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.

Shhhh! WFH Mumsnetters are MUCH more productive at home, even the OP yesterday who managed to have meetings whilst having massages in a spa.

@LadyTrunchbull that raises an interesting question.

Is it that people are not as productive Aka efficient when working at home or is it that they can finally have more boundaries (eg finish on time) which they were struggling to do before?

I work from home. There an office option but if we went into our nearest office nobody I work with would be in.

most of my day is in meetings. A lot or chasing people for work, smoothing relationships with stakeholders, checking we’re meeting standards.

Contact centre. I answer the phone for 8hrs
Also make outgoing calls and deal with emails but generally sat answering calls continuously
Meetings very rare as we can't have a whole team meeting

You had people in the office who spent hours in the ‘smoking area’ or next to the coffee machine etc…

When I was in the office, you started with a coffee/tea - with chat about your evening etc… - , a tea break in the middle if the am, then lunch. Checking the news/your own email etc… at various times too. Tea break in the afternoon with a biscuit (we had someone collecting money to buy biscuits fir the department) etc…. That was the norm. And for some people the break lasted 45mins rather than 5….

There were people refusing to do certain jobs (I ended up doing some of their jobs).

So, yes it has always existed. It just showed up in a different way than ‘in a meeting at the spa’

Depends on your perspective

With no WFH I am a person on disability benefits

With WFH I am a higher rate tax payer

I would say I am absolutely more productive in a work capacity from home

I get the impression that LadyTrunchbull would be against workers having boundries. It would lower productivity after all!

Dh works from home, and he is sure that he is more productive at home than at work - partly because he has set himself up a big workstation at home, with three big screens and his laptop, which enables him to work with different documents simultaneously, but when he is in the office, he just has one screen, and it's pretty small.

I've been working from home for the last 15 years. I have face to face meetings 3-4 times a year that I have to travel for. I develop technical solutions for outsourcing bids and my team are spread all over the world so we've been set up to work like this. I'm measured on my deliverables, not my time so find it useful to pop out to the shops etc. My job is quite cyclical.. ie. coming up to submission/signature I can be working 11/12 hour days and the odd weekend. But at other times between bids it's quieter. I do think some of our younger grads etc suffer from WFH as it's much more difficult to build your network.

I work for a remote first organisation that sells cyber security products. I support the sales enablement team, who are scattered around the world.

It’s the same as being in the office except I put my washing on the line in my lunch. Emails, 1-2 meetings a day and an odd call here and there. i mostly work on customer account issues and fixing them. I am not sure why that is intriguing

I’m a copywriter for an agency. Get more done at home as I can concentrate and write faster, edit faster, interpret briefs etc, Vs the open-plan office full of young people bantsing. My day is basically writing stuff, addressing feedback, editing other people’s work, attending client meetings remotely, attending meetings that should have been emails and reading emails that should have not existed. DP is in an entirely different industry but basically the same: we do some work and we have some meetings. Most desky jobs can be done WFH, really.

I work 60/40 home / office for a bank.

my role is global which means that I’m on calls / email contact with people at either end of the day and resent being in the office late to accommodate these.

in fact I’m in the office today to show my face as have been travelling the last two weeks and I have 11 zoom calls and one face to face. So I don’t need to be here, I just pop up to be present!

I work on a government-funded health project and manage a team. We are all remote, and the nature of our project would have been expensive if we weren't remote.

I have projects I am left to get on with, and I have to ensure my staff are able to do their own jobs, so I am very 'present' throughout the day.

Without this role, I'm unsure how we'd balance parenthood with such jobs. Also, I manage an older woman with a host of physical health issues. I have been very supportive of her need for frequent health appointments. She only needs to tell me when they are, so I know she'll be unavailable at those times. She's one of my highest performers, and she's a fabulous member of staff overall. She's happy, I'm happy, the company is definitely happy lol. A regular daily commute would be totally out of the question for her. I'm grateful for these roles, if not for myself, then for amazing women/people like her.

Every time I read about how WFH is ruining productivity, the economy, and the very fabric of our society, I think to myself, "who benefited from the old system, and why are they so angry about the new one?"

As a PP said, WFH enables people with disabilities to advance a career. When I was a single mum, it meant I could build my career from scratch. It means companies can gain the best talent, completely unrestricted by geography. When done well, it benefits everyone.

I'm an accountant working in Finance mainly from home. I do the same work as I do in the office. Why do you think it'd be any different?

I work with cancer data for the NHS. In the office (1 day per week) I sit in a huge room with loads of medical secretaries on the phone all the time. At home i am in quiet and need that to concentrate on the new patient data. I get through so much more productive work than I did when I worked in the office every day. Start at the same time as always and finish at the same time. Meetings are Teams as we all work different days anyway.

I work in a professional role and work from home half of my time. I do the same as in the office - work, attend meetings by Zoom, emails, calls... if I need to attend something in person then I go in

WFH three days a week. No commute of travel expenses. Can help with childcare and school runs. Career suffers, but in a better Dad for it.

I don't understand your question - as your accounts and so office type job you must be able to see that people just do the same as they would do in the office. Recognise for non office type roles its usually not possible and might be more difficult to understand but you don't sound like you work in that type of role.

I work form home 2/3 days a week.
I'm a university academic with an international focus so most of my meetings are online as the attendees are often all in different countries. I teach quite a bit online too so prefer to do that at home.

I WFH mostly - will usually pop into the office once a week.

In terms of what I do from home all day... I do my job. The exact same job I do in the office, just at a desk from home. I'm a lawyer for a tech company so my day is spent drafting contracts, reviewing contracts, negotiation calls with the other side in a transaction, internal calls to get instructions on new projects or products or to align on strategy, internal calls with colleagues to share knowledge and allocate work tasks. All the same stuff as happens when I'm in the office.

Typically 40-50% of my day is in meetings, with the other 50% spent doing emails, contract reviews and drafting.

Even when I'm in the office, my meetings are usually on Teams/Zoom as a lot of colleagues work around the world anyway in US, Asia, Europe.

Your point about developing networks is a good one, @massistar. Ds3 has recently got a new job because the old one was mainly wfh, and he really missed being in an office, and building relationships with his colleagues - it is definitely better for his mental health.

Senior Data Role working for a London hospital.

Fully WFH but option to go to the office when I want to.

Day consists of:

• meeting with data colleagues, service managers, general managers, consultants, board members, colleagues from other teams.
• Compiling data reports for national and local submissions
• Building scorecards/dashboards for services I am responsible for
• Carrying out ad-hoc data queries
• Data analysis and visualisations, presentations..

The only thing that is different is that I have 2 hours of commuting time completely removed. In this time, I now to to the gym, play netball, go to run clubs, and walk my dog. I have a great balance!

This. If I couldn't work from home I'd have to find some kind of part time work that only needed me between 9am and 2 so I can do school run. Doesnt exist round here and certainly wouldnt cover my mortgage + childcare etc. WFH i'm doing full time well paid work AND the school run. Never a question of me missing a deadline or not not delivering etc.