I’ve spent most of my career working in data roles in the corporate world, often alongside contractors and consultants. These consultants would be hired for various projects and would work with me only until the given project was completed. When I compared my working environment with theirs, I thought theirs must be terrifying.
I believe this misconception began in my earliest days working in IT, when I worked for a firm that had consultants back in the late nineties. When I look back on it now, I’m no longer sure I have any real material proof of this presumption, but at that time, I believed that these consultants had to bill hours to a client or they wouldn’t get paid. As in, if they billed only 30 hours to a client that week, they’d only be paid for 30 hours’ worth of work.
This impression shaped my opinion for years, and only when I was nearly 40 years old did I actually have a conversation with a Continuus consultant who told me, “No, freak*, we get paid a salary, and yes, we try to bill 40 hours a week, but if we don’t that’s ok.” (*Again, I may have made this up.)
The other misconception I had about being a consultant was that it must be super lonely. Back when I had an office full of gossiping water cooler cohorts to commiserate with, I imagined that if I was a completely remote employee that I’d go out of my mind.
And then we had a pandemic and we all laughed.
Years before 2020 I worked in a position where my team would typically work from home on Fridays, or any other day that had some outlier event. Have a couch being delivered? Work from home. Have a sick kid who’ll be sleeping all day? Work from home. So I absolutely knew that there were benefits to being able to work from home, I just had it stuck in my head that I would hate it if I had to do it every day.
Now that I work for a company that has an office I can go to if I choose, it’s actually hard to make myself go there. It’s nice to find a 15-minute break between morning meetings to go throw something in the crockpot that I forgot about earlier. Instead of chatting with a passing co-worker for 20 minutes I might spend 10 switching the loads of laundry. I definitely feel I’ve got a better work-life balance.
And honestly, one of the things that surprised me early on in the pandemic was that I certainly didn’t feel lonely. I had (and still have) meetings with co-workers and clients throughout the day, and whether or not we actually turn our cameras on, I feel I have a connection with them that I didn’t anticipate.
When I finally did ditch the corporate gig for good and join Continuus a year ago, it led me to wonder out loud to a friend, “Can you imagine how life-changing this would have been when our kids were little???” Mine are all teens now and all but one can drive themselves places, but the value of being able to duck out early to take the one non-driver to volleyball practice or drop him at work is immeasurable. So long as my client is taken care of, CT doesn’t care when I put in my hours.
And that is certainly not something I’ve made up.
.jpg)
