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?

I’m a freelance editor and have worked from
home for nearly six years now. I have an office in the spare room and (pre-covid) I’d head to my coworking space for a bit of hotdesking and office buzz. If I need to get out of the house now I head a local cafe with wifi and set myself up with multiple coffees for a couple of hours

I loathed office politics and have lots of friends/interests outside work so was never especially interested in the social aspect of office life. I would never go back - wfh rules!

DH was previously office-based but has wfh through lockdown and his company are now very keen to keep going with a blended work style where people go into the office for meetings etc and wfh the rest of the time. He’s very happy with that!

Digital content editing and SEO; head in a laptop all day and no need to be in an office at all. If anything I work harder and better at home without open-plan office distractions. I do have a dedicated space for it though, as does DP (a separate one), who’s a data analyst. We’d both happily EFH full time forever and due to certain specialisms/job quirks, neither of our roles could be outsourced to India despite all the dire warnings. Annoyingly bought a house in London at the tail-end of last year to shorten our commute. Whoops.

I’m a full time writer, and used to do online tutoring.

Both my parents mixed wfh with going into the office, my mum was a freelance accountant (part time) and my dad owned his own IT company.

I can do the majority of my job from home but I prefer being in the office and apart from 3 weeks working at home I have been in the office

Things like making payments can be done from home except making manual cheque payments, I can load the cheque but someone else in the office would have to write it

I work in CAMHS with wfh since lock down with the exception of duty days in the clinic settings with face to face for emergencies/ urgent cases.
Most families have responded really well to video calls and now that the kids are back at school most families don’t want the kids to have more time off for appointments so we are offering lots of 4,5,6. &7 pm slots.
We will be increasing ftf for some assessments but restricted to how many patients are allowed in the clinic at any one time.
So moving forward meetings continue on Teams with calls/ video the norm.
Our team has had very little sick leave and the expenses costs are virtually zero.

Civil service here - worked from home with one 2-night stay and one, very ocassionally 2 day trips a month pre-covid. Those have just switched to virtual. No impact when we went into ‘covid contingency’ because the entire team were home working.

In my previous civil service role, they were incredibly reluctant to allow home working - despite the fact at least 85% of the work could be done at home. Covid has forced them to allow it and its looking like they will never go back to full time office - possibly will allow 2/3 days per person per week at home if they want it.

Thing is, our offices that holds 2000 is too full. We hot desk. If you are not in before 0800 you may not get a desk. Everything is shared. A lot of places no longer have individual desks. You have to carry bags on equipment, fight for the double screen desks.

I'm a lawyer and there's no plans for us to return to the office any time soon.

Anything that can be done via a computer

often the big international companies or national but with multiple offices, as they are set up to communicate via zoom and technology between offices in the day to day.

In-house PR Director. My role involves managing multiple teams and agencies which for the most part is done via phone or video calls so easily done from home.

I'm in an office job and I can't WFH in my role.

A few of my friends can though. One works for a law firm, one works in TV production, one is an accountant.

Accountant, and in my current role, all of my work can be done from home. A lot of my time in the office was spent on video calls anyway. Unlikely that I will ever go back to the office. I miss my colleagues. I would think that these types of jobs are not usually advertised as wfh because it is hard to build good team relationships that way?

Freelance translator

Public sector working normally in an office. But as pp said we hot desk, not enough desks so you need to be in before 8 and I refuse to pay for breakfast club just to get a desk.
Normally management are reluctant for home working but I think this has helped especially being able to video call people.
We previously had lots of face to face meetings often with lots of travel. I'm hoping some of the virtual meetings will continue although without travelling time I can be in back to back meetings for hours

Complaint investigator. We already WFH part of the week as not enough desks for everyone to be in at the same time. Work don’t contribute to costs associated with WFH though except for a small number of staff on old contracts who permanently WFH so get any travel to the office paid, and some allowances for costs. I don’t think we’ll ever get those kinds of T&Cs back but I’d be happy with no more than a day a week in the office

Well, I've been freelance for years (editing and proofreading), so had worked from home for ages pre-Covid. Previously I worked in a publishing office. Publishers are all WFH at the mo and as far as I can see from the outside, it's working fine.

Civil Engineer - Tender appraisal, drawing approvals, project management, method statements/risk assessments, work scoping, planning applications, client liaison, lots of Teams meeting all done from home. I used to sieve about 2 days a week on site, this is now about 1 day a fortnight. I’m in one if those public sector organisations which introduced hot desking about 10 years ago. Because if the nature of my work, I’m easy been equipped to work anywhere for longer than that.

I’m an IT consultant and have always worked from home. Contractually I work from the London office but never in reality have. I don’t recall asking anyone, it is just the accepted norm in Technology careers

I manage large software engineering teams, they span from India, Eastern Europe with a few management calls to the US late afternoon/evening. It's actually easier at home because any calls needed can be done earlier in the day with India etc and then I can take a call later in the evening with the US. It'll be great to visit them again when I can, but meanwhile no office commute means I am in my office at home to have calls not on an early or late train instead, work uninterrupted and have generally been far more productive.

I work in communication support. It’s all remote these days, baby. Whether it will ever go back to F2F, who knows? 🤷‍♀️

A couple of years ago I was working in an office. We were on a conference call, 6 people sat at our desks around the office with headphones on, and 2 suppliers on the call in a different location. Ludicrous!

It was increasing instances like that that made me confident to pitch my last job as wfh. Contrasts with my initial marketing jobs in the 90s where we had to bike proofs across town to the agencies or the mailing houses for checking before print or posting!

I'm in aftersales for a prestige car brand and WFH for the time being basically taking hundreds of phone calls!

@TheId

I'm a Dr Pre Covid I obviously assumed you cannot be a Dr from home And you can't entirely. You do need to examine people and interact face to face for some things However it turns out that quite a bit of it can be done from home. A lot of people really prefer telephone and video consultations and even online and for some things they are very time efficient for the Dr and the patient. I didn't want to do it but once I had got used to it I was surprised how good an interaction you can have on a video consultation and for patients it avoids parking, travelling, waiting. rooms and time off work as well as reducing Covid risk. There should be more available appts due to increased efficiency (at the moment there is a backlog and cleaning issues etc but long term it should mean more time with patients if less is spent travelling and less missed or late appts due to traffic, parking issues etc.

If you can wfh some days as a Dr then surely you can in an office job?
People really need to check their assumptions

I much prefer the online service. No more ringing for hours for appointments or stressful waiting rooms. The service is efficient fast and must ge so much easier for Dr's too

Freelance writing.

I work for myself though, not for anyone else. Couldn't ever go back to having a "proper job".