With many people still working from home, I was interested to read this article yesterday
Personally, I have no issue with home working, saves commuting time etc, with the proviso that it doesn’t affect the service I receive from organisations. However, you do wonder about this when you read, for example, that DVLA has a backlog of over 50,000 items and the reason given is ‘many of our staff are still working from home’, and you contact HMRC about a letter sent to them at the end of August and are told they ‘hope’ to be able to respond by 26 January because, you guessed it, many of our staff are still working from home. It does make you ponder just how efficient this hybrid system of working really is.
We’re thinking about this at lot at work at the minute.
It seems fairly clear that we, and I’m sure many others, are moving towards a hybrid model: 50% of the time at home, 50% of the time in the office, with lots of flexibility for staff to determine when they’ll be where (unless they’re performing roles which require office presence).
I think it’s fairly evident at this stage that there are some things WFH is brilliant for. For most people (although not everybody), it’s hugely improved work life balance, and created a bit of space in the day that would otherwise have been spent commuting. The greater use of video calls has enabled much closer working relationships between staff who are geographically disparate. It’s reduced micro-management and presenteeism. Most importantly of all, we got an insight into one another’s actual lives: the charade of working life fell away somewhat, and it became impossible for work to pretend you weren’t also bringing up small children/looking after an elderly relative/coping with a cat with a bladder problem. That’s huge progress in my book.
On the other hand, there are areas where it hasn’t worked so well. Certain processes (particularly those which require creativity/close teamwork) have had their efficiency reduced, there are technical issues (e.g. transferring very large files down residential broadband lines), etc.
There’s also a management cost, particularly in times of stress: I used to be able to tell (broadly) how my direct reports were doing by the way they walked into the office and took their coats off. In a WFH environment, that process takes longer, and we’re still at a stage where any call to check in/ask a quick question seems to inevitably last fifteen minutes to half an hour, which isn’t particularly efficient – maybe that will pass.
More than anything, we found that WFH and the intensity of the pandemic caused a lot of people to have the division between work and life collapse: without a commute to bookend the day, a large number of staff were working far longer hours than previously, often while juggling kids/household chores at the same time. We have spent the last 18 months far more worried by burnout than productivity (ironically, given the reservations a lot of people used to have re: WFH), and trying to figure out how to get people to work a bit less (I know that sounds mental).
There are also concerns about the training more junior members of staff receive in a work from home environment, and a recognition that not everyone is set up with available desk space in their home: a lot of younger people in house shares ended up working from the sofa or their own bed, which wasn’t great.
We also worry about people’s sense of mission: sometimes working from home people have complained that their jobs now feels like a succession of tasks without much real context: it’s important that everyone can touch and feel what it is that we’re trying to do, and also that they can see one another. During times of high workload, a number of people have made the (correct in my view) observation that people work hard for their colleagues, not for the company. The sane ones, anyway.
Hopefully, what we’re going to see from here is a model that allows individuals a relatively high degree of latitude to figure out what approach works best for them, and where we try to play to the strengths of both work from home and office life, and mitigate the weaknesses of each.
Long way of saying: there are pluses and minuses to working from home, they vary from person to person and role to role, and businesses would be well advised to recognise that in their return to office plans.
Some very interesting thoughts there, thanks. I wonder though how this affects the service end users receive, where, for example, there’s a lot of paper correspondence to deal with – how efficiently can that be dealt with when the letters are received in an office but the staff are at home? (Also worth noting that the two organisations I mentioned will usually only communicate by post, not email.)
I think technology and in particular A.I. will solve a lot of the problems currently caused by people working WFH in some of the organisations you have in mind. Sadly, at that point, many if not most of the people currently doing the work won’t be needed. The great irony is that a whilst many admin and para-professional roles will probably disappear, the jobs that replace them are likely to be in care and health related roles, which tend not to involve much WFH.
Any organisation which insists upon or is obliged to work via printed communication delivered by snail mail, and which fails to make suitable adjusted provision for the receipt and processing of said mail by actual human beings is planning to fail. When said organisations are arms of HM Gov, then in that eventuality they deserve a good kicking. DVLA and HMRC you say? Why am I not surprised? Both have been struggling for years due to rampant neglect, and the recent complications have just tipped them over into the ridiculous.
There’s more than a few businesses happily lowering service standards and pocketing the savings and blaming the pandemic. Quite a few have also been caught totally flat footed in terms of their ability to cope from an IT / comms perspective – unable to route switchboard calls to mobiles, VPNs that can’t cope with traffic, refusing to allocate more laptops / mobiles etc.
A friend who runs a fairly busy website from home has recently had to upgrade his Internet connection to cope with the traffic.
No problem at all with download speeds at his end, but his upload speed was not sufficient, so he’s had to upgrade from Fibre-to-Cabinet + Copper-to-Premises to Fibre-direct-into-Premises.
Anyone obliged to send quantities of data to their office, as well as receive data from it, is likely to need something better than a consumer Internet connection.
In some areas, uploads the same as downloads is now a consumer product. The house I’m about to move into has fibre right into the house and I can choose 360M download with 180 upload… I’m not going to, but I could!
I would choose it. It’s the modern equivilant of a Ferrari. Imagine the boasting rights down the pub…
Somewhat to my surprise I’m getting better results in the UK via copper (68/18 av) than I was in Oz via fibre to the house courtesy of the much-reviled NBN (50/14). Doesn’t matter to me as long as streaming doesn’t stutter, which it never does.
As for the OP, I’ve spent a large part of my life WFH (or WAH before email happened), either because of freelance stretches or so I could actually get something done. Working in the office is not necessarily conducive to the life of a working publisher/editor.
Listening to a programme on Radio 4 a few weeks back, it reported some research that the group who really do get a lot more done at home are writers/editors/comms people. And that matches my personal experience.
Seems we’re the ones who do best without all the office distractions.
One key factor in making WFH work for a business is for the business to trust its employees to make their own sensible decisions about whether, when and how frequently it makes sense for them to WFH.
We’ve already seen various ‘captains of industry’ and assorted Tory peers wailing about the feckless working people they rely upon to make their money, how they will inevitably take the piss once WFH. Keep it up guys (obv.) you’ll have those pesky plebs up in arms in no time, I hope.
Yeah, I agree. People have demonstrated over the last 18 months that they’ll be productive at home. You’d be foolish not to continue to show them at least a basic minimum level of trust, or they’ll decamp to employers more willing to do so.
I heard a piece on the radio about a week ago where a recruitment agent said a significant number of successful applicants were declining jobs that didn’t allow WFH. No mention of whether WFH is having a negative effect on wages due to reduced commuting costs.
My neighbour works for one of the UKs leading civil engineering firms. His team doesn’t have a London office any more, but then his team members are pretty much all in Bangalore. When he retires it will be interesting to see where his replacement is based.
Bingo, that’s possibly the most savvy and direct summary of the WFH situation I’ve ever read. You’ve said it all!
The legal compulsion to send “non essential” workers home forced most employers to engage in an experiment that could otherwise have remained decades away. As with any type of change, it immediately had it’s fans and it’s detractors, and it’s a pretty reliable gauge of whether managers actually trust their staff or not. I think Bingo’s assessment of what works and what doesn’t is spot on.
Most companies know the genie is out of the bottle now, and are formalising plans to make some form of WFH permanent. The majority of staff given the opportunity to WFH have seen benefits that outweigh the negatives, and it’s already become a critical consideration when recruiting staff. We’ve already had staff poached by companies quick to establish fully remote working and so able to tap people that were previously geographically out of reach.
My own business has a number of 30 year + veterans that having worked in an office all their life, can’t accept that working life won’t just “go back to normal”. As the person charged with standing up a formal hybrid & remote working policy I’ve heard no end of bullshit about how we will rue the loss of those spontaneous “water cooler moments”, and nothing about how most people want just 2 days WFH, relived of the crushing grind of their commute, the fight for a parking space, or relief from John who sits opposite, who conducts every call on speakerphone, eats with his mouth open and bathes only once a week.
As a business that manufactures stuff, there’s a lot of resentment from those who can’t work from home. The classic “someone else is getting something I’m not – it’s not fair”. Demanding we pay their travel to work costs to equalise things – they also objected to the installation of electric car charging points on the same basis.
I’d have a remote working policy up and running too if only my friends in the IT department could get their head around a for fix kit that stops working that doesn’t involve taking it into the office that the user doesn’t actually work in.
I talk with plenty of IT firms and government organisations through work, and there is always talk about how more working from home can save them money through reducing the office space. That’s going to be a big incentive for them to make hybrid working with smaller hot desking offices the norm.
I get the impression most people are happier working most of the time at home, with the big exception of those who don’t have an appropriate space and/or miss the social element of office working.
We’ve got managers arguing that it saves them nothing because the offices are already there and the fixed costs remain the same. But there’s a few where they are short of desk space and so want to use hybrid work to justify a switch to hot desks.
Over the years I’ve learned to stay away from two office issues given the grief they cause – parking spaces and desk / office allocation. I’ve yet to see a hot desk / hotelling arrangement that didn’t make recipients utterly miserable, and a routine cause of inter office strife.
My employer was doing its best to promote hotdesking before lockdown, and is now (presumably with a huge sigh of relief, given that no one really believed that there are any pluses to hotdesking) working on the permanent hybrid model. I have been designated and ‘anywhere’ worker, which means I can do my job at home, in the office, at a variety of meeting locations, anywhere.
We’ll start meeting up in person soon enough, but want to make sure it’s for a proper reason, not just so everyone can look at their laptops in the same building. So far as I know everyone in my small team greatly prefers home working with one exception, who is a carer for his elderly mother, a demanding woman who treated his constant presence as meaning he was permanently at her command.
The end of office culture to the detriment of the office’s work has been an unforeseen but welcome silver lining to the grim cloud of Covid.
Hot Desking; such a great idea.
The employer’s cheapskate solution to having a big enough office to accomodate the actual required number of staff.
The employee’s daily nightmare of actually getting a desk to sit at unless they can arrange to arrive really early.
The employer’s willful ignorance of all of the evidence that says that personalised workspaces (like home!) are good for human productivity.
The employee’s daily nightmare of tipping yesterday’s occupant’s dinner remains out of the keyboard, and having to wipe grubby fingermarks from the chair, from the screen, and from everything else on the desk.
The employer’s willful ignorance of all known health and safety guidelines apropos the importance of having a decent posture for the working day, and a properly adjusted chair, in respect of those who, for whatever reason, arrive later than most and have to spend their entire working day hunched over a laptop on a meeting room table.
The employee’s dismay when they leave their handy little stapler on their desk one day and find that some light-fingered toe-rag has waltzed off with it by first thing the next morning.
The employer’s devil-may-care attitude to the importance of having one’s monitor adjusted correctly to facilitate reduced eye-strain and better reading facility on a person-by-person basis.
The employee’s dismay at arriving at a desk previously occupied by the office computer games freak, who insists on ramping up the contrast and setting the brightness to thermonuclear levels, so that the new arrival has to spend 40 minutes grappling with the baffling and frustrating sequence of button presses demanded by the monitor’s barely functioning screen controls.
What a win-win solution hot desking is!
The miserly swines don’t even heat the desks properly, in my experience.
All perfectly valid reasons why I have never wanted (or had) a desk job.
In fairness, I’ve had a desk and an office in the office building but the parking has been shit. There is always something that makes it difficult Hot desking, done right (it invoves an easy to use booking system and desks with plug sockets etc.) is absolutely fine.
I beg to differ. The last place I worked had a desk booking system (ignored by the entitled twats who think they own the place), every desk had the full complement of plug sockets, there were two (only half decent 1080s) screens per seat, and all socially distanced from the next seat. Some effort made, but for a billion pound company it was still rather underwhelming. Crucially, the experience was still appalling. For all of the reasons I mention above.
Entitled twats aren’t going to help. It’s each to their own I suppose. I like variety so mixing up WFH and using offices is fine. I think if I am not going to be at a desk everyday, then other people using it makes sense.
One of the strangest aspects of all of this is the government ministers insisting civil servants go back to the office. From what I know from people working in Whitehall based departments, at least, is that there haven’t been enough desks for staff for some time, as different departments share offices to save on rent. This predates Covid. Oliver Dowden for example will have known that it would be impossible for all of his staff in DCMS to come in on the same day. I know it’s supposed to appeal to the base voters, but I wonder if it does – don’t conservative voters like working from home? Another piece of rhetoric that won’t be followed up.
I think it’s a symbolic thing. The government wants people back in offices, for understandable reasons, so they’re making it clear that the civil service will be expected to troop back in.
Understandable reasons? Plural?
1) So many of them, or their friends and family, have massive amounts of capital tied up in city centre office accommodation.
2) I’m struggling here. Something about sandwich shops maybe?
See below.
Governments stay in office largely based on economic performance. That’s a simple fact. There are plenty of other, no doubt dubious, reasons a Tory government might want people back to work, but the basic political calculus is pretty simple.
I think there are a fair few Tory donors in the property and service sectors where return to work means return to profit. As ever, just follow the money.
That’s undoubtedly true. But it is also the government’s job to get/keep the economy going. A lot of small businesses depend on people going into offices. Plus, profit is – ultimately – what keeps everyone in the private sector in jobs. It shouldn’t be an entirely dirty word.
I would honestly expect any halfway competent government to want people back at work, mainly because if it becomes apparent to employers that some of these jobs could theoretically be done from anywhere, the result won’t be UK taxpayers video calling from the beach, it’ll be outsourcing to wherever the cheap and suitably trained labour is located, which eventually won’t be here.
That’s not to say I think it’s best for employees to be in the office. Just that I get why the government would want it, even leaving aside any backhanders.
I’ll assume that ‘back at work’ was meant to mean ‘back to the office’, not an implication that people working from home haven’t been working in any significant sense. But now it has been demonstrated that many jobs can be done anywhere, how is a return to the office meant to reverse that realisation? There’s nothing magical about being in the same building which means the same work carried out communally can’t be outsourced if that is the decision taken.
Lol – thank you for the enormous charity of your assumption.
It clearly hasn’t been demonstrated (yet) that all jobs can be done as well from home as from an office, in all cases. Which is why a lot of employers want people back in.
See elsewhere in the thread for plenty of considered thoughts re; scenarios where WFH has proven to be sub-optimal.
UK Gov does actually have a fairly rigid approach to not offshoring work. What is interesting from a UK Gov perspective is how hybrid working allows a less London centric approach to filling senior roles. Most senior civil service jobs involved London and being in the office all of the time. Currently, there is a more balanced approach which is enabling qualified and experienced people who don’t live within a daily commute but who are happy to do it a couple of times a week to apply and get more of those roles.
Friend has just taken a half time job nominally based in Admiralty House. In practice she can work from home in the North, which is where the industry she is supporting is actually based. Makes sense.
I am not a fan of a structured/permanent working from home arrangement. In my industry it doesn’t work. Shipping is a complete mess currently and the shortage of drivers that the media is banging on about is only part of the overall problem that public at large is currently blissfully unaware of.
If a container doesn’t turn up at its load point or delivery point you used to be able to phone the shipping line and determine the whereabouts within a matter of minutes. Not any more – they are all working from home and not answering their phones. In fact they have been known to put the phone down on you as soon as they pick up. It is appalling and stress levels are through the roof. Earlier this week one of my colleagues called a customer with the bad news that his shipment wouldn’t be delivered on the scheduled day. He was told ‘I will put a bullet through your head’ and a follow up email from the customer saying he was on his way. Clearly unacceptable behaviour.
One of the shipping lines asked their staff at their Liverpool office if they wanted to come back to the office. Only 5 percent wanted to. Don’t ask them tell them. I believe it is now out of control and high service level standards are a thing of the past in many sectors.
I am all for flexibility but flexibility should not mean permanent working from home.
Hybrid working isn’t permanent working from home. It’s splitting time between the two. And it’s hybrid not full remote that the vast majority of employees want.
Unacceptable behaviour is unacceptable wherever it occurs. I don’t get how being at home enable you to drop a call on someone any more than if you were in the office.
@foruneight you might not get it but I can tell you it is commonplace in our industry.
Also on a personal level virtually impossible to reach utility companies because they are working from home. No they are not they are either watching daytime tv or playing with the kids.
It might be the way forward if it works properly and the employer can effectively measure productivity. We are an awful long way from that and employees working from home maintain they are more effective when t6he opposite is usually the case.
I think if employees have a proper home office set up then they can more easily work from home – many don’t.
I think the issue on utility companies is more related to the wheeze of cutting numbers to a bare minimum and then playing a message saying that they are dealing with higher than normal call volumes. The fact that you hear that everytime suggests they are just normal call volumes.
I also haven’t noticed a difference from pre and post covid. Call centres for a number of utility based organisations have long response times by design. It is not becasue half the call centre staff are Pelotoning whilst watching last nights Bake Off.
It’s not just employees seeing improved productivity. Microsoft has miles of data based on the utilization of their products.
Microsoft never miss an opportunity to sell don’t forget. But some of the data is compelling.
Own up Steve: we all know you’re the one who bet that tanker captain he couldn’t make it through the Suez Canal sideways.
The insurance claim for that little episode was close to a billion dollars. A drop in the Ocean compared to the extra revenue the lines got from increased freight rates because of damaged supply chains.
Interestingly the broken system that I mention up above is not likely to be fixed any time soon. The reason why? Highest revenues the lines have ever had for the worst possible service. We have to put up with this service because there is no incentive to
improve it.
It has ever been thus: win business, cut staff, deliver poorer services, deliver higher margins.
Sorry to hear that the shipping industry is in a mess. But the shipping industry’s problems don’t translate to many other industries. If there is a structural problem with people deliberately making themselves uncontactable, when part of the raison d’etre for their role is precisely to BE contactable, deal with it by sacking them. It’s an attitudinal problem with those individuals, not a symptom of their physical location. If they were in the office, they’d find another way of shirking responsibility, so you’re better off without them.
Surely this is another horses for courses problem. It may also be a supply and demand problem. I work in a high technology industry where there’s a shortage of suitable candidates. Anything that means my boss can get more software engineers is a good thing. Generally it seems we can be trusted to work (fairly) hard. Most of do the job because we like doing the job so why would we slack? We want to find solutions to problems and put them into action.
I didn’t think I’d like so much WFH but I do and I can get done everything I need to do in the office in one or two days a week, when I invariably manage to leave early to avoid the traffic. I love it and, as I said a couple of weeks back on the retirement thread, it means I’ll probably be able to extend my working life because I hate driving, let alone commuting.
Another thing my employers also benefit from is that they’re now getting output from us when we’re working at the optimum time of day for us. For me that means I can start at 6am – for others it means they can get up in the middle of the night it the muse hits them.
Bingo’s post at the top of the thread perfectly summarises the key issues this is throwing up. I absolutely agree that there are downsides, as he sets out, although I think the reality is that we will all adapt and find ways of working effectively together in this new world – it just may take a little time.
I work for a business which by definition requires most people to be onsite at least some if not all of their time. But there are people who can do at least some of their work from home, and we are allowing that, by agreement with their line manager, up to 50% of the time. I genuinely am seeing no downside to this so far. Some people love it; others really don’t and enjoy the interaction of being in the office. So far there is no indication of a reduction in productivity, and people generally seem happy. As for customer service, I can’t think of any reason why a modern organisation can’t adapt to provide as good a service with a hybrid model as it does (or doesn’t) with everyone in the office. Sounds like an excuse by DVLA to me.
I have to say I find Dowden’s comments insufferable, and utterly tone deaf. There is a (not so) hidden implication that people who are working from home have been just dossing when the reality is that for many they have had the most stressful and hardworking 18 months of their lives. A bit of empathy wouldn’t go amiss; instead they are obviously terrified of the impact on our economy and intent on urging us all to spend our money and our time on public transport, petrol, Pret a Manger sandwiches and post work booze and meals. Never mind our health, or the environment; keeping those businesses going is our moral duty.
Agree completely about the last 18 months being enormously labour intensive and stressful for huge numbers of people.
Agree with this and also with the comment that Bingo (as ever, the bastard) has eloquently and accurately summed up the situation. He only ever seems to be wrong about Limp Bizkit.
My experience is that we hear a lot from people who love the freedom WFH allows them. Rather less from people for whom it isn’t much fun. This includes, for example, many of the people working at my local council’s customer contact centre. They all now work from home. They weren’t given a choice. As one might imagine, this involves a lot of being shouted at by enraged Council tax payers, parents worried at the lack of SENDS provision, and so on. One of the few plus points of the job used to be some camaraderie from colleagues. That has gone.
On a personal level, my wife didn’t much care for sitting in our front room holding telephone conversations with offenders recounting the details of serious sex offences and the like. And amongst our own friends, WFH was certainly more popular amongst well-off people with a large home and garden than those sharing with 4 or 5 five others and effectively working and living in their bedroom.
In any event, I am personally agnostic about it all. What does concern me is that managing performance at a distance requires strong leadership. Not skills and attributes that tend to be found in abundance in the UK.
My d-i-l works as a civvy in the police, who don’t give a monkeys whether she works from home or from the office, as long as the work gets done. If the work is done, she is paid for the time the work would be expected normally to take, unless it takes longer, in which time overtime is rigorously added. Folk enjoy the incentive of doing it quicker, and clocking off, rather than dragging their feet to get paid more. And if they choose do it at night and weekends, sure, that’s fine too, but at no unsocial hours premium, if they have chosen with their alarm clock
Sounds quite sound to me.
When we we were taking turns to work from home at the height of the pandemic, leaving a smaller number in the surgery for the still omnipresent, if reduced face to face need/demand, as long as I rang/contacted my surgery full of patients, I was able to do at whatsoever time and speed, within the timeframe of folk expecting a call in the morning or the afternoon. Took longer, INHO, than at work, mind, so I preferred to go in.
Yep, my wife has been WFH for over 20 years now and if she wakes up early and feels like starting at 4am then that’s fine. As she sometimes needs to work with Colleagues in eastern Europe, it’s actually a boon but ultimately, as long as she gets the work done, it’s up to her.
I hated WFH. Everything took much longer. Work took over even those small corners of my life it hadn’t touched. I nearly had a breakdown and my sleep has never recovered. I’ve had to reduce my hours, and my income, by a third in order to try and protect myself.
Not for everybody.
I’m very sorry to hear that.
I know a lot of people who had similar experiences over the last 18 months; for certain jobs, work really did eat life. As a good friend of mine said to me last Summer – we’re not working from home, we’re sleeping in the office.
I worked from home one day a week before the pandemic and loved it, it was great. I did not enjoy the 5 day a week experience; I didn’t love working round the clock, or taking video calls 9-7 before starting my actual work, or being contactable by Americans who were still in the middle of their working day when I was approaching bed time, or having to say to my kids “sorry, I can’t right now” for what felt like the millionth time.
As of a few weeks ago, I’ve started going back into the office a couple of days a week. It’s pretty much empty, but I’m enjoying it. I like the commute, which brings a natural end to the day and gives me a chance to switch off from work before I arrive back to my family. I like not feeling like my house is a bit of a haven from work. I like my kids knowing that when I’m home, I’m theirs. When I say above “back at work”, I do so very consciously: the office is work. Home is home. There are lots of different ways to establish work/life balance; sometimes they involved a bit of compartmentalization.
On Monday this week, I left my laptop in the office overnight. The first time I’ve slept in a different building to it in 18 months. It felt so phenomenally good that I seriously considered going in on Tuesday morning and smashing it to tiny pieces. So perish all tyrants!
Ta.
Your last para: very much amen brother.
Oooh, leaving the laptop at work – two nights a week. Then it comes home and stays unplugged for three whole days (OK, so one of them is a Saturday…)
I started at my current employer 11 years ago because I hated WFH. The kids were young and distracting, internet to the house was shit (1Mb ish) and I missed talking to people face to face. I used to drive to the offices of the place I was contracting, just to hear jokes.
I’ve since moved house, kids are now good for conversation, 18 months ago I upgraded to 130Mb internet, plus… video calls. And I have become a miserable git as I have aged.
But commuting in heavy traffic ain’t fun when you have dodgy guts, there are never enough parking spaces at HQ, my office window looks out at the grey delivery bay of Tesco. I will go in, probably about 2 hours a week.
As Bingo says above, compartmenting is key. I work on my dining table and I’m lucky in that we don’t use it except for Christmas. I get dressed for work and changed into home clothes at 6pm.
So funny you dress for work.
Lots of people do. Many of us have no choice. Glad it amuses you.
When at home staring at a computer screen?
Yes, that’s what working from home is. Thank you Mr Dowden.
What is your problem? I made a light hearted comment about changing clothes to look at a computer screen and you are getting all pissy.
I apologise @dai .
The combination of thinking about work and having the news on in the background put me on a hair-trigger. Ignore my wilful misinterpretations.
No worries. I also apologize if I was insensitive
You weren’t. Your comment wasn’t even about me anyway. I’m a bit alarmed about the idea of Fents being a miserable git. I’ve come to think of us two as the Bob Ferris and Terry Collier of the Afterword, with me as the latter.
For Deirdre Birchwood read the Early Output of Zang Tumb Tuum.
I just presume we are all miserable gits here and I would offer you a make up beer but I only have 6 left …
See you in the Fat Ox, kidder.
Moosey, if I could work out how to change my profile pic, it would be this: https://www.comedy.co.uk/images/library/comedies/300×200/w/whatever_happened_to_the_likely_lads_bob.jpg
By the cringe, @fentonsteve if I can manage it you can.
Funnily enough for this thread, because of working from home and video calls I know that ^ that is what I look like when I’m looking at my computer.
Unlikely.
For the first week or two I made of point of wearing smarter clothes for work hours; since then I only put trousers on if I’m leaving the house.
Do you have a cup of tea first?
PARKLIFE!
I design the insides of industrial printers for a living. When I’m in the office/lab, it’s pretty difficult to avoid getting inky, so we are given a supply of embroidered black polo shirts when we start.
And I find it helps break up the day, which is good for the old mental health (and it reduces my insomnia). My WFH office is a room we don’t otherwise use daily, so I can ‘commute home’ through the door from the ‘office’ to the kitchen at the end of the day, get changed and switch off. I’m lucky.
When I get my garage soundproofed I’m going to convert the workshop (corner with the toolboxes and WorkMate) to a WFH office. My commute will then be even further, about 10 paces from back door to garage.
Got it
Sorry, Moosey, didn’t mean to sound like I was dismissing your post. Point I was trying to make (and failed) was it depends on you and your circs.
New house has a dining table we didn’t use ‘cos the kitchen has a breakfast table we can all just about fit round, elbows touching, and a spare room. If we hadn’t moved here, I’m pretty sure we’d want an end to WFH.
I know you would never dismiss my post. Though many have.
That sounds absolutely awful. I’m glad you managed to find a way out, even if far from ideal, for the sake of your health.
Cheers. We’ve bought a bit of my life and sanity back. At tremendous expense of course, but I’m already feeling the benefit.
The downside is that I now feel unjustified in moaning about anything. And there’s a list thread over —> there……
Am I alone in mourning the loss of flipcharts? They seem to be the passenger pigeon of Office World.
(I really have no idea. It’s been a long time. I don’t want to get arrested on spurious accusations of assorted harrasments involving the tea and coffee vending machine).
They’re long gone Rob. Even in the physical office it’s been all about PowerPoint slides with confusing illustrations and far too many words for years now. Seriously, I’ve seen this at all levels of my organisation. A plus of wfh is that far more people can attend presentations simultaneously, a negative is the realisation that vanishing gay few people know how to give them. Don’t they watch the others and realise how garbled theirs are?
Luckily I was only briefly an office worker, but it was a good and happy period. Flipchart, landline and a clocking in machine in the tea room. It genuinely gets me nostalgic.
We have flipcharts in my workplace – a few people use them. This allows expressions like, “Could I use your Nobo?”
PS. I once had a drink in the Vanishing Gay. That was a very strange stag night.
I love flip charts. I’m a trainer and yes I have my power points and videos. But nothing beats the thrill of scribbling some illegible half remembered thoughts on a flip chart to “answer” a question.
Hey, let’s have a thought-shower! We can’t say brainstorm any more because it reminds everyone of David Cronenbourg’s Scanners – and we get quite enough reminders of that at work, yes sir.
I often wonder how brainstorming occurred before post-it notes were invented. And colored sticky dots for voting.
The term brainstorming fell into disrepute as it was felt offensive to epileptics. Actually true, with mind map substituted, at least within NHS management circles. What shitey nonsense, and I care not how many of the lax-bowelled I offend in that statement.
Really? I thought it was the zombie community that were getting the hump.
I have a colleague who loves such sessions. Perfect for the intellectually incontinent he always has to tell us – “there’s no such thing as a bad idea”. And he always proves himself wrong.
Arf arf arf!
I used to know someone who was an artist, a painter, and she did a number of jobs to make a living, such as teaching. But she would devote some months a year completely to her own work. She lived in a rural area and had a studio that was separate to her house in the back garden. When she was doing her own stuff, she would walk out of the front door, walk around the village on a set route, and then come in through the back gate and go into the studio. She’d do the opposite at the end of the day. She said that it helped her split up work and her own time. I think she got this from Magritte, who did something similar and also dressed in a suit when he went to his studio. A lot of art, or maybe anything, is having the discipline to put in the hours, and also knowing when to knock off.
I’ve tried something similar myself when I’ve been working at home, although I am no artist, and it does help break up the day. One of the underestimated risks of working at home is not knowing when to cut the working day off.
I work in the largest technology park in Canada (Kanata, ON), about 50,000 people work there. I live a 5 min drive or 20 min walk away. During the pandemic I have worked pretty much 100% in the office, as I need to use specialist equipment in a lab there. We are normally 4 or 5 on site when we used to be 50 something. The whole area has become a ghost town, huge buildings that employ thousands of people almost completely empty.
Many support businesses who rely on the lunch time trade, and the “couple of beers after work” crowd, restaurants, pubs and coffee houses are struggling. Apart from the lack of rush hour traffic not too many positives for the area should WFH become the norm. The same is applying to downtown areas where many businesses are struggling, also public transport. Also getting very difficult to rent out properties downtown. As much retail has previously moved to suburban areas, plus Amazon etc we are looking at the total destruction of the idea of what happens in city centres.
You may be happier working from home, but certainly not everybody is and I am not sure a full scale switch to even partial WFH will be a long term beneficial thing apart from the time wasted and the cost of commuting
My single somewhat at risk brother begged to go back to the office as he was losing his mind not seeing anybody for days and days on end
It’s absolutely the case that it’s not for everyone. For my company the default is the office but if the job content suits, and the individual wants it, 2 or 3 days a week at home is possible.
Your situation sounds ideal. A short commute to an office that’s pleasant enough is hard to fault. But many have 90 mins + of commute each day (my last two jobs were 3 hours then 4 hours daily) at eye watering expense to sit in shitty boxes that would insult battery hens to do tasks they could just as easily do at home.
There will be winners and losers in a shift to hybrid but the prospective benefits are huge.
Yes commuting especially by car is soul destroying. When I started this job I had about a 3 hr round trip bus ride from downtown Ottawa, was difficult especially in -30 temperatures but I could always get a seat and my podcasting listening peaked and I managed to get through the whole of Lewisohn’s Tune In in it’s audio book incarnation
43 hours! I listened to that myself just the other month. Like a madman, I actually miss my commute. It was always quiet time where I was forced to do things for myself (podcasts, reading) because there was nothing else to do.
As long as my buses connected well it wasn’t too bad and as I got on at the start and off at the end of the route I always got a seat. 43 hours? So I guess it took 3 weeks, actually did look forward to those rides at that time. Didn’t enjoy the people who decided to watch TV programmes on their phones without bothering to use headphones
I don’t miss my commute but I do miss the opportunity it provided for podcast/radio listening. I now listen to them on my daily walk.
Since Offspring The Younger has left for university, Mrs F suggested I join her instead on her evening walk. “Only if I can listen to podcasts at the same time” was apparently not the correct answer…
Seems entirely reasonable to me. I Iisten to audiobooks on my daily walk and have often rejected the offer of a walking companion. It may be a daft rule but that’s the only time I listen to audiobooks so I look forward to my walk come rain or shine.
I have keen youngsters at work who want to do a “group walk” at lunchtimes. I will acquiesce sometimes but it does infringe on my Podcast listening
Yay! Like-minded souls. People never seem to understand why I prefer walking on my own.
It’s not all walking.
Totally agree. I have an hour walk every night and do a few good pods, really step out and get the heart rate up and try to purge the shite day I have almost certainly had. Wonderful.
Another wfh bonus. I have a cold at present. I’m pretty confident it is just a cold as I passed it on to my other half who, working in a hospital, tested for Covid to be sure before going into work.
I’m not so ill that I would have stayed away from the office if I had been based there, though wfh obviously makes that easier, but I am suffering noxious farts. Frankly, I’m like a mephitic hovercraft (tmftl), and wouldn’t want to inflict the consequences on team mates. TMI?
The Workplace Farts, TMFTL
I love not commuting but I find working from home exhausting – it’s flat out from 8.30 until whenever you stop – 19.15 today due to a call with the US. Not even a walk between meeting rooms – click Leave Meeting, click Join, off we go again. Also it’s no fun. No chat, no office natter. I think bell ends like Dowden are just motivated by the chubby they get thinking about “their people” and being a manager, but to say WFH is perfect is as stupid as saying it’s all exercise bike and a lazy drift through the day. I’m sick of the whole business actually and can’t wait to bail out.
Loads of valid arguments for/against but sitting at home all day is not for me. I like the hybrid version and the lack of rigid start/end times. Currently 3/5 in the office. I tend to pick up some early emails and business at home in the morning, the head off after the rush hour into the office keeping in touch on my smartphone during the commute – feeling more relaxed than I would battling to get there for a more ‘traditional’ start time.
Twang absolute nails the downside of a life led on MS Teams or Zoom above – I have to say the face-to-face meetings I’m now having are far more effective epecially for complex problem solving and things that need some creative thought , and the dynamic of some of the Online ones is becoming irritating and often really counter-productive with important comments lost in the low bit-rate glitch, or people just zoning out while someone rambles on, or people feeling a bit more inclined to be an armchair critic/keyboard warrior on a Teams call then they might in person.
The other bit, apart from the general social contact is that kind of care and support that sometimes works much better in person, or sometimes doesn’t happen unless you see someone and get into a conversation in passing – I had such an interaction before I left for home tonight – a quick hello turned into quite a serious conversation and was able to cheer up and reassure someone who was dealing with something they were really struggling with. It’s called having a vaguely normal working life – I’ve missed it!
I’ve been very fortunate. As a freelancer in 2016-2020 I was hybrid working already, working at home or some office depending on employer. I took a full time government design job in February 2020. Two weeks later we went into lockdown and I took a Mac home in a cab. It’s been here ever since.
What’s kept my sanity is storing the Mac, plus associated equipment, in a closet. We’re in a small flat and I work off the dining table which is also in the living room so leaving it permanently up isn’t a good idea. Like Fentonsteve, I dress for work a bit, which means at 6pm or so, I back up, pack everything away and change my shirt and shoes. Work is officially switched off til 9am the following day.
We’re encouraged to start going in a day or two a week, which is good for meeting people and printing, but little else. Given that my freelance income would have been severely impacted by Covid had I not got this job at the time I did, I complain about very little.
I think there are companies out there who have shamelessly used the ‘our people are having to work at home’ line in order to disguise staff reductions. I too don’t understand how (for example) customer service type roles and wait times should be affected by WFH, at least to the extent that some companies are claiming.
Like a lop-sided optimist, I’m always one for seeing cluelessness and ignorance where others might see malicious intent. I don’t think companies are deliberately blaming the pandemic for poor call handling and wait times because they are trying to hide something else: I think it’s just become a truism, an easy peg to hang problems on which obscures more insidious problems.
Say a customer calls you while you’re working at home and wants to know something that you don’t have information readily to hand about. In an office with colleagues, you can often put them on hold for a few minutes and find the information from asking someone or looking at a file.
If you’re at home, you have to email or message someone, hoping they see the email/message and know you have a question. They might well be at home too, so they might not have the info to hand either. Working from home with just a laptop, one landline and your mobile doesn’t compare to actually being where the info you need is.
The critical bit is not where the people are, it’s where the info is. That’s in a database, and that’s accessed by the laptop, same way it would be in the office. My access to data is identical at home as it is the office.
I think that depends on the nature of the business. Businesses with a really high creative content won’t necessarily have the info you want in a database or documentation.
I love WFH after 30 plus years of 2 hours a day commutes, but there are a couple of downsides in my experience. I am learning a lot of new technology (software) and pairing by phone to go through stuff just doesn’t work for me, I need to be able to grab the keyboard and do it myself. It has caused me much stress because I know I can do it, it is just another flavour of the same basic task set. So much so that I am considering retiring.
The other thing is I haven’t got a decent chair/desk/monitor combo; it all gets put out onto the dining room table and tidied away at tend of day. This combined with a lack of natural workday rhythms means that if I didn’t have a daily walk I’d probably be sitting still for far too long. Not good for one’s musculo-skeletal heatlth.
We have a group at work who are in meetings all day long. They are currently working from home, which means that they are sitting in front of a screen all day long.
One thing I’ve noticed with Teams/Zoom is that once you have more than 3 people in the meeting, the meeting will last the whole hour whether it needs to or not (it usually doesn’t).
For years I worked in NW London while living in Teddington. Potential 90 minute drive both ways. What I would have given for a couple of days a week wfh. Mine was a very hands on warehouse / drivers / trucks / operational role that meant I really had to be there. I work a 15 minute drive from home now, similar role with less pressure but still need to be here. Haven’t missed a day throughout Covid was just on reduced hours for a while.
I think I’d be rubbish working from home, no focus or motivation. I remember how managers wanted to wfh but hated their staff doing it. Must be a real bugger to manage someone who sees it as a chance to get their washing done, watch This Morning, have a late breakfast etc. Must be really hard to prove.
If I had my time again I’d like my job to be somehow measured by productivity, not by how many hours I spend doing it. You’ve budgeted for me to complete these tasks competently and you’re going to manage me based on my results not if i turn up 30 minutes late because Hanger Lane was fucked again. Requires trust, faith and strong management but I hope out of these last 18 months that will be the future. 40 hour week or just make sure this is done to mine and our customers satisfaction, you decide how long it takes..
Your last point is key. It doesn’t matter to a manager or anyone else if the employee is completing the work required of them by getting their head down and ploughing though it, or by stops and starts based around a hectic schedule of daytime antique programmes and masturbation. So long as the work is done, and the remote employee is available to contact as much as is reasonable, then happy days.
This thread has been an eye-opener for me and I’m grateful for the insight. I’m honestly surprised to learn that so many people have had negative experiences of wfh. While I’m in the large majority who find pluses and minuses I’ve been lucky that the 3 things necessary to make wfh successful (the nature of the work, the home working environment, and a personality which thrives on its own company) all align for me.
There’s a lot of remote monitoring software available which is presumably installed on a lot of company owned laptops.
I guess this again depends on the nature of the job. Today, for example, if I was judged on what I should have output today, I would have been unpaid. As it was, I (hopefully) sped up other people’s progress. When, as is often the case, you’re dependent on a long chain of events to deliver your product, many of which are completely outside your control, being paid hourly seems best to me. If you need to work extra hours, you should get paid for them as well.
I am an engineer, problem solving is a big part of the job, often I will achieve next to nothing in 6 hours then advance the project much more than a day in the next 2 or 3 hours
Today the Daily Mail is blaming the Taliban takeover on WFH, as part of their “Get Back To The Office” campaign (very ironic seeing as you’d struggle to find any group of people as pathologically lazy as tabloid journalists)
I assume that all sales of newspapers are down now that people are not generally commuting
Good point. The Sun was begging for readers during the first lockdown. Sadly they survived it.
long term those titles are all doomed, but the Daily Mail will continue to poison our national life indefinitely because of its website and its sidebar of sideboobs and the like.
You rarely see a newspaper, other than Metro, on a train. It’s all phones, tablets and kindles. With a very occasional book.
I think a lot of commuters would buy a paper to read in their breaks.
Possibly as a means of avoiding conversation with their colleagues.
I’ve never been able to read much during bus or train commutes, personally. Too much distraction.
I’ve never seen a nipple, oh never mind.
Breaks???!!!