Those who WFH or partners do

[Horseskeepmesane]

Many people seem to still work from home, I’m intrigued by this.

if you do what is your field of work, and what do you actually do most of the day working from home productivity wise?

there seems to be so many ‘meetings, calls’ scheduled from home and what else?!

I work in Accounts for a small business, office based.

We both WFH.

We both do our job? I don't really get your question tbh.

His job involves lots of meetings about actual deliverables.

My job is sales and account management so again, lots of meetings....

Neither of us have "fluff" meetings, each one we have is valuable to the role we do. Otherwise it's an e-mail.

Day to day I'll prospect, issue quote/designs, manage existing accounts, liaise with different departments within my business etc

I'm a software engineer. I could do with less meetings, but mainly I just type away implementing the new features and fixing bugs. We were alreay very remote friendly before the pandemic though. I actually have no coworkers in the same city as me.

Same as if I was in the office?

OP - what elements of your job could you not do remotely?

I wfh 2 days a week. DH also 2 days a week. He works for a bank and is on calls a lot which is his job. I work in finance and just do the same job I do when I'm in the office. We both do

Didn't you work from home during lockdown?

I've been a freelance/consultant since my dc were small and have mostly worked from home for 15 years. I also travel abroad a bit, go to London 3-4 times a month for meetings.
WFH I am very productive.

We both do at home what we do in the office. My colleagues are scattered around the world so if I want to speak to them I have to call. May as well do that at home. Everything else is digital so I may as well do that at home too.

It's great when I do go in but I achieve bugger all usually.

There seems to be a fair bit of research coming out that people are actually less productive at home. Who'd have thunk it. 😂

I could easily do remotely to be honest, it’s just the culture of the business is very ‘bums on seats’ I wasn’t meaning the post to sound negatively, I am just interested in how the day pans out working from home,

I work from home. I never have meetings or calls. Productivity is measured on a timer, and we have to account for every minute of the working day. The job is exactly the same as when I worked in the office, including the timer. I have set hours and have to stick to them.

We both work from home and do site visits when we need to. I can do my job anywhere, currently writing lots of proposals for new training for the workplace. Also lots of governance structures development e.g. terms of references. My husband is a PM so lots of talking to suppliers across the country. Which would have been phone calls in the old times. So now it’s phone calls with video. Lots of costings and reports.

I do exactly what I would do in the office but in a much quieter more relaxing environment.

Also I've not had a day off sick (touch wood) since March 2020 whereas when I was in the office I was off a lot mostly mental heath reasons. Almost lost my job twice actually.

Much better for both me and the business for me to wfh

I do the same sort of stuff I would do in the office, but with fewer social moments of having a coffee and a chat with colleagues. They get replaced by things like folding the washing for a bit instead if I need to get away from my screen for a bit!

I do the same at home as I did in the office. Only more of it and quicker as I don't have to wait for others to be finished with the (two) landlines for (six) people in the shitty office 🙄

If I need to go out and see client, I do so, like I did before.

If I need to cover meetings in another town, I travel from my home rather than the office..

Nothing has changed apart from the fact I dress down rather than up for work.

I am available online on the in-house chat system during working hours, as well as on my email and my mobile number (my personal mobile as work don't provide one)

In my last job I was fully remote. I just did my job - I work in marketing. I think meetings take a little longer from home maybe. In my job now I’m hybrid. And again I just do my job except at home I take a lovely lunch break - in the office we tend to work through. I don’t think I’m more or less in productive either way but it’s a fast moving job.

I do the same as I'd do in the office, only far far more of it. I dont kniw how people are less productive at home, I get loads more done. Mind you, I work in an open plan office and it's so disruptive.

A more striking observation: Workers who preferred working from home were substantially (27%) less productive at home than when they were at the office. That productivity gap was only 13% for workers who prefer being in the office.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2023/08/03/remote-workers-less-productive-research/amp/?bshm=rimc/2

A study published by the American private nonprofit research organization the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the productivity of workers randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than that of those in the office.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/wfh-workers-less-efficient-than-people-in-office-new-research-2023-8%3famp?bshm=rimc/2

Didn’t a spate of studies during the covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?

Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/the-working-from-home-delusion-fades

As a freelancer I have few meetings or calls, sometimes not even once a week. I write long form SEO content for the outer reaches of a huge international website and my work is always published under someone else’s byline, usually an expert in their field.

The brief is generated by an AI tool each time which scores my writing as I go, in this way it is virtually guaranteed to beat the competition and appear at the very top in organic search results in Google (ie not a paid for ‘sponsored’ link). I outsource most of the editing to save time so I can research and write more articles and this pays off.

I would not in a million years be able to do this routinely in an office, although in the early days I found it helpful to use office space away from home. I like to start work very early, take three hours for lunch and have a three day weekend. I’m not sure how many employers would go along with that!

We're both only at home.
We work as we would anywhere, maybe fewer distractions at home.
Both in financial services but unrelated.
We each have a daily huddle and frequent meetings, but that's standard and would happen in the office.
We both get the odd collaboration day in our closest cities, office space is rented for the purpose.

I like having more time for my own things, like going to the gym out of peak times.

I get my work done and on time. Our CEO has said everyone must be back in the office. I’ll try for 2 days a week. They have so many people quitting especially women. And if they insist I would leave too. It has to change. I’m the only person who does my job in the local office. Sure they can get someone in another office to do it, remotely, which rather defeats the point. They want to hire 400 people over the next 5yrs they’ll struggle if they insist on presenteeism where
Other companies are not

Hs company were offering 2 days at home. Again they had so many quit. They’ve now rolled back and said we’re moving into this fancy new ‘google’ like office, come in and you’ll love it, or don’t, it’s up to you.

The world of work has totally changed IMO,

my background is HR also,
and recruiting has never been as tough. But I think that it is due to the fact Covid exposed the entrenched and dogmatic side of the workplace that just kept grinding on because it had never been questioned before, for example those managers who would make a vendetta against a working mum if she requested flexible working or the boss who would make those who got to work early and left late the best employees.

this is a good this I think, the psyche of the working world has changed massively in general would you agree?

I'm an academic - I do clinical research and I lecture at a uni. I've actually worked from home at least part of the week for about 15 years. It's quite standard in my field and none of my colleagues are ever in 5 days a week, even pre-COVID. What I do from home is a lot of project management/admin/data management stuff, data collection (which happens remotely because we can't secure funding for anyone to travel to collect research data anymore, so it's all online surveys and zoom interviews), and then teaching and teaching prep. Most teaching is f2f again, but not all. So I largely only go into the office when I teach, but that's only a few hours here and there. All the prep is done from home.

WFH is actually much more convenient for a couple reasons: (1) privacy - I have a home office with a door and I can assure privacy when I talk with people and many of the meetings I have are confidential, so I can't have them in an open plan or shared office. It's actually really hard to find a private office space if I'm 'in the office' as it's all shared or open plan, despite nearly all of us needing private spaces for confidential meetings! (2) I have reliable wifi - wifi in the office is hit and miss, some days it works, some days it doesn't! In my actual office, I don't even get wifi signal, I have to use my bloody hotspot on my phone to access the internet, which no one seems to care about and it uses up my data and can be expensive, so it's so much easier/cheaper to stay at home at use my home wifi which works perfectly well in my nice private home office.

Dh runs a small company that manufacturers particular technical bits for home/commercial kitchens. He largely works from home - he spends most days doing admin, organising shipping, dealing with customer issues, doing marketing, ordering supplies/raw materials, photographing products, website design, product development. He has a small manufacturing site in a warehouse unit with 4 employees and he is on site there once a week just to oversee things, collect orders, deal with any issues, tidy up stuff, sort out safety issues, etc.

I WFH 99% of the time, I’ve had 4 days in the office this year.
Tax Accountancy firm. We downsized our office two years ago.
Mornings are spent dealing with customer emails, queries etc, then I complete paperwork for customers, liaise with HMRC, work on rolling rotas and spreadsheets etc. I usually spend some time speaking with my customers in the afternoon about their tax affairs. The odd Teams meeting every day, nothing major.
I can do three times as much at home because the only thing to disturb me is that cat crying for Dreamies or Jeremy Vain on the radio.
I know that the days I’m in the office I’ll be disturbed by the ‘buzz’ of noise and people chatting about MAFS. I’m nearly 60, it’s doubtful I’ll ever have to go back to the office in any significant way, I’m reliable and my productivity is excellent at home.

It’s great in lots of ways but can be lonely.

I WFH. I am an IT Service Delivery Manager. Basically, that is a professional nagger - someone who knows the contract for delivery IT services like the back of her hand and makes sure all the work we do adheres to it.

It's a lot of email, phone, Teams chasing up, phone meetings with the client and internal checkup meetings to make sure everyone knows what we're meant to be doing, when and how.

I've WFH increasingly for about 15 years, going full time from home about 6 years ago. Except the odd face to face meeting - about once a month - which I travel for.

My job can be mainly done from home and was during Covid. Powers that be don't like that though so instead we have a staffing crisis as people are leaving for other departments offering hybrid working.