I have some very mixed feelings regarding working from home.
I work in a specialised design profession that relies heavily on close collaboration and I do feel that working from home has made certain tasks more difficult. Some things are just easier when you are in the same room as the other people.
Me being young and sharing a small flat, I simply don’t have the space for a desk and chair and certainly don’t have a spare room to turn into a dedicated work area.
I have spent the past 9 months working from an armchair in my bedroom with my laptop on my lap.
In the office, I have a very high end PC with two very large monitors so working from a tiny laptop screen via a laggy screen sharing app is a very noticeable downgrade which can be highly frustrating at times.
I also miss interacting face to face with my colleagues. I miss overhearing conversations about other projects. I miss the hustle and bustle of the city.
Although we have a weekly catch up meeting, I feel almost completely ignorant about what else is going on in the company.
Yes, I have saved a lot of money from not travelling but I worry about the changes which might occur in a post covid world.
I’ve always been drawn to the buzz and vibrancy of cities but if 40% fewer people are communing then will any of the shops, restaurants, bars and other leisure facilities which bring vibrancy to a place survive? Will all the people saving money from not committing be surprised when there are no restaurants or bars in which to spend that money? Most of the shops and restaurants in city centres are sustained by office workers so a large drop in patronage can’t be a good thing.
Combined with the demise of retail is the city centre a thing of the past?
Will large parts of our cities become derelict wrecks like they where I the 70’s?
Things don’t bode well for rail travel either. What is the point of HS2 if there are going to be 40% fewer commuters? Will we need a second Beeching axe in a few years?
Perhaps I am being a little hyperbolic but most of our cities have improved massively within the past 20 years and it seems a shame to throw all that away.
Going back to more practical matters, I agree that home working must be terrible for new recruits and especially terrible for people just joining my industry. How do you get a feel of the company when they don’t even have an office?
In my industry once you start working you learn my doing. But much of that learning happens passively just by being immersed within an office environment. You overhear conversations, you can see not only what people are doing but how they are doing it.
Perhaps in some industries a computerised training course is sufficient to bring people up to speed, but not in my industry.
I think people in my industry do realise that we are not particularly suited to working from home so we will remain mostly office based.
I think post pandemic I will definitely be one of the people working mainly from the office, perhaps 5 days per week.
I appreciate the social aspect of working so I wouldn’t be interested in taking a job where I never meet my colleagues.
There is a lot to unpack there, but being honest, half of it sounds like your company has been pretty useless in terms of supporting you.
Not everywhere is like that. Many places have either let staff take monitors, office chairs, powerful desktop PC's etc home with them, whilst others have given staff budgets to purchase home office equipment on company money. Some places are actually making staff feel more connected to the business by giving more regular an detailed updates in terms of what is going on, and providing time to just generally catchup with colleagues on calls etc. And in terms of starting a new job - remote work really is not a new thing, and many hugely successful companies already did it before COVID, some to the extent of being 100% remote. If it didn't work those companies wouldn't have done it. Appreciate that doesn't help some living situations though (not just yours too - but thinking of families with kids etc), but that is why looking forward very few people are talking about 100% remote work (those that are talking about that will likely be the companies and staff who were already either doing 100% remote or thinking about it) .
As for for comments about cities - remember there will always be hubs for things like entertainment and for times when staff do need to meet (even if its not every single work day). Cities aren't just cities because of the offices there. Sure it may help with some trade for some businesses - but it certainly isn't the be all and end all.
The danger. With workers sat at home, companies will question why they are paying people a salary to sit at home when they could just pay a small retainer and then pay piece rate for work actually done, which is how it was before the industrial revolution when people worked at home in cottage industries.
That is a pretty big stretch I think. Especially for most industries.
I’ve no idea how it could be implemented but I did float the idea of a working from home tax a few weeks back. These people in the ‘new world’ are raking it in with their full salaries, no travel costs and then not putting anything back into the economy by not busing coffee, lunch, socialising after work etc.
Well yes, because people don't have additional heating costs for example to pay? And as for not putting anything back into the economy, if my and my colleagues experiences are anything to go by, we are! It is just we are spending that money on places local to where we live instead of local to the office.
This is where I see the real unspoken danger of working from home, add into the mix employers - now clients saying I’m not paying you company sick pay or paid annual leave let alone a pension.
I mean that is a pretty big stretch isn't it? Aside from the fact that paying those things is law for people classed as employees, and I am sure HMRC will take a very dim view of companies pretending that their staff are just contractors when in reality they are employees (indeed that is why the IR35 changes that came into law last year were introduced).
I live in London and can only fibre direct to the property, i.e. not via the BT exchange. That means there is a choice of just 1 ISP I can go with if I want decent internet connectivity, all the others offer standard broadband only which is speeds of up to 16mb. My borough has 328,000 residents so I don't understand why BT haven't upgraded my local exchange as its not as if I live in some remote part of the country!
I think most people with poorer internet would bite your hand off to get fibre direct to the property tbh! I've resorted to 5G to get decent internet as the phone line alternative is useless and there is no option of fibre here, despite living right bang next to Bristol city centre.
I think the issue really lies with the VPN that companies provide. In normal times they have enough capacity as a lot of people are in the office but with everyone working from home there isn't sufficient bandwidth to go round everyone. Earlier in the year my employer had to ask people north of Coventry to use the secondary VPN, which was only ever designed to be a failover option in times of outage, whereas before everyone would be on the primary connection without any problems. Some companies will have upgraded their VPN capacity but I expect some will have a make do attitude and not increase VPN capacity.
This is where the cloud beats all. My company moved to a cloud based VPN a few weeks before the WFH stuff started (totally unconnected to COVID - but very well timed in the end!) which means we aren't capacity constrained in the same way as a more traditional setup.
You could and people can claim an extra £6 a week in tax benefits. If costs are over that then they need to submit receipts.
I wish my heating expenses were just an extra £6 a week! As for receipts - that only works if your company will reimburse you - most aren't.
