The office.

[Workingman]

For two days running the BBC website has run Have Your Say (HYS) articles on working from home or returning to the office.

On the one side you get 'lazy-bones', 'shirkers', 'people in non-jobs', and so on.

On the other side you get 'more productive'. 'better work-life balance'. 'less stress', etc.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, but it really is too early to tell.

At the moment working from home (WFH) is an enforced novelty for millions of workers, and there is no doubt that many of them are enjoying the experience. It is also a novelty for their employers and many of them have not found it the disaster the old way of managing and working predicted. It will be interesting to see how it pans out in the longer term.

I can honestly see the new way of working, certainly for office work, being a mix of WFH and 'going-in' basis. Something like WFH three days and being in the office two days one week, with the reverse the following week.

Unless we go back to the old ways of everyone being in the office for the full week, and that does not look likely, then the impact on cities and large towns, huge office complexes, transport and their support infrastructure will be massive and possibly transformative.

Change is a coming.

[TheOstrich]

My concern would be that if an employer found that his employees can work from home efficiently, without the necessity of face-to-face office meetings / interaction, it might only be a matter of time before that employer decides to outsource his workforce to somewhere cheaper like India.

Be careful what you wish for ....

[Workingman]

And if they want the face-to-face interaction it can also be done by staff in Lahore as easily as it is done in Londonistan, but for a fraction of the price.

What I am finding interesting, from the proponents of WFH, are the almost universal claims that they are more productive - there are no downsides. Well, if their company's workload is pretty much the same as it was, pre Covid, and they are all more productive WFH, as they claim, then the logical conclusion is that fewer of them are needed = job losses.

100 in an office working at 100% = job done.
100 WFH at 110% = fewer needed for the job done.

I would advise those WFH to be careful about their boastful claims. Also, at the moment it is new, novel and exciting. Let's see how people feel a few months down the line after a winter at home paying for extra heating and lighting with no escape from the Mr, Mrs and the kids. I suspect that the social interaction with others outside of the immediate family, neighbours and local shop staff will drive many back to their old ways. Time will tell, but my bet is that the euphoria will soon wear off for many of them.

[TheOstrich]

100 in an office working at 100% = job done.
100 WFH at 110% = fewer needed for the job done.

My experience of working from home was certainly that I could be far more "productive" - no distractions during a job where you needed a fair bit of sustained concentration.

When a certain accountancy firm I worked for decided to close a branch office - mainly due to the lease on the building running out - a team of at least 3 (and possibly 4) staff was replaced by just one guy working from home with a small amount of backup from one of the remaining offices ..... as far as I am aware, he was able to service all the existing client base quite comfortably.

WFH doesn't work for everyone, and it's not suitable for all jobs, but certainly the accountancy profession (small / medium firms especially) would have no difficulty adopting it in principle. And alongside this, it is worth noting that even 20 years ago, at least one firm to my knowledge was actively investigating getting rid of all their accountancy clerks and outsourcing accounts preparation to India in order to reduce costs. I remember there was a bit of an outcry about it, and I don't think it ever came to fruition - but the warning signs were certainly there.

[Suff]

In the IT business we have been involved in remote working and home working since the 90's. RBS was already introducing 70% desk allocation and 2 mandatory days work from home for IT staff in 2016.

What I have seen is that most people are camping out and making do at home as if this is a few days temporary working and they'll go back to normal.

Certainly my German colleagues are looking for guidance about longer term working at home, probably in anticipation of charging expenses to the company to convert.

If people who are going to work from home are going to do this long term, they are going to have to make provision. We have all taken for granted the office equipment, quality chairs, correct height desks, foot stools as required, ergonomics in keyboards and mice as required.

None of this has gone away, yet I see people hunched over laptops sitting on stools and working off small laptop screens.

When the reality of getting full ergonomic equipment into the homes of workers and keeping that equipment maintained, companies are not going to be quite as happy.

Ditto the conversion of homes to allow a dedicated working space where you can be separated from normal family life in order to concentrate on work.

It is unlikely, in the long run, for the family life to be welcome as an intruder to the workspace.

I have had a home office since the mid 90's, but then I have run a company since the mid 90's. I doubt very much that anyone has fully thought this through. Even if they have decided that a home equipment budget is cheaper than a maintenance team.

I do, however, feel that it will drive Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) much faster than has been going to date.

There is nothing easy about this transition no matter how it looks in the middle of a pandemic. My work Laptop, shipped to me 3 weeks ago, developed a Bluetooth fault. I use Bluetooth for mouse and headset for meetings so it is hardly optional. After a few days of playing with it myself, I raised a help desk ticket. After 3 days of the support team asking me to do everything I had already done, I had a thought. I opened the bottom of the laptop and undid the screw holding the wifi and Bluetooth module in, wiggled it and screwed it back down. Restart and hey presto one Bluetooth working again.

What was wrong? The packaging for the laptop was designed for going inside a much larger and better shock protected, box. So, in the post, it was shaken so violently that it moved.

Not a problem at work, you take it to the tech desk and they open it up and fix it. At home this can be up to one week delay as you put the laptop in the post, send it back, have them fix it and send it out again, only to have the same fault develop again due to rough handling.

So, did I tell the support guys I had fixed it and what the problem was so they could avoid it int the future?? Telling the support team you opened their precious junk is not a winning proposition.

Hence why I think BYOD will accelerate. However employees will find, very rapidly, that their bargain basement, company price, base spec allowance for a home decice, will pay about £300 of the £2,000 of their nice shiny appletech they want or of the £1,300 for the Microsoft tech they need. Then they will have to have a decent size of monitor. The £50 the company pays for their monitors is not going to buy much on the home market.

Fortunately, for me, I have a mobile office which goes wherever I work. Doubled up with my casual home office gives me a better experience than at work.

It all looks very simple, just work from home, problem solved. There are reasons why it has not happened and thinking people are less productive is not the only, or in some cases the largest, concern.

I will say that, today, it is more possible than ever before. However, as the 6 power cuts to my home yesterday show, it is not without issue. How many people will invest in Uninteruptable power, use their mobile phones as the network, have generators??

It. Is worth watching though.

[Workingman]

Well said Suff.

I am reading lots from people talking up the positives: work-life balance; no commute; family time and so on. It is as though there are no downsides.

However, I will put good money on the novelty wearing off for ever so many of them when, because of poor equipment, their backs start aching, ankles swell, wrists hurt, they have tired eyes and other niggles. Then they find that there is no escape from the spouse / kids / cat or dog or when equipment falls over it does so in a Murphy and Sod's law way. Then autumn and winter sets in and the heating and lights are on 18 hours a day, the bike and lycra gear gets put away, that much needed exercise walk is in the rain and sleet so does no look so appealing and there is a realisation that they have covered the same old subjects with the few same people a thousand times. At that point their views might change about WFH.

It obviously can work for lots of people and businesses, but the claims being made that it is the solution to all our ills are a bit previous IMHO.

[Suff]

Certainly a bit previous. Everyone is in the same boat right now. When that changes, so will attitudes.

I have extensive experience working from home and it is a mixed bag, including the family who refuse to read the calendar of meetings stuck to the office door or Mrs S who insisted that she should pass through my office to get to her sewing room, causing frustration when I have 6 hours of back to back meetings.

I also worked at a time when contract consultants were expected to buy and use their own laptops. So I understand the issue when your own 5 year old laptop has a serious hardware failure in the middle of the working day. Forcing you to go to the nearest PC outlet (in this case a French supermarket) and buy whatever is available. No time to go online, find the best deal and wait 2-3 days for it to arrive.

Mind you, when #1 daughter changed roles and wound up using her laptop screen instead of the desk system, 14 hours a day, she developed an eye problem. Bringing the dual monitors from work has cured her as she woks on them from home all the time now.

So there will be upsides for many, but I doubt for the majority.

[cruiser2]

Recently had a plumber and an elecrtician to do some work in the house. How can they work from home. Both said they have been busy during lockdown.

When I was working, the firm put a phone line in so I could make calls and was connected to the computer at Head Office.This was in the 1980's
when computers were starting to take off.

[Workingman]

My two ex BIL were both firemen, two of my neighbours are teachers, D over the road is a machinist producing parts for the aerospace industry and A is a civil engineer. None of them could WFH - ever.

The UK, under Maggie, became the 'service' sector of the EU: insurance, finance, banking and stocks. Germany was the engineering force, Spain the veg basket. Italy the white goods and supercar king. France a mixed economy. It could have, and was, working for us all, then we broke it.

Now we are not Napoleon's "Nation of shopkeepers", we are the nation of office workers and although those who are WFH claim to be more 'productive' many of them are not producing anything we can sell. We need industry - high end industry. We do have the skills if we want to go there, but it will never be a mass employer like digital paper pushing is. It is a sad fact, but because our education system is so bad the pool of those with the abilities we need is small and many of those with the skills will leave for opportunities elsewhere unless we value them

WFH might suit some individuals for a while, but it is not the solution many think it is.

We desperately need to get back to being a mixed economy or we are done for.

[Suff]

I'm not sure about that.

The Tempest aircraft and the recent collaboration with India on the satellite company acquisition show the direction we are going.

Maggie set the trend and it has continued. High tech, high value, fast moving and flexible businesses. These are not resource heavy as they were. So the service industry sucks up the staff and the high value work grows the economy.

Not a bad model if you want to keep on pushing workers rights and pay for the same job done in Sri Lanka for £5 a day. Which is a living wage in their economy.

We have to accept, as the EU accepted, that there are things we are simply not going to make any more.

If you follow industry and treaties, you see that new German car factories are going up in China, Turkey and the US. You see that the new trade treaty with Japan dropped all tariffs on car imports. Both decisions point to manufacturing being moved out of the expensive and slow moving EU.

Who is the EU following?

We aren't moving back to making all our stuff any more than the EU is.