COVID-19: I Did An Internship In Israel, From Singapore

3 months into my internship in Israel as part of the NUS Overseas Colleges Programme, I was recalled back to Singapore in light of the pandemic. In the midst of the flurry of changing circumstances, I am among the privileged group of students who were given the opportunity to continue my internship for my Israel company, Inception, remotely from Singapore. Here's how it went!

Image: Celebrating Purim with my colleagues in Israel!

Also read: My Experiences as an Overseas Placement Student With Disrupted Plans

1. Reduction of Physical Interactions

Image: Celebrating Passover despite work-from-home!

I have always valued the workplace experience, especially so when involving myself in physical interactions with different colleagues in the office. Working remotely limited these interactions of mine significantly, and this made me seek other ways to understand the people I am working with.

As a people person who enjoys being surrounded by a diversity of personas, physical interactions accelerate my ability to understand how I can work better with people, in creating synergies to produce meaningful outcomes. With physical interactions being greatly reduced, this made me think of alternative means I could achieve the same outcome without being able to interact with my colleagues face-to-face.

That was when I started to intentionally notice the effort that my colleagues put in when engaging in our daily Zoom calls in rapport building. Engaging in some small talk before getting into business played a really big part in enhancing my work experience from miles away, and this to me was one of the biggest lessons I have learnt about Empathy.

Work aside, my internship was filled with loads of encouragement and support, even though digitally. I felt like the people I was working with were interested to listen to me, and this authenticity made me more inclined to share my feelings about my whole experience. In retrospect, this was an organic process and took time to cultivate from day one.

With the new normal in working arrangements, empathy has to now be more intentional than ever, and not be taken for granted. Not being able to interact in real-life does not give us the excuse (and in fact gives us a stronger reason) to provide this support for our teams working alongside us!

Lesson learnt: Empathy is not limited in its channel of delivery. Make the effort to find out how to understand someone and allow him/her to feel understood.

2. Time Management

Image: A sneak peek into my ever-handy Google Calendar!

Israel's time zone is 5 hours behind that of Singapore's, which means that my work hours (and days) are not perfectly aligned to that of my company is Israel. This goes to say that apart from working remotely geographically, I am also to a certain extent working remotely in terms of time. As we expect, this posed as a challenge for me, as there was effectively only half a day when both parties are working at the same time. This half a day also serves as our window to communicate any expectations or hold any discussions for decisions to be made or issues to be resolved.

Having worked from home for the first time, this saw me dabbling with managing my own time in terms of sticking to a routine to get work done. Having to also juggle a special term module and running Skilio full-time concurrently, I soon after realised that working remotely required me to not only manage my own time but also be considerate of the schedules and preferences of the people whom I am working with, in a different time zone.

A few tips I have picked up along the way was to plan my time with increased granularity and informing others of this plan as well. Being an extremely structured thinker, Google Calendar was extremely useful for me to understand the plans of others and myself. Overcommunicating my schedules in advance was also highly beneficial, and something I will practise in the future as well.

Lesson learnt: Time management is not limited to yourself, but that for others as well. Being able to manage and foresee the needs of others and yourself makes you more effective in the collaborative work you do!

3. Communication

I recall countless times when communicating a point across could take half, if not less than half the time as compared to if I was working physically in the same office. Things I took for granted - being able to sit beside someone and go through something together, being able to simply walk over to my colleague's desk when I have an issue, or even inviting someone else to join a discussion when we deem necessary.

These experiences all take a new form and level of difficulty when you are not physically in the same space. Working remotely means having the make do with online collaborative tools which attempt to bring us slightly closer together. It means increased complexity when trying to coordinate and accommodate schedules of various stakeholders from multiple time zones for the team to come together in discussions. It means being aware of the limitations and overcommunicating to make things work - something most of us are not used to doing, having worked in a physical space alongside our team for most of the time.

In light of the sudden transition to work-from-home arrangements, some are caught some off-guard in adapting current company management practises and operations to the current situation. Without a doubt, this has posed a challenge for me as well. Nevertheless, with structured daily check-ins established from the start, the usage of multiple channels of communication (eg. Zoom), setting of expectations to maximise engagement (an constantly exchanging feedback on how to do this better), coupled with the social interactions and emotional support I have given, these alleviated most of the difficulties I had as a remote intern!

Lesson learnt: More than ever, over-communication has become increasingly necessary for operational efficiency and effectiveness in the long run. Do not be afraid to take more time in laying out the ground rules at the start!

Conclusion

Having experienced this once-in-a-lifetime remote working stint, I am now more confident to exercise more flexibility in managing myself and my team across different working arrangements. In this post-pandemic era where more are entertaining the possibility of alternative modes of work, this experience has definitely made me more adaptable to ever-changing circumstances, and this is something I definitely want to continue working on.

Being a remote intern has also made me put in more effort to make sense of my own learning, especially since learning takes place not in the workplace, but in the comfort of my own home. I have come to realise that the value of a workplace experience (especially for an undergraduate preparing for the future of work) is beyond the mere completion of assigned tasks. The value of an opportunity like this comes from pausing and reflecting on how you have been getting things done, and how you think you can do things better than before. This, to me, is the core of making this workplace experience uniquely yours, and one worth telling.