is your living room, the boundaries disappear.

It's been five days. The immediate crisis is managed. The work is flowing. But I'm not naive about what happens if this goes on for weeks or months.

Isolation compounds. The developer who was flat on day three will be in a much harder place by week three if we don't find ways to maintain genuine connection. Video calls aren't the same as being in a room together. They're better than nothing. They're not enough.

I'm also watching for the slow erosion of the things that make us good. The design critique that happens because someone walks past a screen. The architectural discussion that starts over lunch. The junior developer who learns by osmosis, by sitting near senior people and absorbing how they think. Those things don't have a remote equivalent yet.

We'll figure it out. We don't have a choice. But I want to be honest that this is hard, not pretend we've got it sorted after five days. The teams that come through this strongest will be the ones that looked after their people first and the work second.