It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
I've been working from home since 2016. To a certain extent work never stops for me, but then it never really starts either in the normal sense. I have no set times I have to do anything. I don't need to take calls or go on Zoom. If I have a business meeting it will be in the pub, face to face. I can (and often do) sit on the beach in the summer designing stuff and answering the odd email.
But I never really switch off and will work online to quite late at night sometimes. I don't mind this as I enjoy it. It's a vocation that just happens to pay really well.
It's hard to describe but it's kind of like there's no distinction between work and home anymore .. it's all kinda rolled into one enjoyable thing. It suits me but I can see some people need firm lines between the 2
Now you may think “sock it to the man”, but those “men” Will wisen up, put you on short term contracts which are probably put out to the cheapest bidder overseas, close their costly offices and “companies” will be no more. There will just be co-ordinators offering to jobs the cheapest.
no now is a time to get it right. The workers want some of the benefit (not all like everyone is saying they are “taking”), which is not unreasonable, the companies want sensible long term facilities and asset management not being at the whim of where any individual might like to work, but also many people want sustained employment, valuable communities with employers, jobs for life-ish.
it needs to be win-win, and all I see are “well I can do my job from home form much cheaper”
But I agree, nothing beats the informal, casual, unplanned human interaction that happens when people are co-located.
Many leases will be fixed across multi-years. The US has started to see a lot of empty office space post-Covid, which will likely create issues for the investment funds who hold many of those commercial buildings as revenue-earning assets. That's a fairly significant risk, IMHO. Check where your pension fund is invested.
That's already pretty standard practice (in the industries I work in). "Permanent" employees are effectively on contracts as long as they're notice periods. And outsourcing/offshoring has been a thing for 20years. Some companies today are little more than brand shells compared to 20years ago.
Jobs-for-life hasn't been a thing since the 60s/70s. The only way to guarantee employment is to maintain your own skills and employability (or the saleability of those skills). If you rely on being employed by a company, you'll likely find yourself with a lot of unplanned spare time.
Just because that's all you see doesn't mean it's all that's been said. Some people are happier, more productive, and more engaged working from home. All of those are good for the employer.
basically wherever I am, I have the ability to respond and do work at times I couldn’t before when commuting. I’m also able to work late to meet deadlines or start very early - our office closes at 7pm. It’s not all weighted in the employees favour from my experience.
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.
That said I do agree that not every role is best WFH. Not every person either - I know of a good few people who really need to be around other people. Not constant chatting, but they just don't do "alone" happily.
It's weird; it's as if almost everything we talk about here doesn't have a simple, universal, binary answer.
Is your implication of the world as we know it ending if people work from home meant to mean that we should all suffer a less good life in the hope that the big business overlords employ us forever more? No, they'll still do what they like when it suits them and drop you like a stone as soon as they legally can, and then you'll have spent the last X years of your working life in a miserable place for nothing
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
Ebay mark7777_1
This thread has been a fascinating read - thanks for sharing, everyone. Truly interesting how different we all are, and how different our personal WFH circumstances are with different flavours regarding the other people around us.
I'm retired, so I won't bore anyone with my WFH experiences - they were all 10+ years ago and irrelevant, now, I suspect.
One of the problems with all being in an office is that people will just wander up to each other's desks with a question. Brilliant, you might think, except that now you've interrupted someone mid-flow, and disrupted their work.
With online presence, you can make it clear to colleagues whether you're available for random questions, or if you're focused on a specific task, and when you'll be free again.
With the right technology and processes, bringing new starters in works every bit as well as it ever did - possibly better, because if someone's not in the office you can still see if they're contactable.
The norms of work were presumably formulated a century ago when life was very different, I'd like to think things can progress and the only thing stopping the flexibility (ie the choice to work in or out of the office for those who each option suits) is that there's a resistance to find ways for it to work as it takes away the overlord > pleb dynamic.
And this one is much more of a personal gripe, but it does piss me off how people pretend that it's ok to be certain personality types ("We need introverts as much as we need extroverts really!") then design every single element of working life to only favour those who are extroverted and specifically isolates those of us who are not. Not to mention those who dare to be neurodiverse, ASD, ADD etc. "It's ok to be you....but no not like that"
My old job would have needed time in the office, but it was also a private hell for me wherever I was doing the job (that's another story though I suppose). It would still have benefitted from probably two days away from the office to escape the annoying smug pretentions of the colleagues and also to get some of the more focus-heavy tasks done. It would also have served to help me avoid those cringey work friday pub social occasions where everybody pretends they don't hate each other to drink fizzy piss in a crowded old bank.
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic