I’m a supervisor and always feel more productive and professional in the office. I have a number of teleworkers on my staff who’ve been doing it 1-3 days a pay period (2 weeks) for years, and I don’t have a problem with them teleworking (I have good staff who work well, even at home). But I am more than ready to get back to my office routine.
I was working from home 1 day a week prior to this. So I’d invested in an ergonomic chair, and a decent screen set-up.
I am liking this a lot more than I expected. And I feel more productive. If there’s something I’m in the middle of, I just finish it, instead of needing to catch the train and losing my chain of thought.
While there’s some stuff that’s better face-to-face, I would love to switch to working in the office only one day a week.
Well, I worked from home before this, and our nearest office is an hour and a half away, so… no.
I did commute that 2 days a week for a time, then I told my manager I’m not doing that anymore. I’m still there.
I had been permitted to wfh once a week before the virus and looked forward to that day every single week. No kids, no husband, no loudly talking/laughing/gossiping co-workers. Now I get that it’s not so much that I would like to stay at home all the time - I just wish I had the choice to go in or stay here. Also, my kids are generally old enough to handle themselves most of the day, but they tend to orbit around me and hunt me from room to room. So when I’m working, they’re usually sitting at the dining room table with me.
Opposite here. My home computer is a gaming rig and the way I can download and handle the large PDFs I use for work is way smoother and easier than with whatever business-class Dell was $400 that fateful day in 2016.
But I do agree with those saying face-to-face talk is much quicker. Plus all my files and stuff at work that I can’t easily access. Also, my job uses some large tools that I don’t have at home. So, I’m making due but still find myself going into the (empty or mostly empty) office once or twice a week. I wouldn’t mind one work-at-home day a week but it’s not a comfortable day-to-day fit for me.
I don’t mind being a school librarian from home; pointing students and teachers to resources is something that’s easy to do from home. However, my greatest talent is building relationships over several years. I don’t know that I could do that remotely. At the point we switched to distance learning the relationships had already been built.
Don’t really want to go back. But I do have a nice cube as cubes go. I suspect we will end up with a sort of a mix of being able to work from home some now that we have proven it can be done.
My biggest problem is my internet latency. Satellite dish is my only option.
In the long term, I’d prefer to work from home. Right now my Internet is too slow to support efficient telecommuting, and I have a jury-rigged home office. If I knew this was permanent, I’d put in the effort to correct that.
I’d say that barring these issues, I’m slightly more efficient at most tasks from home than at work as I do not have to hear every damn sound that anyone makes in the office. The minor inefficiencies of not being able to talk to other people immediately, and the slightly-less-minor one of not knowing if other people are ever going to answer your questions if they don’t respond in a half an hour are more than made up for by the calmness of a home office.
On the other hand, since I live only 5 miles from work, I’d still drive in for long meetings. Virtual meetings are way more stressful than face to face ones with all the lag and talking over each other.
I miss my docking station and monitors, and work has faster internet.
I work for both my regional section and for our program IT section at HQ, so I already work remotely with one of my teams. My favorite coworkers are all in other locations. I’d be happy to go into the office one day a week to look at physical files, pretend I like people, and whatnot. I’d like to work from home the rest of the week.
I conduct administrative hearings. VERY challenging to do via phone from home. I DEFINITELY wish to be in the office during the 2-3 days a week that I am actually holding hearings. Prep and post can easily be done from home - which I was doing before the virus.
My work at home desk lacks the surface area of either my hrg room bench or my office desk + computer desk + credenza. I have not installed a second screen at home, and as much as we’ve gone towards paperless, there is still paper that is useful to have handy.
One of our big concerns is ensuring that people get the process they are due. I think it questionable that telephone hearings afford that.
There are certainly some perks to working from home. I’m spending less money on fuel, food, if I continued to work from home clothing costs (if I’m rarely in the office I don’t need so many nice shirts, trousers, etc., etc.), and I’m able to run quick errands at lunch that aren’t possible for me to run from work.
But, no, I don’t care to work from home. I prefer to keep home and work separate and I can’t do that now. The only appropriate place for me to work in my house is from my personal office and this is also where I relax. It’s tough for me to switch from work to relaxation mode when both are done in the same space. I also prefer face-to-face interactions when possible which is hard to do from home. I’m looking forward to being able to come into the office on a daily basis.
I don’t like working from home. I miss the in-person interaction with the people from my office. And it’s harder to work from home, both because of the home distractions, and because I don’t have all of the files I need at home. I wanna go back!
I want to go back. But I’d still like to be able to work from home when I’m not feeling well, without taking a sick day, which previously wasn’t allowed. There are a lot of days when I feel just a little sick–I can still handle research and case prep, but I’d be more comfortable doing it from my bed. I hate to use one of my precious 5 annual sick days, but of course I also hate to come in and get other people sick.
My husband used to have one telecommute day per week at his old job. That seemed pretty sweet.
I’ve been working from home for years, so I am well set up for it, it suits me, and I already have routines / hacks to minimised the downsides.
What I can’t wait for, is for everyone to go back to working in the office!
OMG, the pain of people fumbling to get up to speed and into a good working routine. The time wastage of people talking about working from home. The lack of “video conference etiquette”. So many people thinking they only need to work a few hours to count as “a day”. Pretending they can do good work beside the pool, ugh. And the extra meetings!!! I thought there would be less meetings, but all these extroverts need to see people and talk to people and it’s killing me.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to all the people who aren’t suited for working from home going back to working from the office
Working from home is getting frustrating. Traditionally, I could log in to Outlook Web Access, or even run Outlook. These days, OWA won’t let me download attachments. This is for security of documents, of course, although I can forward messages to my Gmail account. So, security through laziness???
My equipment is vastly superior to anything work gives me, although I’m now waiting for Fedex to deliver my new Mobile Engineering WorkStation (MEWS), which is some type of Dell with an SSD and lots of memory.
Oh, I’ve been without a work PC since mid-March. My previous MEWS, despite having a redundant RAID array!, suffered an irreparable hard drive crash. Luckily, despite guidance-but-not-concrete-policy, I had an external backup of my file. If I’d followed guidance, I’d be screwed.
I don’t feel that my company expects anyone to do anything outside of the office, whereas, even pre-Wuhan, 60% of my time is outside of the office.
Working from home would be ok if I didn’t also have my 10 year old son home from school. He needs attention throughout the day to get his schoolwork, such as it is, done.
Is there any way to add a poll to this thread?
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Right now the situation is actually pretty good.
The company is considered part of the Finance sector and my role is considered essential. We all have the option of working from home and, since I’m on the IT team, I’ve always been equipped to connect to whatever I need via VPN or various other remote control methods in case emergencies in the middle of the night required swift intervention.
But ironically, I tend to get into the office as much as possible. The commute was never that bad and now there’s even fewer people on the road, plus I can access the multiple monitors and the servers and a better chair in the office. Plus my wife isn’t distracting me with honey-do items or ‘just one small question’ that turns into a 90-minute there-went-my-lunch-and-both-breaks interruptions.
And once this mayhem is over, ‘back to normal’ will mean more pressure for all of us to be in-office as much as possible. And that wouldn’t be so bad except that one of my three colleagues in the IT cluster where I sit just loves to come to the office for the social aspect – and that’s all he does all day. :mad:
So I’m actually getting more work done – including handling the helpdesk calls – without the distractions of home or my coworker’s feeble jokes and banal discussions. I’d love to keep it this way, but I know that’s not going to happen.
–G!
If I can avoid going back into the office after the lockdown, I will. I’ve been looking to buy a house- but my office is downtown, so unless I want to pay a premium for a nice house near downtown, I’m resigned to a commute of about 1.5 hours (total) every day (Edmonton really isn’t laid out very well).
Being able to work from home means I can buy the house I want to buy, rather than the house I have to settle for. I miss working with my coworkers, but I’m saving so much money right now.