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?

Finance in the public sector. We’d already moved to hot desking (0.8 desks per FTE so everyone had to do at least 1 day out of the office - either home or meetings) to make it add up. Been fully WFH since lockdown started, meetings are conducted by phone, Teams or WebEx and we do our work on computers as normal. Looking to move to part time in the office from October hopefully, which is probably not 100% necessary but people want it.

The large teaching hospital where I work had 30 staff logging in from home pre Covid. It’s now 1400. Our secretaries work from home now. The trust likes it as we don’t have enough parking anyway and it helps with our green credentials.

A lot of customer service jobs can be done from home, as companies are now finding.

Senior civil servant. Most jobs are not advertised as work from home but so many offer flexible working once you are established and have good work performance. I worked from home 2 days a week before lockdown. Haven't been to the office since mid- March. Won't go back in til next summer. Will likely do one day a week in the office.

I do know people who previously described themselves as working from home full time - but in reality it tended to be that did a lot of travel and home was like their office base, rather than they were actually sat at home at their computer all day every day.

I'm a project manager. I'm sick of the constant conference calls and everything I do depend on someone else replying to an email. I would like to have the option to choose office/home.

@Violetroselily

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

I think most customers of financial institutions with a customer face that working from home has been a total disaster for customers

I don’t work at the moment but I am an accountant and I think most accountants would find it easy to have worked from home for the last five months. I wouldn’t like it long term though, I think working relationships are stronger with personal interactions and I think it is easy to train somebody or explain something in person.

DH is an analyst and has been working at home, it is generally been ok although he needs good internet connection and urs isn’t brilliant in the countryside. He will want to get back into the office.

Technical Consultant/Integration Specialist for a large software and Services provider. As long as I can remotely connect to a client site, I don't need to be there. I haven't been to one of our offices since July 2019.

I do visit client sites, but it's not often. Last time I went on a client site was January.

I work in Commercial Finance for a household name bank. All I need is my laptop and phone and I'm good to go. My job has remained exactly the same, only the location is different. I did however have one awkward client a few weeks ago, who emailed me at 8am, saying they had been calling me at 6.00am! I politely re-iterated just because I was WFH did not mean I was available 24/7 and normal working hours still apply.

My Sister has worked from home for years.

Her day consists of taking kids to school, do keep fit session at home, do about 5 hours a day work do a bit of washing pick kids up. Always email and phone on just in case. By her own admission she has an easy life!

On the flip side I know a legal profession worker who has worked from home for the last 6 months and is flat out from 8-6.

I've been a copywriter for 12 years. I got my first job as a copywriter when DD1 was 3. That was in-house though...after I had DD2 I shifted to self employed.

Contracts Manager. No team, lots of detailed paperwork, reasonable amount of meetings (which have all successfully taken place virtually). Getting so much more done without the interruptions of working in an open plan office. I'm going to apply to change my work base to home I think and go in once a week. I have a long commute to work by car.

Software developer. Wfh fully for last three companies I've worked for.

My DH can do his whole job from home. He's a principal civil engineer in Highways at our local Council. With zoom available now, their work meetings can take place online so they don't need to be in the office at all. He no longer needs to do inspections at the level he's at.

I have exactly the same functionality at home as I do in the office. I can do my job anywhere. I worked from home two days a week pre COVID.

My role is a bit niche but I'm basically in the marketing department of a large company.

@Polnm

Service degradation hasn't necessarily been caused by staff WFH though. Alot of banks and other large companies have significant numbers of staff in India either in operations or contact centres. When India went into complete lockdown, they would have lost the workforce there overnight as WFH capabilities are not as good there (some staff may not have broadband at home, for example, and generally don't work on laptops in the office). Business continuity plans get invoked and work is rerouted, but ultimately with a reduction in staff there is unfortunately going to be some degradation in service.

From people I know (including me) who already worked from home, most of us work in IT, accountancy or marketing.

IT. Our team have been set up to be able to work from home for years because we do out of hours callout, plus we had recently relocated to an office with not enough desks for everyone so we were all expected to work from home 1 - 2 days a week and timeshare them anyway.

Thanks for replies - very interesting.

I've not worked in an office since I had DC (16 years) so there have obviously been lots of changes.

I became a nanny so I could take DC with me sometimes. I'd like to return to the office to be with people - is this going to be a thing of the past?

I work as part of a customer service team - I set up accounts and do the background checks with other departments. It is an international company so even when I worked on the office, everything was done via the system or email as many of my colleagues are based in China or the US.

I just need a laptop. There is really physical no reason for me to sit on the office.

Those who wfh fully and want to continue - do you all have a dedicated office/ spare room you can work from without being disturbed?

Benefits adviser. I'll be starting to do some F2F appointments in the community soon, but all through lockdown it's been done electronically, by phone or by Zoom.

Even representing at tribunals has been done by conference call. I haven't done any, but colleagues have.

do you all have a dedicated office/ spare room you can work from without being disturbed?
Yes have an office and work supplies a budget for you to pick your chair, monitors etc

I work for a large insurance company, I’m in customer service but not in a customer facing role. I have been able to do everything I need to do from home, once I log into the work cloud everything is the same as in the office and any calls have been routed via mobiles. I think in the future I’ll be doing a blend of home and office but quite happy at home for now!