I don’t think they’ll be this huge transformative cultural shift.

I do think however that WFH will be a benefit that every employer has to offer by default going forward.

Even 2 years ago when I was searching for my current job, a few places I interviewed at didn’t offer WFH. I declined to take those interviews further. (This is within software/tech in London, so you’d expect everyone to already be there, but no.)

I expect WFH will be much more casual and ‘expected’ for people 2-3 times a week. It’ll be commonplace to ensure everyone can come in to the office at the same time if you need face to face interaction rather than assuming everyone will be in the office that day.

You won’t see many businesses downsizing immediately as they’ll all be locked into 10 year contracts for their buildings.

You won’t see many businesses downsizing immediately as they’ll all be locked into 10 year contracts for their buildings.

There is also the thorny issue of hot desking whilst Covid is knocking about. It is very problematic. I’ve heard of firms that have gone hot desk in the last few year undoing that policy for the moment. A long term solution would seem to be a smaller office with bookable meeting rooms and hot desks but whilst social distancing and clean spaces are a thing firms will either keep all the space it has or sack off the whole office completely. Most I suspect will do the former for the moment.

I am lucky – we have always prioritized me having somewhere to WFH since my PhD, as writing in large open plan offices was never productive. Plus various back issues means I have had periods I couldn’t go in. Therefore, I have a dedicated office set up in the 3rd bedroom which I can avoid the rest of the time (well, I would shut the door if we weren’t so bad at rehanging salvaged doors!).

However, for 3 days this week we have a plasterer in doing the halls, stairs and landing, so I am working from our bedroom to maximise social distancing, and minimise the noise. And even in half a day, it is certainly given me a new found respect for all my team working in non-optimal conditions. This picnic table is wobbly as hell, and my back already aches in a camping chair!

I think an established level of understanding to be flexible re WHF would be the ideal solution. For me I have had that flexibilty at times, but for others, it would be good for companies to offer similar.

If it’s more efficient why do companies (credit card, utilities, holiday companies) and even HMRC go to great pains to say on the phone – we are much slower than usual and your call may be on hold for a long time – because many of our staff are working from home?

I suspect long term it will only work for some people and types of work.

The messages on phonelines about delays due to COVID are because some people are working at home – not everyone is yet – there’s still IT issues around access to all necessary systems. There’s also a massive backlog of work to get through caused by the delays while everyone was set up at home.

Think it’s fair to say that among people who typically work at a desk, there’s a huge spectrum of experiences with WFH. While it’s been an interesting big experiment to have everyone doing it at the same time, it’s worth remembering that there’s some massive differences in terms of how ready organisations were for it, and that doing it during a global pandemic isn’t the same as introducing it at your own pace.

I’ve been happily WFH full time for years, in a team that’s spread all over the country. We just couldn’t have got the people if we all had to be commuting to the same town. We have managers who are used to managing remote teams, our company is all about Microsoft SfB and Teams so largely we practice what we advise our clients to do. Having our kids at home all day (and me scaling back massively to look after them) has been the biggest challenge really.

There’s definitely a place for in-person contact and working – we were doing it every other month or so to meet for the day – but I’ve never missed the noisy, chaotic open plan offices. Between the noise and interruptions I struggle to get anything done. For some people, who exist to make themselves look busy all day but produce nothing, it may be ideal. If you need to do focussed work with some tangible output then old-school offices with a closing door, or a similar space at home, are ideal.

I’m hoping our office does away with most desks, and uses the space for more generously sized meeting rooms instead. The little 4-6 person cupboards to squeeze into won’t cut it any more, will need to be boardroom-style to keep appropriate distancing. Use the office as places for people to come and work together on something, then separate to home working to continue on individually with virtual meetings in between.

If it’s more efficient why do companies (credit card, utilities, holiday companies) and even HMRC go to great pains to say on the phone

Call centres don’t really lend themselves to transforming to WFH overnight. I guess it’ll be desktops and a lot of specialised telephony and case tracking software. Call centre staff probably won’t have work laptops or be doing all their collaborative work on Teams/Skype/Zoom.

If it’s more efficient why do companies (credit card, utilities, holiday companies) and even HMRC go to great pains to say on the phone – we are much slower than usual and your call may be on hold for a long time – because many of our staff are working from home?

It’s because they’re busier.

I work in banking and our call centres went from 30-40 calls queuing at peak times, to hundreds queueing all day. This was at the start of lockdown when none of our customer facing staff were WFH.

Call centres don’t really lend themselves to transforming to WFH overnight. I guess it’ll be desktops and a lot of specialised telephony and case tracking software. Call centre staff probably won’t have work laptops or be doing all their collaborative work on Teams/Skype/Zoom.

I’ve got pictures of a delivery of 500 laptops for call centre staff, 4 full pallets worth that were built and deployed in less than a week. That was at the end of March. We’re still deploying laptops now, plus monitors, chairs etc. We’ve gone from 5 or 10% of people with laptops to over 90%, that’s in a company of 1600 people. Then there’s the changes to phone systems, vpn, citrix (50 users remoting in to nearly 1000 each day).

No office based big call centre would have been able to say WFH at the drop of a hat, it takes weeks to get everything in place.

I had a client who is an online financial service provider who has been wfh for a long time. They were displaced due to flooding a few years ago and got secure telephony set up then. Everything is recorded and their systems are all compliant with regulations but they all work from home. There’s still office banter and the team meets and they have to do a lot of training so there’s definitely a team spirit. It was pretty impressive to be honest and I wondered why more people haven’t gone down this route. Covid made very little difference to their working arrangements.

You won’t see many businesses downsizing immediately as they’ll all be locked into 10 year contracts for their buildings.

Well only something like 1% will have the full 10 years reamining, half will have less than 5 years remaining…..

Some people will be able to WFH for ever more. I am lucky to be one of those even though I work for a company fo 40,000+ and have many offices scattered around the globe. In the summer of last year (before COVID) we announced 25:25 which predicted that by 2025 only 25% of our staff would work in an office. Turns out it was a bit quicker than that with 97% productively working from home in June.

The point being made about none office workers struggling to work from home is valid. I can’t see people building steel processing plants in their spare bedroom.

The point about people not having space to work at home is also valid. I had a speculative look at a big motor home at the weekend thinking MrsWCA and I could drive somewhere for the weekend and I could stay working there for the week and enjoy the second weekend without driving home. This was quickly discounted as even with just 2 people and a big 7m+ motor home there was no real way to block noise and have privacy. This is true in many peoples home too.

I think there will be a market for ‘privacy booths’ with internet and power. A bit like Regus offices but for individuals. This would allow people to get a quiet space if they need it and could be nice and local for them too. I can see some of the coffee shops taking up this idea where customers just rent the booth for the morning of afternoon. You don’t need many in any one shop but with 1 or 2 in many shops the demand can be met with ‘local offices’ for all. Much smaller cost than traditional offices and only used when needed.

working from home is **** boring

In the summer of last year (before COVID) we announced 25:25 which predicted that by 2025 only 25% of our staff would work in an office. Turns out it was a bit quicker than that with 97% productively working from home in June.

Nothing like events to speed things up…..

the truth is people want to wfh because you do less work. It doesn’t feel like work, you can flex your time, cram in a weeks work into 2 days, and go riding for the other days. Accept all your deliveries, do the washing, watch netflix, entertain kids. All of that used to happen in my last (ever) office job, productivity was a joke if you discounted the ‘fake productivity’ tricks everyone played.

We need a massive cultural change in offices yes, but this isn’t the answer.
I wfh for about ten years in IT, an didn’t enjoy it. I need to be properly engaged and enjoy my work and feel part of a team working to achieve something, wfh is counter to all of that. None of hte benefits of wfh ever made up for that.

Productivity in our offices is already rock bottom, wfh will make that worse, and companies know it.
A shift to being paid for ‘outputs’ rather than attendance and appearing to be productive. maybe. Who knows.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but just my opinion from having been there.

Accept all your deliveries, do the washing, watch netflix, entertain kids. All of that used to happen in my last (ever) office job, productivity was a joke if you discounted the ‘fake productivity’ tricks everyone played.

There’s no question that some days that’s absolutely the case. When a day is bad, it’s really really bad and you do almost nothing bar the minimum needed to not get caught, but there are plenty of others when you put a proper shift in. For me it’s always one or the other, in an office I’ll have those big days, but can’t get away with the low days so overall I do more I reckon.

it also depends on the job you’re doing. If I’m writing reports or researching then I’m better at home, if I’m making sales calls it’s bloody horrible at home alone.

Well, MrsF was at our caravan last week, so I worked in the conservatory (she usually sews in there). I’ll be back in the shed tomorrow as she’s home but there it lots of general noise now, so off out to commute across the garden.

A shift to being paid for ‘outputs’ rather than attendance and appearing to be productive.

I’m a coach, much of the time I have no visible output, however, I help other people with their output. So should I not be paid?

This is an interesting thread for me as I was 100% in the office, I have been 100% at home and will be till probably the end of the year and beyond that it’s not really clear. We are a tech company so have adapted well to working from home, the people with the slowest internet have all been those in cities, those of us out of town seem to have faster and more stable connections. Obviously this model works fine for us, but we have some people it doesn’t work for, for example, research teams love to talk through things with either other, usually with whiteboards or windows covered in equations, this hasn’t been an easy change for them. Other more code centric teams have adapted using Miro and the likes.

I want to get a dog so selfishly want to work from home as much as I can to make this more viable, but as my work is with people this requires them to be willing to work with me in this way.

Poor productivity and lack of motivation of the team isn’t normally down to their location, more their job engagement and the management style.

Different people need different things. Some need other people to work along side and they seem to miss the office. People saying working from home is ‘boring’ should be listened to. What do they do in the office that is different?

If their job in the office boring but spending lots of time chatting to others relieves this boredom then perhaps if it is possible to add interest to the job it won’t seem so boring. Also will lose less time with people just chatting away.

WHF need better management. It may be harder for the managers but that doesn’t mean it is wrong.

the truth is people want to wfh because you do less work.

Not where I am sitting. I get more done at home without deskside interruptions. I am also less stressed as I don’t have to put up with annoying people and noises.

I do however do a job where most of my conversations are with people not in the UK so sitting in an office is pretty pointless.

As others have said, even if just 25% of people have jobs that could move to more home working that would help in many ways.

If I ever needed confirmation that I’m Aspie, this thread is it.

I’ve worked from home for a couple of years now. I absolutely love it. I worked in a large open-plan office for a while and I say with no exaggeration that it was badly affecting my mental health. All the background noise, phone ringtones at full volume, people mithering me every half an hour, when I eventually wangled my own office it was bliss.

I don’t doubt that some people will use it as an excuse to skive, but I’m way more productive at home. I can set hours to suit myself – I was chatting to the head of IT at 1am last night – and there’s no-one tapping their wrist if I start work at 8:32.

you can flex your time, cram in a weeks work into 2 days, and go riding for the other days.

Is this a bad thing? If you can do a week’s work in two days then why should you be expected to do another two and a half weeks’ work just because you’re being more efficient? You said yourself that people will come up with ‘productivity excuses’ because there’s no incentive to work any faster. In an office, if you work harder you still have to sit there looking busy until 5pm so why would you?

the only things i miss about the office are cycling in, and Caribbean curry wednesdays.

I don’t miss the commute at all. I did a mix of train or bike; the bike commute was mostly along the main road, lots of traffic lights.
Now I can log off at between 4 and 5, head straight out on road or CX and be in the hills in a few minutes.

There was an Indian guy in our office who used to make the most amazing samosas, bhajis and naan, he’d sometimes bring a huge pile of those in. I do miss those.

I work in open plan, but we had a lot of meeting rooms for talking. Worked well until the ratio of desks to rooms went down. Most of my meetings are international and Teams is now the default tool. We would use a Smart room and try and meet together on a site basis in as few rooms as possible. But not always. Meetings from desks in open plan is just not appropriate. It’s hard to code in an open plan office with the distractions, and I tend to go in late and work late after people have left.

I listen to Radio 3 on headphones in the office and Radio 3 through speakers at home. I brought my nespresso machine home before we shut the office. I use a better monitor and the same keyboard and mouse at home.

I’ll continue to work at home at least two days per week in 2021. I expect the company are counting on this, regardless of 11/9 occupancy.

Like a lot of people I’ve been WFH since the start of Lockdown. Despite working for an O&G operator we largely had to supply all our own equipment whether IT related, proper seats, desks etc. I have always wondered what the implications are for the company should they mandate working from home (rather than being implemented as a result of a pandemic)? Would they still have the same responsibilities regarding occupation health etc? My understanding would be yes however I’d be interested to know if anyone has any more direct experience of this.

I also like work and life to be separate.

This is very true for me, and has been all my working life.
I do have colleagues I choose to include in my social life but that is due similar interests outside work, not cos I work with them.

Also as host to visiting service engineers it would be somewhat difficult to do my office paperwork at home, even in this day and age someone still has to physically sign a bit of paper far more often than a lot of people realise.

Yes, I do know about E signature etc but in an industry where the end product is paper reports ( more often than not ) it is still not a common practice.

TiRed, yes, unfortunately I think we’ll see a death rate bubbling along, maybe not doubling every 3 days but peaking and troughing in various locations as lockdowns are applied and lifted but the push, for a lot of folk, will be business as the old normal. The town where I live and most of the other borders towns don’t have a workforce where a majority can work from home.
My WFH experience was not the best for various reasons (one being building works that went on for 8 weeks with stone cutting everyday) and as a teacher education cannot work on a WFH basis. A lot of us did our best (some did fa) but pupil engagement is poor. I have a fear that schools are going to be an issue when everyone is back, maybe not for the kids health but in a room with poor airflow with 7 groups of 20 people and not allowed ppe unless there is a first aid issue has surely got have an effect.
Given how a common cold or nits can spread.in a school.

I also like work and life to be separate.

Me too. I have a work life at home when I am working and then when I stop working I have a home life. It just takes a bit of mental training I guess. Imagine being a taxi driver during the week and then driving your family at the weekend. That doesn’t seem strange so why does it cause a problem is you use a room to work for one part of the week and something else for another part of the week?

fatoldgit – I agree and said in my first post that there would be jobs that require physical presence but I expect there will be a lot of people and companies looking at exactly who needs to be where, when and how often.

It just takes a bit of mental training I guess

Please feel free to pass on any tips other than the normal ones, because despite all the meditations etc its frequently on my mind after I close the lap top.

Am I really the first to say that it’s not dead, it’s just resting?

Kryton – work works for you when you used to leave the office?

Was it the journey home allowing your mind to switch off from work and start thinking about home?

This was the main thing for me when I used to commute by car. The drive in allowed me to plan my first actions of the day and the drive home allowed me to tick off what I had done and what I needed to do tomorrow. By the time I was home I was thinking about what was for dinner and was I riding that night.

Now I finish work about 5:45 – 6pm and go to the sauna / hot tub for 30-45 minutes and just relax. My mind does much the same mental cataloguing but when I get out I am ‘home’. It doesn’t need to be a sauna and before I had that I would just go into the garden and listen to the noise of the birds/traffic/kids screaming and try to identify the different sounds. It had the same effect by creating a mental break. Nothing ‘cosmic and groovey’ just letting the mind have time to switch between the two mindsets

The temptation to ‘just go back and check if another email has landed’ was another thing. Now I refuse to let myself send an email after I have ‘switched off’ so very quickly reading emails at night becomes pointless. I normally do check my emails on a Sunday evening in case there is a change to Monday morning but will scan fir emergencies or diary changes and ignore the rest until the morning. Dealing with a stack of emails in one go in the morning is more efficient for me that answering every email immediately.

I will try to think of other stuff if you want but most of it is creating mentally separate sections of the day or having different patterns for different activities. Emails in the home office, Conference calls in the conservatory, Group chats laid back on the sofa etc. Try some and see what works for you.

Thanks to this thread, just ordered a fold up desk, so I can keep working in my lounge, but tuck everything away easily when I have guests (or want to get at my CDs). Cool 🙂

If their job in the office boring but spending lots of time chatting to others relieves this boredom then perhaps if it is possible to add interest to the job it won’t seem so boring. Also will lose less time with people just chatting away.

Problems arise when the one person who is bored / has done all their work etc is doing the classic thing that @Cougar mentioned of desperately trying to look busy which involves wandering round chatting aimlessly to people at their desks and in turn, disturbing those people.

WFH, if someone gets bored and buggers off to watch Netflix, go for a bike ride, do some cooking or whatever, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest and vice versa. There’s been several times where I’ve had very little to do at times so I’ve done stuff around the house just keeping my laptop to hand in case anyone phones. Equally, at busy times, I’m happy to “stay” late or pick up stuff out of hours because I know that a few days ago I spent half the day essentially on ad-hoc flexitime. Works for me and for the company and I’m not mooching round an office distracting others or wandering off to get a coffee.

WCA yes, very similar to all of your content.   I brought my Turbo sessions back to 6pm to enforce a 17:30-17:45 cut off point and the laptop/phone goes away until then.

I will try to think of other stuff if you want but most of it is creating mentally separate sections of the day or having different patterns for different activities. Emails in the home office, Conference calls in the conservatory, Group chats laid back on the sofa etc. Try some and see what works for you.

I haven’t done this though and am guilty of sitting at my desk with a sandwich after initially in lockdown having lunch outside with the kids in the warm weather.  Although I’m on STW and have the Yellow light on in Teams, I’m still here I guess.

Would they still have the same responsibilities regarding occupation health etc?

They do. An employer has duty of care for its employees WFH as in an office, workstation assessments and all that jazz. It’s on .gov.uk somewhere, I read it the other day. Which reminds me,

I do think however that WFH will be a benefit that every employer has to offer by default going forward.

Again, this is already the case. Legally if an employee wishes to work from home then the employer has to be able to justify refusing that request. Of course, there are many many reasons why an employee cannot WFH, but “because we say so” is insufficient.

Presumably putting your two points together Cougar an employer is honorbound to refuse your WFH request if you are unable to prove you have the space to do so safely. Would a screaming child in the house break the occ heath guidelines too? It would be hard to imagine it would not – imagine it being considered reasonable to work with the equivalent plonked on the desk next door in an office. What about an alcoholic or violent spouse? “Your house is an unhygienic, dysfunctional shower of shit and your violent husband is a risk to your health so we don’t want you in it on our watch”.

Also (never been involved in this) if you put in a WFH request against your employers wishes and they have provided all the kit (computer, desk, chair) for you in an office is it up to you to pay for the same in your home if they were to (begrudgingly) grant it, especially if you had a health condition that meant they had paid out for expensive adoptions? Thinking of a colleague who made a successful case for a £2K electrically adjustable standing desk for his office because of his back problem. Presumably if you have persuaded them it was essential for your welfare you can’t un-pursuade them when it suits you.

the truth is people want to wfh because you do less work.

I’m not sure that’s the case and it won’t be for long once all th ecorporate world ebraces key-stroke counters and productivity monitoring tools that will tie you to your keyboard and telephone like never before.

It won’t just be call center bods who have every secosn of their day moniotred and get kicked out for the slightest trangression.

Call centres actually shifted to working from home pretty well.  Around 80% of employees moved into home working over a 2 week period.  The reason they all had notices up about hold times being longer is that most of them were bombarded by calls way above anything they ever experienced or predicted, and most of these calls were complex and hence took longer to work through.

The office isn’t dead. For those of you lucky enough to have a dedicated workspace or room at home, then working from home is brilliant.  For those employees fighting for space on a kitchen table in a shared house, or balancing a laptop on a chair in the bedroom of their parent’s house then home working doesn’t work at all.

Hopefully the badly designed office is dead, the good office (the hub for company culture, where people can be creative, teams can learn from each other, where you can identify and manage vulnerable employees) has a long life yet.

I’m not sure that’s the case and it won’t be for long once all th ecorporate world ebraces key-stroke counters and productivity monitoring tools that will tie you to your keyboard and telephone like never before.

^ This.

I reckon that in 12 or so months when the productivity figures begin to get analysed the whole WFH thing will quite quickly become observed in a far more critical and potentially harsh way. Don’t forget, HR have had much less to do for 4 months…

we largely had to supply all our own equipment whether IT related, proper seats, desks etc.

This is something I’m unsure on. I was going to start a thread asking this question but I guess here is as good as any.

I enquired as to what work would pay for / subsidise and was told I could claim back £40 for a chair, £60 for a desk, and a few other sundries (I already have a laptop, it’s standard issue as we sacked off bulky mini-towers a couple of years ago).

That left me kinda torn. On the one hand it’s nice that they’re offering, on the other you wouldn’t start an office job to be handed £100 and told to pop off to Ikea. What if I can’t afford to add to that? You’re going to get a bright environment for that sort of budget. To my mind they should be providing what they’d provide in an actual office.

Presumably putting your two points together Cougar an employer is honorbound to refuse your WFH request if you are unable to prove you have the space to do so safely.

It’s a good point and I don’t have the answer. Is “I want to work from home with an abusive partner” all that likely a scenario though?

Thinking of a colleague who made a successful case for a £2K electrically adjustable standing desk for his office because of his back problem. Presumably if you have persuaded them it was essential for your welfare you can’t un-pursuade them when it suits you.

“That desk you bought me, when can you have it delivered?”

If they can supply it at work then they can supply it at home assuming that said home has sufficient space for it.

If they can supply it at work then they can supply it at home assuming that said home has sufficient space for it.

I missed out an important word…a flexible WFH request. ie. 2 or 3 days in the office, 2 or 3 days at home – two sets of kit required.