Working From Home

The "Netflix and wank" social media posts won't help this trust and there will always be the piss takers, like those who absolutely have to take a 15 minute fag break every hour (unless it's raining, miraculously) but then working from home they'd be able to smoke at their home workstations anyway, surely?

The streets where you're based are BUSIER? With lockdown in Spain my town is like a ghost town.  People are allowed to go to the supermarket, but they are still much less in evidence than before .... and we need to eat here too ;-)

I am enrolled on an intermediate level Spanish course and the classes are running on Skype ... so though I already speak some Spanish and I can communicate with some confidence I absolutely HATE video conferencing.  I find it detached, impersonal and relatively unproductive, so I would be horrified if the outcome of this crisis was that people moved away from personal contact in business.

RHM.Photo said

It's always been a trust issue and I'm sure people like Ivanka Trump posting "influencer" photos of herself playing with the kids rather than doing her "work" as a senior government employee won't help.

In my case following a month in hospital last year and mobility issues after that, working from home was something that I was doing whenever possible and a senior staff member at the company I work for, trust was less of an issue anyway.

Fast forward to now and the advice for people to work from home where possible and not travel unnecessarily.

Monday I was supposed to fly to Stockholm for a 3 hour meeting with lawyers.  Instead of an eighteen hour day with travel, we accomplished it using Skype for Business. A couple of dropped calls and one restart of the software, but it handled a meeting room in Stockholm and three people on VC (even though one couldn't get a mic working).

This morning I've had a videoconference with a colleague in Dubai and one in Egypt using Microsoft Teams and that was completely successful.

My work files are being stored in Dropbox and/or OneDrive and are accessible anywhere I can get an Internet connection.

So post-COVID-19, do we see a sea change with much more remote working? Where I'm based it's like a huge dormitory ordinarily but now the streets and local grocers are busier because we all need to have food and drink (although the idiotic stockpiling means some shortages*) so is this the new normal?

Obviously there are people who can't work from home - including those in the very shops I mentioned - and in service industries, but surely this is the way forward as we're largely a nation of tertiary industries with little manufacturing left?

With all the benefits to the environment from reduced transport too.

*apart from Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire Puddings, because fuck them, obviously

Edited by RHM.Photo

You make some very valid points in all of this.

Personally , I am trying to get my own YouTube Channel off the ground. Hopefully over the long-term , I am aiming to earn some extra income on-top of any day-job.

Cliff Mdx said

The streets where you're based are BUSIER? With lockdown in Spain my town is like a ghost town.  People are allowed to go to the supermarket, but they are still much less in evidence than before .... and we need to eat here too ;-)

I am enrolled on an intermediate level Spanish course and the classes are running on Skype ... so though I already speak some Spanish and I can communicate with some confidence I absolutely HATE video conferencing.  I find it detached, impersonal and relatively unproductive, so I would be horrified if the outcome of this crisis was that people moved away from personal contact in business.

The Spanish lockdown is something the UK Gov are trying to avoid. I can't see the French coping with it either, to be honest. And yes, ordinarily the streets where I live here in London are empty as the entire Rotherhithe/Canada Water peninsular is a dormitory area for the City.

A lot of my day-to-day work requires telephone conferencing with people around the world. THAT I find very detached and impersonal.

Dennis Bloodnok Photography said

Personally , I am trying to get my own YouTube Channel off the ground. Hopefully over the long-term , I am aiming to earn some extra income on-top of any day-job.

If that's an unexpected outcome from all of this then that's even better.

RHM.Photo said

Cliff Mdx said

The streets where you're based are BUSIER? With lockdown in Spain my town is like a ghost town.  People are allowed to go to the supermarket, but they are still much less in evidence than before .... and we need to eat here too ;-)

I am enrolled on an intermediate level Spanish course and the classes are running on Skype ... so though I already speak some Spanish and I can communicate with some confidence I absolutely HATE video conferencing.  I find it detached, impersonal and relatively unproductive, so I would be horrified if the outcome of this crisis was that people moved away from personal contact in business.

The Spanish lockdown is something the UK Gov are trying to avoid. I can't see the French coping with it either, to be honest. And yes, ordinarily the streets where I live here in London are empty as the entire Rotherhithe/Canada Water peninsular is a dormitory area for the City.

A lot of my day-to-day work requires telephone conferencing with people around the world. THAT I find very detached and impersonal.

Dennis Bloodnok Photography said

Personally , I am trying to get my own YouTube Channel off the ground. Hopefully over the long-term , I am aiming to earn some extra income on-top of any day-job.

If that's an unexpected outcome from all of this then that's even better.

The thing is, with more people staying at home, my YouTube Channel is gaining more Subscribers, more Viewers and more Watchtime.

As they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

Yep I think you are correct (apart from the bit about Aunt Bessies Yorkshires, there excellent) things will change. However I'm not sure that will be for the better short term. To me a lot of business is about personal interactions and we all give off signs, that others consciously one subconsciously read (wether they realise it or not). I'm concerned that without face to face interactions real intentions (good or bad) will be missed. 

jump the wall photography said

Yep I think you are correct (apart from the bit about Aunt Bessies Yorkshires, there excellent) things will change. However I'm not sure that will be for the better short term. To me a lot of business is about personal interactions and we all give off signs, that others consciously one subconsciously read (wether they realise it or not). I'm concerned that without face to face interactions real intentions (good or bad) will be missed. 

I like Aunt Bessie's Yorkshires, but that was the only stock left in the freezer compartment when I popped over to our local Co-op yesterday!

I agree about face to face meetings, but with the added saving of no travel time if you're hourly-billed, it makes sense to go VC if possible. The more present, the more bandwidth required though.

I had a VC interview yesterday.

The interviewer was in his kitchen somewhere near Reading and I was in my kitchen somewhere near Edinburgh, and I was being interviewed for a job based in Glasgow.

The potential employer has an 80/20 rule where it expects 20% of any office location staff (and they have several around the country and employ several thousand office based staff) to be working from home at any time.

This is an existing rule and has nothing to do with the current crisis.

Design Jobs like mine can be done from anywhere in the world where there is an adequate broadband to cope with the VPN / remote desktop demand.

Provided you have the space to be able to work from home (I really don't have the space for an A0 plotter, but I do have the space for 2 monitors and a laptop dock), then the only real barrier is trust.

Oh yeah, and configuring the ISP router as not all of them are happy to allow private tunneling (whatever that is).