Does working from home increase the number of casual-tees?

Warning: this blog may cause mental images of your colleagues to appear which may be hard to forget

With ‘freedom day’ feeling even further away, especially with this week’s announcement from the Prime Minister of its push back, here at DragonflAI we are still celebrating even the smallest of wins that could help us return to some normality. Whilst we fight for the protection of children, it’s also important we look great doing it…right?

Working below the belt

With millions of us working from home over the past year, it seems we are all now masters of the online video call- from work meetings to Zoom quizzes- however it appears that some may have taken the luxury of working from home a little too far. We’ve all seen the at-home-working disasters from the likes of Professor Robert Kelly- a clip which has now been viewed 44 million times onYouTube. Embarrassing? Yes, but at least Prof. Kelly was fully dressed…unlike 10% of your colleagues who, according to a survey conducted by Fishbowl, are actively choosing to wear only underwear from the belt-down during video calls. So does comfort improve employee productivity? Or is it just simply a matter of making what has been a hard time for everyone more bear (bottom) able? Dr. Karen Pine, a fashion psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, discusses the idea that dressing casually at work decreases worker focus and alertness , however that is in a workplace, under ‘normal circumstances’, but here at DragonflAI where some of our employees haven’t even met in person, we haven’t had to worry about whether we are keeping up with the latest fashion trends to impress our colleagues as they gossip at the vending machine. It’s easy though to understand why motivation for working at home is hard to muster up, when the differentiation between work and home life has become more and more blurred as the pandemic has developed. At DragonflAI we have found a few ways of making working from home just that little bit easier from the comfort of our elasticated waistbands.

“Roll up roll up! Get your DragonflAI t-shirts here”

For nearly as long as the Coronavirus pandemic has been around, so too has DragonflAI, so it should come as no surprise that we, like many other companies who have been affected by this virus, have only just got around to getting something as simple as ‘merch’. Working remotely developing software for child protection and nudity detection hasn’t stopped us from wondering about what it would be like if the company was founded in ‘normal’ times, so things as simple as a merchandised high-quality mass marketed t-shirt from China- was seen as a small but significant insight into company life when Coronavirus is out of the picture.

With claims that certain vaccines for the virus can cause people to become magnetic, we have now started to look into personalised DragonflAI bottle openers, so that we can have them attached to different body parts at all times, to celebrate our successes wherever we are- however small they may be. Who knows, maybe in the future we might even invest in DragonflAI mouse pads or stationery to really jazz up our home offices, or why not go even further and get the pets involved- before we know it the furry friends of DragonflAI will be walking the cat(and dog)-walk with the likes of Neighomi Campbell.

For some of us the novelty of remote working and learning is rubbing off or began to a long time ago- but here at DragonflAI where it is all we know, going into an office to work may seem even stranger than those who are returning to their place of work.