Government should advise 'work from home if you can' - plain common sense

[swabthenose]

I'm not talking about furlough, or people who are unable to do their jobs from home. I'm talking about office jobs where people have successfully worked from home for months and months with no decrease (and some increase due to no commute) in productivity. Surely it's plain fucking common sense for the government to say 'work from home if you can' and stop encouraging people back to offices?!

All this talk of a lockdown except offices and schools - why offices?! Why is the government so determined to keep all the worker bees in the group working environment when it's not necessary? Yes I know, save the sandwich shops, but tbh if people are working from home then local businesses are going to get a boost instead AND the public transport will be less crowded. Home working at least part of the time is the future, and trying to swim against the tide during a global pandemic seems pretty dim even for our shitshow of a government.

Completely agree OP. I’ve said for years that home working is the way forward, even before the pandemic. Reducing pressure on public transport, spread housing needs and prices across the country, better work/life balance, less office politics. Less traffic being much better for the environment, better productivity, less stress.

I can see the problem for control freak micro managing managers, city centre businesses relying on office workers, transport providers but the effects of this will be redistributed.

I’m hoping and praying this is one long term positive change to come out of Covid

Maybe other work places are being very firm about keeping staff at home, but if you are one of those who wants to go into the office then I strongly recommend putting a business case together as to why you “can’t” work from home. That’s what I’ve done and I go in as usual.

Totally agree OP. I've been at work throughout and have steadily seen the trains and tubes get busier and people looking more and more worried every day. To make everyone feel more secure, and leave transport emptier for those that cannot work from home, is a no brainer.

Trouble is that some people are doing "some" of their work from home, but not everything they'd do in their normal working environment. Yes, they're probably busy, working their full quota of hours, but "some" things aren't happening. That's fine short term, but as the months pass, it's starting to manifest itself in other problems now. I work on a daily basis with numerous organisations - some things are taking far too long to happen and some things aren't happening at all. When I email or phone their staff, it's just one excuse after another why they can't do certain tasks that need doing.

Eg, one contact I have can deal with current projects but he doesn't have access at home to archived projects that aren't on their "cloud" servers. If he was in the office, he'd just go to a different PC and could access it all, but he can't access it from home. That's just one simple example. It is "non essential" work for them, but it's essential for my firm and the client and has left us in limbo.

If WFH is going to be more common/permanent, then firms are going to have to sort out 100% of the work usually done by their staff, not the current 80% or so. It's the old 80:20 - 80% of the work is easy to do remotely, but the real problem is the other 20% that may need a lot of re-planning, new equipment, new systems, etc.