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Will Working From Home "Stick"?


Razors Edge

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...for you after this COVID-19 thing is over? Or will your company return to "business as usual"? 

I was 40% WFH prior to this thing, so it will be interesting to see if that goes to 60% (M-W-F) or back to the old W-F routine.  I like going in to the office, but I could see two days in the office as reasonable or even less often :D as I would love to start being a totally "remote" worker (and able to buy my Airstream ASAP instead of 5 years from now).

What do you see????

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I agree with you. WoW and I still have positions that require in store/office presence, but many people I know have been working from home with no real impact on productivity. I can see a lot of businesses downsizing their building space and having people rotate being in the office. 

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1 minute ago, groupw said:

I can see a lot of businesses downsizing their building space and having people rotate being in the office. 

This is huge - but in a positive and negative way.  For a company like mine where we have a HQ in the burbs, and offices in the city (very expensive), reducing footprint would be a great cost savings.  However, town and cities really depend on real estate to support all sorts of stuff. I imagine this current WFH situation has devastated all the downtown stores and restaurants (even without there being big restrictions in place) since foot traffic would be way down.

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I hope so. Unless we wait until there is a vaccine, we have to come back and remain socially distant. Our desks are pretty close together.

I heard from a teacher friend that our schools might continue distance learning this school year and even into next fall.

I can get a lot done at home.

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27 minutes ago, groupw said:

I agree with you. WoW and I still have positions that require in store/office presence, but many people I know have been working from home with no real impact on productivity. I can see a lot of businesses downsizing their building space and having people rotate being in the office. 

Yeah, this, big time.

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9 minutes ago, dennis said:

Unless we wait until there is a vaccine

Post vaccine.  Back to "normal".

4 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

I work for a manufacturing company so it's not possible for me to work from home.

But if all the office drones are off the roads, even a short commute becomes shorter????

3 minutes ago, Dottles said:

I like WFH but I also miss going in sometimes. It'd be great if they had Work From Work Fridays 

I'd rather have WFW Wednesdays. I like my Fridays at home :D

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The company my wife works for has found more work is getting done having the employees work from home. So hopefully working from home will be a permanent thing.

On another note, a friend that manages a big name fast food franchise says going forward that corperate will start concentrating on the drive thru business and start phasing out dinning in.

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From everything I hear, our office's billability has remained high and WFH may indeed become a regular thing long term; they may be able to downsize office space. The real test will be if there are quality control or productivity issuers that don't surface for a few months, from all these people working (billing) unsupervised.

There are certainly times i wish i could just get a handful of people together in a conference room; a 10- minute discussion in person is a lot more efficient. I'd like it if we ended up maybe 3 days a week at home and 2 in the office. 

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Although I've appreciated being home and being able to sleep in, if I'm really busy, I'm more productive at work.  WFH is fine for a reduced workload, but I wouldn't like to do it long term. 

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My company did a huge 180 turn & sent about 2,000 employees home from our corporate campus in the period of about a week.  It was nuts from a security stand point as people were just packing up PC’s, monitors, desk chairs & such and blowing doors.   But that’s what was needed and with the exception for a few hiccups we haven’t lost productivity.

The road forward looks like we are not in a hurry to bring people back once stay from home orders are lifted.  We’ll phase people back in based on criticality of job function and probably see  more people WFH going forward.

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WFH would be really helpful in a lot of ways.  Sure, some businesses would suffer, but others would boom.  And the amount of vehicle miles reduced would be a fantastic advantage.

It's not been as delightful as I'd imagined, but that could be a result of also not socializing.  I do need to be around people.  I do need to get in the office to my lab occasionally, but I could deal with a few days a week at home.

I have noticed my electric bill is quite a bit higher.

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Most of our work has been done from home for the last few years.  We do application development and most organizations don't care where it happens.  Currently many of our clients are in MO, OK, FL, IN and then we have Spain and Mexico and Canada - and much of the business in Michigan is spread out across the state.

Our sales and admin staff now works from home were before maybe 10% of their activity was WFH.  A truly virtual office would be nice but we will always need some space.

 

EDIT:  There was discussion last week regarding the need for COBOL programmers.  We are working to close an opportunity with a state that need COBOL help for their UI office.  I'll leave the state name out of the discussion but we aren't sending any people to be neighbors with Petite.  They can work from home.

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3 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

Which is ironic as places like Wework are likely circling the drain right now. :(

I'm not familiar with Wework.  I have rented similar space from Regus in both Chicago and Minneapolis.  I'm not sure how they are doing.

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My wife had the chance to work from home years ago but we couldn’t get fast enough internet. Finally she asked if she could work from her mom’s vacant house. They inspected her workspace and locks and agreed to it. She had high speed internet installed and was happy as a clam working there until she got sick. The work from home worked out so well they encouraged everyone to work from home and closed down the high security work space they were renting underground. The few people that couldn’t get fast enough internet they found room for them at one of their other work spaces.

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Although we are mostly field oriented in this office there is a fair amount of work people can do from home, especially in the winter. Our Agency just launched a pilot telecommuting policy. We will need to see how that goes. In the past I have allowed people to WFH during bad weather, albeit unofficially. This new policy requires a preapproved schedule so it probably won’t work for us.

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59 minutes ago, 12string said:

WeWork - Cool!  I can work from the hipster store all day!

Home office - wow, those hipsters were really annoying, now I can get some work done

I don't think the Wework type things were specifically "hipster-ish" as I knew some non-hipsters who liked having an office when they needed it, but not having to lease office space.

The hipster places are more likely the places you book during the day to take a nap. :D

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6 hours ago, dennis said:

I heard from a teacher friend that our schools might continue distance learning this school year and even into next fall.

We're doing it for the rest of the year.  There are a lot of ideas being pushed around for next year.  My "I am not in charge of anything" guess is that we will do an every other day schedule for half the kids. One-half will go M-W-F while the other half goes T-H.  I have even heard of some schools thinking about a once every three days schedule.  

I was originally very against the idea of using COVID to "reimagine schooling in the 21st century." (I even ranted about that here.) But people are starting to get into the swing of things and finding their pace.  We can begin to think about new things.

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8 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

I don't think the Wework type things were specifically "hipster-ish" as I knew some non-hipsters who liked having an office when they needed it, but not having to lease office space.

The hipster places are more likely the places you book during the day to take a nap. :D

Agreed.  I used Regus offices for years and it’s nothing like a Starbucks or hip joint to hang out.

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13 minutes ago, Forum Administrator said:

We're doing it for the rest of the year.  There are a lot of ideas being pushed around for next year.  My "I am not in charge of anything" guess is that we will do an every other day schedule for half the kids. One-half will go M-W-F while the other half goes T-H.  I have even heard of some schools thinking about a once every three days schedule.  

I was originally very against the idea of using COVID to "reimagine schooling in the 21st century." (I even ranted about that here.) But people are starting to get into the swing of things and finding their pace.  We can begin to think about new things.

We have an accounting assistant that was here 3 days a week.  We went to WFH in March like everyone else and she would come in to the office for a couple hours 2 days a week for paperwork stuff.  A couple weeks ago she changed that to a few hours one day a week.  She has 4 boys - ages 8 to 17 that are distance learning now with a couple IEPs and a 3rd soon according to her.  She has homeschooled in the past so she has some experience but the load with the 4 boys is killing her - trying to keep them on task and focused.  She would shoot administrators if she was told she had to do this next year.

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I could do the vast majority of my job from home.   

We have a new person on our team.  She was trained in the mechanics of her position before WFH went into effect.  She didn't get good instruction on how to use the mechanics to do her job.  Typically, I just have them sit with me for a week with permission to interrupt me at any whim, then each subsequent week, work with another teammate.  As skills improve, obviously, the questions are reduced but it really takes about a year before someone can be trusted to go solo.  I am not seeing her progress.  I am not holding it against her, and I am confident it will work out but she isn't moving forward at an appropriate rate.  My point is, training is something that is best done face to face.

The other issue is we had a manager about two years ago say to her employees, "If your job can be done from home then it can be done from India."  A year later, the department's responsibilities were moved to India.  Granted, the task they did was fairly rote, "If you see 'X Event' then do 'X Action", type stuff.  But the way the department was resolved put the fear of WFH in me.

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1 hour ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

It looks like we will go back to the office like nothing ever happened. At best they might use it to thin people oot. But I’m not holding my breath. 

On the plus side Ralph. Clean air is nice.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/30/848307092/greenhouse-gas-emissions-predicted-to-fall-nearly-8-largest-decrease-ever

The IEA says the lower emissions will reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change by almost 8% this year, which would be the largest annual decrease ever recorded.

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10 hours ago, Razors Edge said:

This is huge - but in a positive and negative way.  For a company like mine where we have a HQ in the burbs, and offices in the city (very expensive), reducing footprint would be a great cost savings.  However, town and cities really depend on real estate to support all sorts of stuff. I imagine this current WFH situation has devastated all the downtown stores and restaurants (even without there being big restrictions in place) since foot traffic would be way down.

Contrary to what people might think about govn't operations as being the last of the pack in work "innovation" ie. working from home:

  • campaign from top down, for managers to encourage some staff to work from home over 8 yrs. ago.  That didn't take off a lot because of culture change, cheaper technology for remote home
  • hotelling cubicles, etc.
  •  entire operations is only work from home is operations for  311 staff (these are people who answer citizen/public queries, complaints/compliments on services, programs, etc.).  I believe it is 24/7 operation. There are  200+ staff in this group. Being done for past 10-15 yrs.  
  •  major flood which disabled headquarters' power system...did alert some depts. to scale up digitization of some business processes afterwards.  Right now, I'm working on a project on just a piece which covid-19 has highlighted hassle of paper only records. 

My gut feeling is our dept. will allow at least 1-2 days work from home.  They will have to stagger us for social distancing anyway. I prefer to meet other client depts. face to face...but then some clients, will end up more frequently working from home while I'm videoconferening for meeting.

Probably those who might want to return to work, are those with young children and can still pay for childcare costs.

I don't know about classroom group training which is part of my job (& others). It is quite expensive and time-consuming to develop custom e-learning modules that is also learner-self directed.  I have worked directly with another staff on the whole design and testing that he does for our e-learning modules (only 4 courses).  Our organization can't use canned vendor software learning because our software has been customized to a corporate standard in features, applications and content rules.  Then software changes in 5-8 yrs. :(  So it already e-learning visuals looks dated.

Certain dept. operations and services don't work well at all working from home because of:

  • specialized technology
  • outside mobile work in trucks, etc.  that will continue
  •  personal information confidentiality (ie. information of the public).  You can't do 911 command control operations, working from home. Our organization covers 911 for the municipality. Taking distress calls from home and then also being able to talk to your colleagues quickly on demand, can't be done from home. There are some high stress jobs in public sector....that are better done at work, not at home.
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For an entire organization to work from home, does require lst of all, most of all its operations to be digital.   We're moving there. Some stuff is just impossible and too expensive to convert. Not worth the time and expense.  Or simply....the job is working directly with people/clients face to face.  Children's summer programming, youth at risk programs, etc.  All the things..that private sector might take for granted.

 

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Before the pandemic, my sister was working from home once a week as a clinical research nurse at Johns Hopkins and my sister-in-law, an accountant, was working from home 2-4 days/week.

I think working from home will stick in disciplines where people have a lot of self-discipline and can get the job done that way.

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3 hours ago, Mr. Grumpy said:

 I am not seeing her progress.  I am not holding it against her, and I am confident it will work out but she isn't moving forward at an appropriate rate.  My point is, training is something that is best done face to face.

I agree. I've had to do other employee training in other jobs...not just because the person reported to me but other training required of multiple employees to learn complex software and internal procedures which would take forever to learn on one's own.

Adult learners are different.  There are other different approaches and  motivators than lecture style..and it must be tied in directly to learner's job role.

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I hate WFH for my job on a long-term basis. Much of my team is still at the office in-person, I’d prefer to be there with them. It’s better for what we do. I get to go back in two weeks, I look forward to that. I’m sitting at my computer doing video conferencing about 6 hours as WFH, it’s no great benefit. What I do think will stick is 1) video meetings rather than in-person and 2) WFH for short term stints like major weather events. Why drive to the office in a snow storm when it’s been proved I can do the job remote whenever needed.

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1 hour ago, Dottles said:

I ignore a lot of my emails. If somebody needs something bad enough, the important people know how to reach me.

Maybe you're just a cc: person.

For me to ignore most of my work email, wouldn't fly.  True about 20% is just info. Rest is for me to truly know, act, etc.

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10 minutes ago, BuffJim said:

BuffCarla is playing Muzak. Someone save me. 

When we marked our territory when WFH first started, Mr. Grumpy took the office.  I took the basement.  I get to listen to or watch what I want and she can listen to what she wants.  Being separe is helpful.

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