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?

IT/Telecommunications sales, the sector has had flexible working for years, office for team meetings, otherwise home working or customer facing. I’ve been working this way for about 15 years.

Solicitor, haven't been in the office since March 2020. The firm don't plan to make us return although I anticipate long term most of us will go in once a week or so.

I do social research - so I write surveys, conduct focus groups, do desk research etc.

Office admin/customer service for a sports activity. I can do all the stuff I used to do in the office from home, except for talk to colleagues face to face.

Used to be an area manager, WFH except for site visits. The site visits covered most of England and South Wales so became more onerous than a regular commute.

I work in events nowadays - all prep and admin can be done from home but obviously event is on site

A lot of artisan food businesses and event caterers are run from domestic kitchens. Again, all their production and admin work is done from home but they'll still need to go out for events, to deliver, to get stock etc etc

Give legal advice

I work in Local Government. Even pre pandemic we were being encouraged to wfh as our main County Council building was being sold and so office space was very limited. However it was envisaged that we would still travel all over the county for f2f meetings. Covid has shown us we don't need to do that and that there are huge savings to be made in time and money if meetings are virtual.

Many jobs can be done from home, but the culture of many organisations was not to trust people to do so effectively.

I’m an academic. I’ll be going in to teach, but most planning, admin and research will now be done from home.

I’m a statistician. I sit at a computer all day or occasionally I sit and stare at a wall and visualize my data (my non-NT brain is very handy). My actually analysis work is done on a centralized computer located remotely because it has to be kept cold. Even if I were in an office my personal computer is just a terminal that connects me to the main remote computer. I pay for extremely high speed internet so it really makes no difference if I am in the office or at home. I’m approaching 15 years wfh.

I can remember telling one of my bosses that having to commute into work was regressive, old fashioned and inefficient. He was quite upset by this as he thought he was quite cool and trendy. This was back in the 1990s. Gradually I spent more and more time wah and other staff began to copy me. The culture gradiually changed.

Commercial Insurance Broker - been working from home for 7 years. I think I’m extremely lucky. I don’t miss the commute at all and I get far more work done without constant interruption in an office environment. As long as my work is done, my days are pretty flexible.

@Florencex

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.

Funny, I'm an accountant and have found that my relationships with other teams have strengthened. This is especially true of teams which are remote from the main office.

Much of my work is system based. We share screens all the time. I find this really helpful especially when I am introducing new people to the system as I can get them to press the buttons. For this, over the phone works best as there are fewer distractions.

Tech Support Manager. Tech company.

Another freelance translator here.

I’m a fire engineer, the teams always worked from home. It’s a lot of meetings with clients and writing reports, drawings etc. Occasionally I get to go to site but we don’t need to be in an office

Call centre ( nursing helpline - nurse ) 12.5 shifts from home chained to my laptop with a headset ( so like the call centre just at home )

I’m in local government and all our administrative functions have been wfh since March 2020. We’ll be going back on a hybrid basis once the wfh if you can recommendation is lifted.

Prior to the pandemic a number of staff in revenues and benefits and accounts payable worked from home full time, and most of the others did 1-2 days a fortnight (as a way to reduce amount of office space required).

It, coding, accounting.

Regulatory Affairs for Pharma

I’m a nurse and even I managed to work from home for three months at the start or covid doing remote telephone triage of patients calling the Out of Hours GP.

Clinical trial management. Just like any project management job if you’re not site based you can WFH

Accountant in the construction industry. I have worked from home on and off over the years and throughout covid.

@ErrolTheDragon

Re the I never saw any WFH vacancies advertised

I was already in my job, I was allowed to wfh because it was that or lose me. I suspect this may apply to others who've wfh for a long time - companies wise enough to be flexible in order to retain skilled employees.

Yep, definitely this. I was WFH (some of the time) because I was moving and I gave them the option to keep me and let me WFH, or I was looking elsewhere. It wasn't an ultimatum, the job just didn't fit my life anymore and I wanted to give them the chance to keep me on board as I've been with the company from the start.

They said yes straight away because my value to them was more than the value of having me physically in place in the office. Most of the other WFHers I knew pre-Covid were the same. It's good that Covid is making employers think about giving their staff the option though - it makes for a much more attractive job for someone who'd like the flexibility. We advertise all roles as potentially remote now!

I'm now WTF 90% of the time. I'm a lifestyle reporter.

Late to the party on this.

I’m an internal/in-house Recruiter.

My role is field based because of the regional areas I cover, so pre-covid I’d have a mixture of being out and about conducting interviews and being at home reviewing applications etc. We don’t have various offices we can work from, only one head office, which is in another part of the UK, so not an option to be office based (fine by me! I much prefer the flexibility of WFH!)

So my role has always been field based/home office. Just that since COVID I’ve been based solely at home as unable to go out in the field.