Working from Home.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

Most of the things you list can, and are, done on Zoom or Teams. We chat on Teams, we waste time in meetings on Teams, we do birthdays and leaving dos on Teams.

At least you are not stuck in traffic to go somewhere to waste time.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

I have 'Teams' where i work. I just don't do the meetings, can't be arsed, complete waste of my time.

My connection goes dodgy everytime one of these meetings turns into something trivial.

[xsnaggle]

Re: Working from Home.

Not the case at all.

Of course it isn't. You know.

[Rjk]

Re: Working from Home.

When I first started work as a data entry clerk, I used to get my daily work done by 1pm. The result was, I would then have to do the work others hadn't finished because they'd been gossiping, doing quizzes, smoking while I'd been working. After a few weeks of that, I decided to slow my pace down so that I finished and did the same amount of work as everyone else. Had managers sent me home after I finished as a reward, I guarantee the others would have matched my efforts.

some more modern thinking businesses have started to come around to this idea, usually the likes of google, Netflix etc. some roles have no core hours and no fixed holidays etc. just objectives. if you hit your objectives then it doesn't matter what you do, how many holidays you take etc.
finished your objectives for the year by the end of November - take the rest of the year off.
if more companies worked like that a lot more projects would complete on time.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

Of course it isn't. You know.

Seriously, last minute stress is something I've always tried to avoid (sometimes unavoidable if you're in a team of slackers, or have managers that are crap at organising). If I am involved in a last minute panic, I make sure that I let the people who caused that panic know they are completely culpable.

Funny thing is, since everyone has been wfh, last minute panics are much less frequent. I can guess why.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

some more modern thinking businesses have started to come around to this idea, usually the likes of google, Netflix etc. some roles have no core hours and no fixed holidays etc. just objectives. if you hit your objectives then it doesn't matter what you do, how many holidays you take etc.
finished your objectives for the year by the end of November - take the rest of the year off.
if more companies worked like that a lot more projects would complete on time.

Exactly - it is a real incentive.

Manufacturing industries spend fortunes upgrading machinery to do the job faster. But, they also spend fortunes on inefficient and unrewarding work practices. Penalising people who do the work by giving them things that lazy sods didn't complete? Result - efficient worker slows down, inefficient worker carries on not giving a crap. Rewarding people for completing ahead of time? Efficient worker has more leisure time, is more likely to keep up the effort. Inefficient worker will say "I'll have a bit of that" and increase their effort.

[Optimistic Nick]

Re: Working from Home.

I was perfectly calm until I saw your apostrophe.

In all seriousness though, about 20% of my work life has been spent trying to drag people like the OP forward. All these "We can't, we shouldn't" excuses are helping to achieve one thing. Lower productivity. Change is good. Less time wasted on roads is good. Less opportunities for people to slack by

1) Chatting at the desk
2) Chatting at the coffee machine
3) Chatting about what time to go for lunch
4) Chatting after coming back from lunch
5) Popping out for a fag to have a chat
6) Christmas/Easter/Valentine quizzes
7) The entire office congregating because someone they never spoke to is leaving, wasting another half an hour for each person.
8) The entire office congregating because someone they never spoke to has a birthday, wasting another half hour for each person.
9) Groups of people gathering photos of someone who has a birthday coming up, then spending an afternoon putting them in strategically hilarious places like the bogs
10) People surfing the net pretending to work
11) Calling meetings of 1 hour where the first 10 minutes is spent waiting for others to arrive, the next 20 minutes are spent laughing and joking between people who despise each other, 10 minutes talking about work, 15 minutes talking about the next meeting, and then the leader of the meeting saying "Good, we finished early, you all get 5 minutes back in your day".

is good.

The office is nothing more than a distraction. It is noisy, it is full of interruptions, it is full of banality, it is full of people who are only capable of forming relationships with people they work with, it is full of excuses to not do any work which results in lots of last minute rushes. That the OP thinks people should have to endure 12-15 hours of travel a week just to waste time is hilarious. Personally, I was getting more done and spending less time working once I went to wfh. It also means I can apply for jobs in London with higher wages, without having to endure the joke that is the London property market.

But, yes, none of this ever happens and people working from home is the cause of lower productivity.

Items 1, 2 and 6 (and for others, 5) which you list as negatives, I see as positives. Not just for my personal enjoyment of work but for the performance of the job itself. This does not mean that I think everyone should work from the office. Far from it - do what works for you. But for me in my line of work there are loads of benefits of those chats at the coffee machine; chatting to people you sit near. I have found it very difficult to do parts of my job during lockdown without that type of constant chatter and asking people for a quick view on something, as have others. And for trainees and junior staff - that is how they get their work and how they learn and so some of them will have suffered from lack of development. Personally - I'd never do an "office job" if my home was my office, it would be too lonely, too boring and too impersonal. My line of work relies on relationships - far harder to build over a teams call. Absolutely, delivery of projects can certainly be done 100% remotely in most cases. But long term: if that is all you ever did I think it would lead to an unfulfilling career and a style of work that would not allow people to appropriately train juniors.

Items 3 and 4: how much time does that really waste? I certainly miss going for lunch with colleagues and again - a great way to build relationships; check in on your colleagues/juniors etc. All things made much harder by remote working.

Items 7 and 8 we got rid of years ago anyway and agree - the leaving speech thing is awful. But not really sure I'd say loss of productivity is its main problem. Item 9 sounds a bit juvenile and I suspect that would wind me up too- but I've not really come across that. And items 10 and 11 are hardly behaviours driven by being in the office. My PA tells me I now spend on average 7 hours a week more in zoom/skpe/whatever calls than I used to spend in physical meetings before lockdown- and some of that is deliberate to compensate for the loss of interaction that we'd generally get in a working day in the office.

[Rjk]

Re: Working from Home.

Exactly - it is a real incentive.

Manufacturing industries spend fortunes upgrading machinery to do the job faster. But, they also spend fortunes on inefficient and unrewarding work practices. Penalising people who do the work by giving them things that lazy sods didn't complete? Result - efficient worker slows down, inefficient worker carries on not giving a crap. Rewarding people for completing ahead of time? Efficient worker has more leisure time, is more likely to keep up the effort. Inefficient worker will say "I'll have a bit of that" and increase their effort.

In my experience there is a lot of resistance to this from the people at the top.

They have often risen to the top working in the old fashioned way of working, and don't feel comfortable letting go of the reigns.
Now many have been forced to during the pandemic it will be interesting whether there will be an attempt to pick those reigns back up and how the workforce will react to it.

I'm working mostly with people in China, Eastern Europe and the states at the moment, so it makes next to no difference whether I'm in the office or not, and I already have to keep unconventional hours.
Home working allows me to leave 30 minutes later when I have to pick the kids up to school, and get to work 30 minutes sooner after I drop them off. More time is available for work and I save on fuel costs.
My girlfriend doesn't work at all so the amount of sex during office hours has definitely increased (from 0) so I can't claim to always be 100 focussed on the job (so to speak), but I think all things considered it works out better for me and for the company I work for.
Some things are always better face to face though. Once things seem more stable from a covid point of view I think I'll be trying to spend 2 days in the office and 3 days at home per week.

[Rjk]

Re: Working from Home.

A counterpoint to the people saying there is a risk that remote working will threaten people's jobs.

Whilst I don't do much engineering these days - by training I'm a mechanical engineer.
Engineering in this country is hugely undervalued both in terms of financial reimbursement and social standing.
People seem to hold a lot more respect for a lawyer than an engineer for example.

Working in the medical device industry in any of the roles I've been doing over the last decade or so my pay would have been a lot more if I'd been doing them in the US, or Germany, or Ireland, or Switzerland etc. where they properly value their engineers.
For the US you'd probably double the salary and for the rest of Europe increase it by at least 50%

Remote working has now become a lot more normalised in the rest of Europe as well, and I've started getting head-hunters looking to fill roles in Ireland and Europe on places like Linked in that are 100% remote based and paid at the local rates, whereas previously they would have been mostly looking for relocation.

[A Quiet Monkfish]

Re: Working from Home.

I'm perfectly calm, dad, and am enjoying life. I don't need to spend 10-15 hours traveling to work a week, I don't need to spend £50 on fuel every week, I can start work when I like, and finish when I like. I am not constantly monitored (last time I experienced this was actually in an office), I don't get to hear people's boring life/love/health stories.

Your suggestion is that people should throw all this away because one day our jobs will be gone. It's based on nothing but being an old twat, and is probably based on no experience of management at all. I know a few people who can only function by having people telling them what to do every single hour. As a manager, I know who is slacking because it becomes pretty obvious. I don't need to be sat in an office with them to manage them, and they don't need to sit with me to be managed.

Needless to say, you probably wouldn't last very long in any team I managed because you aren't exactly innovative or forward thinking are you?

Aw, that's a shame - you sound inspirational.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

Aw, that's a shame - you sound inspirational.

And you sound like you're stuck in a dead-end job.

[Allez Allez Allez]

Re: Working from Home.

In my experience there is a lot of resistance to this from the people at the top.

They have often risen to the top working in the old fashioned way of working, and don't feel comfortable letting go of the reigns.
Now many have been forced to during the pandemic it will be interesting whether there will be an attempt to pick those reigns back up and how the workforce will react to it.

I'm working mostly with people in China, Eastern Europe and the states at the moment, so it makes next to no difference whether I'm in the office or not, and I already have to keep unconventional hours.
Home working allows me to leave 30 minutes later when I have to pick the kids up to school, and get to work 30 minutes sooner after I drop them off. More time is available for work and I save on fuel costs.
My girlfriend doesn't work at all so the amount of sex during office hours has definitely increased (from 0) so I can't claim to always be 100 focussed on the job (so to speak), but I think all things considered it works out better for me and for the company I work for.
Some things are always better face to face though. Once things seem more stable from a covid point of view I think I'll be trying to spend 2 days in the office and 3 days at home per week.

Interesting, I've just interviewed an old colleague who got in touch with me looking for a role. She has been forced back into the office and no real justifications have been offered from her manager who is a classic micromanager. The assumption is that, if the manager can't see you, you're up to no good. It's that sort of pre-historic thinking that has spurred the OP into making a bit of an arse of himself talking, as he is, as a casual observer and not an actual player.

Undoubtedly there are things that are better face to face, and I have no engineering experience so I concede the percentages of time required to collaborate may be higher than in my line of work.

How often have we all finished early just because we have a dental appointment at 3:30 and that requires us to leave at 3pm, and it's not worth going back for half an hour? How often have we had workers, often women sadly, for whom the chore of picking up the kids has fallen to them and not their partner? One lady I work with has just gone back to full-time work purely because, after picking up her daughter, she can get back to work. She also does an hour late at evening. Prior to this, everything was office based and she had no option other than to go part-time. Like I say, this tends to unfairly fall on women so it has held her progress back.

The OP listed some suppositions on why home working is going to cause all our jobs to go to India, but hasn't offered anything other than a little thought that occurred to him that he simply had to put into writing. Sad to say, there are folks in boardrooms around the country with an equally silly outlook. Home working isn't for everyone, but clogging up roads for stuff that can be done in a building that costs a fortune in mortgage payments - completely non-sensical. A bit like the OP.

[blue matt]

Re: Working from Home.

when i used to do maintenance and fire prevention work in Offices ( a few years in total ) I was a little envious of the office work environment, a real micro-world, a snapshot of life, people from different backgrounds all slung into a melting pot, the laughs, flirting, bullying etc etc I worked at cardiff city hall for 18 months and got invited to Christmas parties ( Yes i went and enjoyed them ) spent some time with some city lads ( who i had seen about, but didnt really know them, i know they used to post on here ) Office looked a decent place to work

I guess if you are a social type of person, you would be itching to get back to the office , i can see how it would have been missed

another issue with WFH must be training people, all them Jnr Office types learn from watching people do what they do, thats not going to happen when you WFH

[xsnaggle]

Re: Working from Home.

Segriously, last minute stress is something I've always tried to avoid (sometimes unavoidable if you're in a team of slackers, or have managers that are crap at organising). If I am involved in a last minute panic, I make sure that I let the people who caused that panic know they are completely culpable.

Funny thing is, since everyone has been wfh, last minute panics are much less frequent. I can guess why.

I think that is total bullshit mate

[The Lone Gunman]

Re: Working from Home.

particularly liked the bit about not having to listen to peoples boring bullshit.

You listen to my boring bullshit often enough and by choice too!

Earlier today I thought of another waste of time for people who work in offices. I was walking through the Ty Glas Industrial Estate in Llanishen and witnessed loads of people shuffling out of their offices onto the courtyard. It was a fire drill! Not a waste of time if it saves someone’s life of course, but in truth they’re almost always a waste of time and they can drag on for ages.

I’ve worked in our office throughout the pandemic and wouldn’t want to work at home, doesn’t suit me as an individual, but it’s been blatantly obvious since March 2020 that those who are productive in the office are also productive at home, and vice versa.