To ask what all these work from home jobs involve?

[MissCharlotteBartlett]

I'm reading about people who've "worked from home for years"
And people who have started working from home during COVID and are hoping to continue to do so from here on in.
What do you do? PreCOVID I never saw any WFH vacancies advertised. When DH requested to WFH sometimes his bosses had an attack of the vapours.

So what jobs can you do from your spare room?

The majority of standard office jobs.

I'm an accountant. I've been WFH through Covid but will be back in the office next month.

I'm in the US, but in my job we telecommute. I conduct public assistance hearings. I do the hearings over then phone, then spend the rest of my time writing decisions.

In-house legal. Can do majority from home, not all.

This pandemic has taught people that most office jobs can be done from home. I’m a lawyer and 90% of my job can be done from home. With the exception of being in court (when they start to do in person hearings once more) there’s nothing that actually physically requires me to be in the office any more.

I want to do part time office / part time home working in future, because I do miss lots of things about being in the office. But I certainly don’t need to be in every day from now on.

The civil service has been pushing home working for 15 years. There is an entire government department (office of government property) that has been downsizing government estate, moving people to hubs, championing “activity based working” ie hotdesking for the best part of 20 years.

After payroll, accommodation is any businesses largest cost.

The notion of people working from a set desk day in day out has been becoming a thing of the past for a long time

I work in safety so basically a lot of paperwork and calculations and assesments.

I do need to go onto site to see it but usually once or twice then spend weeks writing everything up.

I’m my circle - accountancy, IT Support, Sales, Recruitment, Admin, IT Analyst, Tutoring and Counselling.
Many of them have utilised telephone or Skype/zoom

Just think of any job where your physical presence isn't essential and it can be done from home.
WFH has surged in popularity, so there weren't many jobs advertising this, but many workplaces have always allowed it as part of flexible/agile working. Whilst it won't have been explicitly stated in a job spec, many workplaces allow it once an employee is established in their role.

I work in marketing. The job was created for me in a small company after I pointed out their need for someone to do it over dinner.

I’m a software engineer. The vast majority of my job and those of almost everyone I work with can be done from home. We have gone from everyone being based in the office, to everyone working entirely at home, to being mostly at home with office space available to use when needed. It will probably continue as it is for the foreseeable future, and the change to at least partial home-working will almost certainly be permanent.

Well, I do my bit running large NHS directorate from home. Meetings on Teams, shared documents, project management. It can all be done online. Productivity has increased. We have saved a fortune in travel costs that can be ploughed back into clinical care.

My job can't be done by a random in India though - it takes highly specialised local knowledge.

Ideally I would like to be in the office a couple of days a week, but that isn't going to happen any time soon.

Adult care social worker. I can write reports, make phone calls, do zoom meetings from home. Doing some face to face home visits and occasional office stints but can do most from home.

I’m a lawyer and other than client meetings, all my work can be done from home. I am really missing the collaboration with colleagues and the tea breaks though plus I also end up working much longer hours at home.

Editing and proofreading. I've run my own business from home for 20 years.

I work in marketing, but our entire company including IT, call centre, operational support, HR, finance and accounts have been working from home since March. The only people in our office of over 500 people are the maintenence team and the mail/distribution team comprising about 30 people. We just remote log in to our PCs from laptop at home and have access to everything we would normally have in the office.

Watching because I keep being told by MNers to leave my teaching job if I'm too scared to do it (I'm not; I just want similar regard for my health and safety at work as is given to other workers).

I worked in two different universities and a lot of the work I did involved writing guidance and policy or teaching advice. It was much easier to concentrate on this at home rather than in a busy open plan office. All phone calls were rerouted to our home phones,

I work for one of the big banks. Whilst most staff work from a specific office, we have alot of location independent workers who are home based - pretty much any role (except branch based roles) can be done from home i.e any back office support function, call centre staff etc.

Approx 50k colleagues have been WFH since March

Accountant working in finance.
Was working from home 1-2 days per week before this. Theres no estimated time for us to get back to the office so far. Only the people who wanted/needed to go back to the office have gone back so far, about 10% of the total staff.

I'm a lecturer, so can't wfh in normal circumstances but have been doing so during covid as all my teaching has moved online.

DH works for an insurance company. All 7000 employees are currently wfh.

It’s anything that used to be called paper-based isn’t it? By paper-based, I mean reports, data, legal documents, accounts....all that is now onscreen and therefore can be done anywhere.

Just to add, even when I'm in the office I'd say 90% of my meetings take place on conference call because my team and usual stakeholders are based in multiple sites. So that hasnt been any different since being at home.

Mathematical modeller. Nearly all computer-based. Miss the office though

And I am WFH to keep the amount of mixing my family is doing down in the hope that infection rates stay low and schools can stay open.

I'm a Sales Manager in travel. Selling distribution products to airlines. I travel a lot as we are talking high value contracts that have an average 6-8 months sales cycle but when I'm not travelling I WFH apart from a monthly team meeting in the office.