Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
She feels she can't practically ignore out of hours requests and she doesn't want to challenge the practice for fear of rocking the boat.
Unions are really powerful in education - it's one of the only benefits of the sector I can think of. Hopefully your wife has a union rep they can teach out to on behalf of all the staff if not just herself? Teaching assistant salaries definitely don't to high enough to compensate for anything outside of school hours!
It's not that they expect everyone else to be working these odd hours at all, just that it's the only time they themselves can catch up on work.
One colleague who is a manager even has a note to this effect in his email footer, explaining he doesn't expect others to action or respond to messages outside of normal working hours.
you realise that's a relatively privileged position in the emplyment market, right? you:
a) have enough choice in employers to be able to pick one
b) have both a profession that allows you to differentiate yourself and the skills that can make you differentiate yourself
that's unfortunately not the case for the majority of employees
It's a little patronizing for you to assume I have no experience of being unprivileged just because our opinions about it differ. Or that those without privilege can't manoeuvre their way into choosing a slightly better job, even if they don't have an absolutely free choice over the space of all possible jobs, or even if they have to take a worse one temporarily in order to transition to where they want to be. Not all poor people are mindless cattle devoid of planning or agency.
https://www.stephens-scown.co.uk/employment/employment-right...
> Even though an employee has fewer employment rights in the first two years of their employment, an employer would be foolish to assume they have carte blanche to dismiss at will.
So while it's true that there's less protection for workers, there is no at will employment in the UK. Probation period probably comes closest to it but is much shorter.
'At will' in the US and the 2 year qualifying period in the UK are practically identical, apart from that the UK has a 2-week statutory notice period. The protections that remain in both the US and UK are almost entirely about protected classes. Even the classes themselves are virtually the same.
"Have they been there less than 2 years?" is the first thing legal will ask you when you want to sack someone in the UK. It's a wholly different status to being protected after the period.
I was silently thought it was very interesting how they have been convinced that at will employment is a good thing... and thanking my government work laws which require any company to pay for 3 months compensation if they desire to fire me.
For me, work ends when I switch my monitor inputs to my personal computer.
Almost everyone I know works normal hours or less even during WFH.
To be perfectly clear, this is true regardless of WFH. Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.
This has become a bigger issue as all communication is via phone or computer. Before, a lot was via personal interaction which just wasn't possible once you left the office. Now, no one really knows if someone is working or has already called it a day at any given point.
My Dad resisted getting a mobile phone from his company from the mid eighties to the 2000's, on the principle that if they can't contact you, they'll figure it out themselves.
The point I would make is that the WFH experience is very different for different groups. Like everything about the Pandemic it has had totally inequitable impacts on different people.
I'm in tech and I've had no issue, but many people I know are not and I've seen how it works out. Not everyone can just move to another job. Perhaps most people can't.
Some workplaces do set boundaries, and it is not universally true that "harder and longer" working brings benefits.
a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer skills of work arent easily passed on via a Zoom call
b) The world has had to quickly adapt to WFH, and I suspect much of the dislike some people have experienced with WFH is due to things that arent fit for this purpose. Many of my colleagues live in small London flats with both parents trying to hold simultaneous zoom-calls and with schools being shutdown, having to manage their children while also doing their jobs. As WFH (hopefully) sticks, these problems iron themselves out
It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym.
We are just trying to work from home now, not really living through a proper experience of that with all its benefits.
Mine was too, and I really appreciated that they made a point of it. Lowered expectations led to lowered stress, people did their best without fear of negative consequences for decline in productivity - and, as it turned out after management reviewed the issue few months later, productivity did not suffer.
In my own company of almost 50k people, the ones clamoring the loudest for offices to open are, by far, those with kids at home.
With family and house, sure. But I literally don't have the real estate to make a nice home office.
Mixed mode works very well tough, I can go to the office if I want and stay home if I want, so I mostly spend 4 days in the office, 1 at home.
If we as a whole continue down the path of more WFH, open shared office spaces may eventually begin to find their feet and fill that 'mixed-mode' equivalent if the company itself does not have office space. I predict there might also be more public spaces such as libraries opening up with work areas for people to get out of home when working.
The other challenge is the social component of work, but I think that will change post-Covid too. Being in Australia has afforded me the extremely lucky capability of being able to get out and socialise almost completely freely during the last year, and it undoubtly helps immensely. I think that for people who live alone, working from home will become less isolating when they can socalise outside of work hours more freely again. For example, social sport is a lot easier to fit in to your day when you're not then also losing an hour or more in your day to travel. You can do it and still easily have time to prep dinner or do your daily chores.
In short, I think that the shift to WFH due to covid will be a lot easier for a lot more people once the restrictions of Covid subside.
I've heard a lot of people saying that companies are going to realise this means they can cut down on their property costs, but far, far fewer mentioning that they're moving the costs for us. We're looking for somewhere with 2-3br so we can dedicate WFH space, and it's going to mean 2-3x our current rent.
Whereas an office could write off coffee, TP, cleaning staff, electricity, the whole rent etc, we are stuck with only being able to write off equipment we bought specifically for working and wondering if the tax authorities will come after us for that.
covid is still very much among us so don't expect much socializing until people feel safe to leave their basements.
To respond to the point you made: I am a young single guy loving on his own. Still, I do not mind the lockdown so much. Granted, I may not be very representative, but just another data point.
In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the social side of the office.
Generally remote working means flexibility and freedom (to varying degrees). We don’t have that now.
Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone.
This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but for people like me who actually enjoy their peers, it‘s a net negative.
I feel completely out of touch with what happens in the company and everything feels super transactional.
I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Sure, we could adjust to an even more asynchronous workflow like the poster child remote companies, but to me it would make this issue even worse.
I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
Looks to me like that is the root problem you're having...
Always reminds me of meth lab enforcers walking around and intimidating illegal immigrant meth cooks on a meth assembly line.
Looking forward to going to the pub with colleagues when it reopens in a couple of weeks, but nobody wants to go to an office to sit around.
Can not wait to get back to being able to meet people in person, even if remote and WFH is allowed and accepted in the future, which I think it will be for all but the most dinosaur of companies.
Because for me the concept of managers 'just walking around' gives me that itchy feeling on the back of my neck.
And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.
You might have a bad case of a micromanager there, but here‘s my definition:
> Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318016170_Managing_...
Your definition of success might be technically right, but doesn‘t resonate with me.
What good does it do if some code works but the employees behind that aren‘t happy, don‘t feel valued and we can‘t celebrate success together?
I thankfully no longer have to deal with micromanaging, but have in the past (hence the itchy neck feeling).
I should have specified happiness in there somewhere because I agree that the efficiency should come with happy team members.
In my case if theres something I need to make me happier as a team member I'll just ask, but I guess that isn't the case for everyone.
That is the short term goal. But it isn't the only goal. I want my reports to trust me so that if things change or they are having problems that they'll be honest with me and provide feedback so I can make things better. I want my reports to feel valued and emotionally satisfied with their work. This means understanding their career goals and what makes them feel happy so I can make sure that they get the kinds of rewards that matter to them. These sorts of things are important for the long term sustainability of a team even if a team is delivering efficiently at a given moment.
With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.
And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.
In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".
Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.
What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.
Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.
> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.
For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.
Why is that? At all the companies I have worked at the managers would join in with these kind of things same as everyone else (not all of them, but then not of all the ICs were interested either).
But the reason is, these chats are for conversations you won't feel comfortable having with your boss around. Cat pictures, stupid jokes, random topics. Even if people felt comfortable with such topics around their manager, they might still be worried that the volume of communications will be seen by the manager as evidence that people are slacking off.
I guess my feeling is that if your manager is doing that then they aren't a good manager (of course there are plenty of not-good managers, but it's not part and parcel of being a manager)
In other countries it got even more strict - 1 hour exercise and you had to pre register on a form.
Yet the subsequent lockdowns have been enough even for me to nudge me into what feels like (very) mild depression. Low-level enough that it's a nuisance rather than a problem, and I'm confident it will just go by itself once I am able to spend more time doing other things, but nevertheless it's a noticeable deterioration in mood and happiness level.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people with stronger social needs... It's also the main thing that keeps me from getting judgemental about people skirting lockdown restrictions.
she used to loathe working from home during the lockdown, but when the restrictions were eased she started enjoying it a lot.
if anything, she says, she's getting at least one hour and a half more sleep in the morning and she's skipping the commute on the way back, so that's another hour saved.
she still has to go in the office on friday, but according to her that's more of a management wish that anything really useful.
We experienced 2 months of 'school at home' with kids 5 and 8, and there is no comparing with the current situation (schools open)
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?
And banks aren't the only companies where that applies, anyone dealing with customer data cannot just use a shared office with people of other companies. If you deal with code that can also apply to some degree.
I've often enough seen confidential data on trains/planes because people were working on the go and not using proper screen protectors (in the past those were mostly consultants). Luckily that never included sensitive customer data. The more people work in public places, the higher the risk for data breaches.
I love working from home but I think it has to be either home or office for many, cafes or co-working spaces aren't a viable solution and a nightmare for anyone in IT security.
I had to cancel my co-work subscription when no client would accept my proposal to work remote. When the world reopens I'll never go back.
In your case, imagine yourself pleasantly walking to your local co-working space or to any of the urban entertainment facilities that will inevitably proliferate in the effort to capture all the time freed from lousy daily commutes.
Teams were assigned areas so they knew where in the building to meet, but if you arrived late and all the desks were taken you simply went and found another area (or if you needed to hide to minimize disruptions).
In a hybrid-model this becomes even easier, because the hardest thing with the above model is keeping free capacity in a growing company.
Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally.
Some people don't need it. I had a co-worker who would come super-early in the morning, so he could leave early and spend time with his kids. At work, we could see his kids were his whole world, and he was always happy. But at that same job, I also had a different co-worker who went out his way to find reasons to stay overtime - he dreaded coming back home. I don't keep in touch with them much, but I imagine the former one was super-happy about forced WFH, but the latter very much not.
Add to that, quite a lot of people in cities bought their apartments on the assumption that both partners are working 9/5 at the office and the kids are at school/daycare - this let them buy smaller places for less (or closer to work). Such apartments become living hell when all dwellers are present simultaneously for the entire day, and each is trying to do their work/school.
This is not to trade who has it worse - just pointing out that it's not smooth sailing for those of us with families either. There's a tight line between being happy to have people around, and hating their guts for it - this pandemic pushed a lot of us close to that border.
The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get it that alone time is extremely important. I practice it as well -- my wife too. But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Please understand that none of this is meant to offend or generalize. But what you describe is just legitimately baffling for me.
Because it costs a lot of money to buy a house with enough room for 2 separate offices. Paying for that if you have no reason to believe you'll ever need it would be well into the stupid range for most people.
Ignoring those might be the venturing into the irrational range that you mentioned.
For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years. Vacations are often handled by traveling, visiting extended family, etc. There normally are many options available. And by the time retirement comes, children will have moved out, or perhaps the parents will have sold the flat, or left it to the children, and moved out elsewhere. I don't think there is something as a "lifelong estate purchase" these days in the cities. Not when you're in your thirties.
> The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy to say :). But some people only discover that quite late - once some unpredictable circumstances (like job loss, or a global pandemic) force them to actually stay in the same flat for long periods of time. Most working-age adults don't experience that ordinarily (and I think every couple expects they'll work such issues out by the time they get to retire).
> But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Relationships are complex, and every one is different. They get even more complex if extended family gets involved, or when children appear. And sudden events like a global pandemic have a way of revealing previously unseen cracks in the foundations. If people were aware of all this up front, humanity would have died out centuries ago :).
I would be very careful making any claim going as far as the next 30 years, given what has happened in the last 2 years, let alone in the last century. If that wasn't enough to convince my fellow 20-30yos, nothing's going to shake them awake to how volatile life can be.
A) less work hours per day
B) fewer years of work per lifetime
I think most people around my age in Europe (in their thirties) started working around 25, at the latest, and will work until they're at least 65. Probably later, since in many countries the retirement age is starting to be indexed with life expectancy. It's quite realistic that by the time I retire I will have worked 50+ years.
Simple answer: You aren't locked into a home for life, so you buy a home for the life you want now. My parents are on the verge of retiring, so they bought a beach condo and plan to sell off their suburban home.
My wife and I are looking at smaller city homes, but definitely do not plan to retire in it, we're looking at maybe a 5-10 year timespan of ownership.
> Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5.
The extra time spent commuting from a distant house are real costs paid every day. The potential of owning a home that you can retire in is a hypothetical payoff many many years in the future.
All while WFH is obligated by the government.
I've also seen WFH advertised much more in job ads. That in turn probably means that more candidates ask for partial WFH as part of their decision to join the company. In the end, that will drive change even if some managers object it.
I personally love the Scottish Highlands but internet is unbearably slow anywhere but in a few major cities. Let's hope Starlink can meet demand of those areas.
The area I live in (west highlands just past the Rest and be thankful) has good 4G coverage anywhere in the village and even on the road up to the A83 now.
Whilst the ESN project has been a bit of a disaster overall it's really helped rural connectivity.
I still experienced many times signal drops from 4G to 3G in Berlin late 2019, it's baffling coming from the perspective of Sweden.
Come school holidays I put all the TVs/iPads etc on one and the other for my work. Still a pain with slow internet but it limits it. ADSL is 3.5mb down and satellite is 30mb but latency is worse.
I'm looking at bonded networks currently to improve, plus when Starlink gets to me I think I'll keep a second connection as I heard there are a few dropouts and will be a while for the satellites to number enough to mitigate that.
Anyway, it's not ideal but it works ok and lets me live rural.
There's only one city in the Highlands - Inverness.
I have 900/100 FTTP and 4G connectivity is available anywhere in the village on EE. With lack of contention you can get 100Mbps down stream over 4G
I did have to pay for the FTTP install (FTTPoD) but when compared to the reduction in property prices it was easily offset.
Even without extra money for FTTPoD, the village has FTTC and a couple of cabinets so most get decent coverage, and the houses next to the exchange have straight FTTP.
I've lived here 7 years and gone from using 3 Bonded DSL lines to get 12Mb/s to where I am now over that period.
I consider "good to work remote from" to mean
- High speed internet
- Somewhat reasonable way to get to airport for office time (e.g. Michigan Flyer has bus service from East Landsing to the Detroit airport.
Personal bonuses
- Mountains, trees, and winter
- Low cost of living
There are some requirements, you can't use the room for anything except work, it must have a lockable door, etc;
There's some consideration too for broadband, though I don't speak Swedish well enough to be able to file this for myself.
Can confirm. Or rather, there are tax exemptions for working from home, as opposed to having a home office.
> Du som under 2020 har jobbat hemma med anledning av pandemin kan som regel inte få avdrag för exempelvis arbetsrum, bredband, möbler eller kaffe, även om du har haft de kostnaderna för att du har jobbat hemma.
Translating:
> Can I make deductions due to corona?
> If you have worked from home in 2020 due to the pandemic, you cannot normally receive a deduction for, for example, workplaces, broadband internet, furniture or coffee, even if you absorbed the costs by working from home.
[0] https://www.skatteverket.se/privat/deklaration.4.2b543913a42...
I know that at Spotify this is the case. When choosing to work from home you receive Wi-Fi allowance, as well as being allowed to expense a standing desk, monitor, desk lamp etc. You are also allowed to claim for coworking space fees, but only if you are > 50 miles from the office. Since working from home has begun all employees have been given a prepaid food card for lunch expenses, and after the pandemic this will be available to both home and office workers. The other benefit for a multinational like Spotify is you can work from any country that they are legally registered. I don’t know how other companies will approach this.
Laws of France says I can offer an allowance, but only if I gather every single receipt and do a pro-rata of, for example, the additional electric consumption caused by WFH. The administrative overhead of admitting a dozen invoices per employee of $7 each is probably around $7 each (their time, my time, the accountant time, and the opportunity cost that we spend 10%, 15%, 25% time dealing administrative matters rather than interesting software work - making our work boring is a huge cost). If I give it as a bonus (and pay taxes like on a salary), god knows whether I’ll be required to keep paying the bonus when they come back to the office.
I’d rather the govt say “Allowance is $10 per day”, but it is considered unfair between those who have to purchase their own desk and chair, and those who had the Aeron chair provided by the employer. We’ve succeeded to negotiate our social framework so much that moving in any direction has an important cost.
Having lived in Australia, it’s incredible how administrative overhead impacts morale in a huge way. In France you are always late for some paperwork, never free of mind.
I was always a “pay for your own telework stuff if you want to telework” kind of person, but after teleworking for a year in a crappy chair, I really wish my org would buy me decent office equipment. I took a chair and a desk for granted. And it seems like a good deal for orgs if employees all start buying their chairs and desks and whatnot.
Fun stuff, I work more than my employees, so OSHA asked me to have an Aeron-type chair (500€, Enjoy model), while my employees will be fine with just a good work seat for 7hrs a day. I actually wish I could give more stuff to my employees but they are a bit afraid to ask - It’s important to have regular talks about comfort.
A more accurate description is probably “vacation days determined by whether your manager likes you”.
It's like claiming to have flat structure. Nope, there is still a hierarchy, just like there is still a limit to the "unlimited" vacation days you can take. You just took something explicit and made it implicit to the detriment of your company.
It's a red flag when I see either of these advertised as perks and it makes me less likely to work for the company.
And if they were truly unlimited, why would anyone work part-time? You could just work full time and take 2 days off per week (plus vacations) at full salary. But I doubt many companies would accept that.
However, going into full time home-office mode isn't great either since you would miss out on the random meetings/talks when you run into each other in the office.
so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why.
since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure.
what i found is a big productivity drop. in some cases there was 40% less work done from home than from the office. and this happened gradually over the course of a year.
and since i know people working for big corps in HK i’ve asked them to do the same. their company’s productivity increased slightly (5%<). they were never forced to work from home.
this is by no means a scientific study, but i was surprised at the huge drops i was seeing, and even more surprised at the continuous drop off across the time line.
did anyone else notice this, or are just my clients outliners?
what will wfh do to the productivity difference between asian countries and western ones? will this apparent productivity loss be offset somehow?
I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.
Well, that's just a fun detour, I meant manual loop unrolling: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops
But it would need a different kind of OS and lib organisation than the ones we have right now to make it feasible.
A bit of a shame since Gentoo is quite a nice distro.
Read the second one, it's much shorter. It's just a joke about people "unrolling loops" manually, i.e. not using loops, so that their line count goes up (for people paid per LOC).
My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents).
Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me.
I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal.
So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.
Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside.
The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have).
We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.
But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat.
I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice.
I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.
But nothing truly freed me like the ability to work from bed. The possibility of a bad flareup or injury always haunted me because in the past it has meant possibly months of missed time while I go on disability or even having to change jobs. Now it means nothing. I mean, something because I'll be in more pain and miserable, but I can at least keep working.
not to mention the difficulty of finding work that will accommodate your needs, since, even if it's required by law to not discriminate, some companies still find an excuse to not hire, or are making it difficult to get your workplace adjusted to your requirements.
I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will be because they prefer to or need to live in a big city where it is affordable to very few.
If you're in that situation working from home is going to be a less pleasant, less attractive option. If a large portion of workplaces become remote-first are you going to be at a disadvantage if you prefer an office?
We're not there yet - there aren't many remote first companies, and most companies offer the option but I worry that what for a lot of us is a blessing will become a curse to some.
however that's the thing. most apartments i looked at in one particular city didn't have any small rooms. in order to get four bedrooms (one to be converted to an office) i could not find anything smaller than 150sqm. a friend of a relative has a 100sqm apartment with 5 rooms. two of them are mere closets with a window, but that's the perfect size for a home office.
another issue is tax relief. if you don't have your office in a separate room, you can't write off the full cost for that office as a work expense (which would be subtracted from your income, so you pay less income taxes). if your office is a desk in the living room, then you only get to write off half of the cost for that desk (or less) just because the room is also used for other purposes, and your kids, god forbid might use your desk for other activities when you are not working.
"Hi HR, you need to pay be the 8 years maternity pay you owe me because I live in Svalbard and the local laws require all employers pay that".
you're usually bound by the locality where the contract is signed, so you dont suddenly gain rights just by moving abroad until the employer actually creates a new contract. for that to happen, the employer would have to create a legal entity in that legal region.
do note however, that some nations dont allow you to work while on their soil, unless you specifically get a visa permitting it.
Therefore I believe all nations will decide that work done on their soil must follow their employment laws, even if done for a foreign company.
There is precident for that interpretation pre-pandemic in many western countries.
The employer will need to withhold taxes for the state of the employee as well.
This is frequently hard to detect with everyone teleworking, but rest assured that HR is getting a call if someone works in a state with maternity leave laws requiring it.
While not generally applicable for digital jobs that telework, I think the most obvious would be minimum wage. If I live in Seattle and telework to a job in Alabama that pays only $11, that’s a liability for the employer.
Of course, I think that if an employee was teleworking from a location without approval that’s likely grounds for dismissal.
High skilled, (comparatively) rich, healthy knowledge workers will leave the place they reside, move somewhere like Dubai (no tax, few free public services - doesn't matter they're not going to need them) to work for a company based - on paper, somewhere similarly - meanwhile the sick, aging and destitute back in the old country depend on tax-funded public services that have lost their tax base.
I don't know what the solution is - but it's something I think needs to be considered. Conversely, people might want to move the other way (say to the nordics), but, I'd wager it being heavily skewed in the first direction.
Of course, it also has a dark side such as no real social support net or anything (criminals, the sick and unemployed can just be deported), but the people moving there don't need that.
Yes of course, society, solidarity, etc etc - but in the past that model kind of worked because people didn't really have the ability to just pack up and go - whereas now they can just bring a laptop and their credit card and have a plane ticket, airbnb, leased car and new, and to them better, life with barely any effort.
I guess in the US people can fly for this too. Does anyone do "work anywhere but must be in the same state"?