WFH, On Calls All Day

[namechangetoxyz]

just for a nosy as i can't work from home (utilities infrastructure) On here i keep seeing people who are On calls/Zoom etc, but what do you actually DO .

Medical secretary - I do all the same admin. Phone diverted to my mobile so all the usual calls - patient queries, requests for appointments and lots of typing. I tend to work alternate days at home. I actually get loads more work done at home because I have less interruptions from colleagues wanting to chat. I have to go in to print correspondence but that's about it.

University lecturer- I'm either teaching via Teams, in meetings with colleagues or having student tutorials.

Everything that was face to face is now via teams and it's exhausting!

I win new clients for an advertising agency. My zoom calls are a mix of catch ups with my team to check in on what they’re doing, catch ups with various project teams that I’m involved in for example for new technologies we’re building, coordinating pitch teams and all the prep that goes with that, carrying out pitches, speaking to potential clients, meetings with tech partners for example Google or Facebook and then various trainings/whole company meetings

Insurance worker.
Calls from clients, lawyers, insurers.
Meetings on zoom with team once a week.

Teacher

Education worker for social services - we've finally been allowed to use Teams! Yay! Before then it was phone conferencing - awful!

Civil servant. So having 121s with my management team, other teams across the department, other gov departments. It’s fab. Previously I would have travelled for hours and cost the tax payer a lot of money just to have a meeting that I can now do from the comfort of my own home.

@namechangetoxyz ah you've hit the nail on the head for office workers.... Fuck all! Seriously, the amount of 'digital paper pushing' you find in an office, especially big HQ offices is unreal (used to work in some years ago!) the amount of time wasted if you're not in something like customer service with regular customer interaction, sales or marketing is completely unreal..... Don't get me wrong, everyone in an office does have something to do BUT there is a huge amount of wadding.... Companies sometimes run a LEAN exercise to trim the 'fat' to try and weedle out the time wasting that really does go on.... I now work in the public sector and the difference is hugely unreal.

I work in financial services for a global company, even before covid my day whether in the office or WFH was pretty much spent on Zoom. Various meetings about meetings, calls/IM chats with questions/input to a report or deck, checkpoint calls for progress on projects, delivering some presentations to managers and larger meetings where you just have to listen in so multitask emails/tasks at the same time.

thanks everyone, really interesting hearing about how your days are structured.

I'm PMO. I spend all day emailing engineers to make sure they've done things they are supposed to, and they've done them correctly. I mostly then tell them to put it all down and then I run around fixing it all and doing it for them.

Board member here. We have board meetings and committee meetings with papers sent out for noting or for discussion in advance. The actual meetings are similar to those we used to have IRL, in that we have an agenda, a chair to take us through the agenda, the executive team present to answer questions or make presentations, and opportunities for board members to ask questions of the executive or make points for minuting. Meetings tend to be shorter and much more formal now, with less opportunity for 'casual' chat and networking. I like that I don't have to go travelling across the country for meetings, but I do miss chatting with colleagues.

I'm not on physically on calls all the time but have to be available to take them from our customers all day. I probably take up to 5 calls a day.
We have a team zoom meeting in the morning where we discuss workloads, comms and any issues and also have a bit of a general chat. When not on calls I am answering emails which is the main way our customers contact us. We get a lot of them and it's non-stop for the whole shift with tight response timescales to meet.
I work for a major high street bank and the customers we serve are big businesses who bank with us.

Therapy Coordinator. I spend a lot of time emailing and calling people before and after their therapy. There's many other jobs and projects that I'm involved with but that's the basics of what I'm doing on a regular basis.

Oh and we answer all sorts of queries about their accounts such as providing information on debits and credits, invoices for charges and complete things like account openings, closures etc.

I teach, so 3 or 4 hours of live lessons everyday (my 7 year old joins in quite often!) And then as I'm also a Head of Year, endless welfare and pastoral phone calls to my students and their parents.

My daughter, a teacher in a High school is working from 8.30 am until 10.30 and later at night. All of the work she prepared for every class over the Christmas holiday now has to be converted for presentation over the internet. She has to do her usual lessons on line everyday then in the evenings prepare/change/adapt the next days lessons to be presented in an entirely different way through tech. She was preparing her lessons for presentation in the usual way right up to Sunday night due to Boris' constant assurances that kids would be in. She has a year 11 tutor group so when she isn't teaching, at lunch times or after school, she is also constantly trying to reassure her year 11s and their parents that all will be ok in the end. She isn't totally sure of this herself, but is also trying to reassure her own year 11 son at the same time. Like all other parents working from home she is also supervising work for her own two kids. Would she rather be in school doing her usual well prepared lessons? What do you think? Yet she also feels demoralised by references on various sites which imply that teachers are happy with the current situation. I understand that people who are working from home are genuinely doing so because I know she is working harder than ever.

I am not criticising the lock down though. I understand that there is no choice with the virus mutating and more deaths everyday. Kids, in general, only get it mildly or are asymptomatic, but not knowing they have it, come to school and send it out into the community. The closures are driven by the science so no choice but to get on with the extra work.

I dont spend all day on calls . Perhaps about 30% of my time on average. Sometimes more sometimes less.

I have meetings to discuss projects and to define what needs to be done, meetings to discuss progress or outcomes of said project. We have team meetings to talk about what we are working on individually and to share ideas/ problem solve etc. I also attend a few senior strategy meetings where the outcomes of my projects are discussed etc.

Mostly though I work on the projects which are mostly to do with data analysis and market information gathering
So lots of spreadsheet work, data collection and summarising of all sorts ( qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis as well as as analysis of secondary data)

There's peaks and troughs of my zoom calls some weeks loads some only my team catch ups. I work in health and safety so we need to know what projects the site are planning so we can do hazard assessments for them. However as we're not doing the project we need then to talk us through them. This is when we used to go on site to see the work which obviously we can't do right now.

Global Finance Director - on many calls either client or internal, direct team and/or account team. Subjects include performance reviews, project updates, strategic planning etc - started job in lockdown so not met anyone yet apart from zoom/teams/skype!

Mixture of online meeting and then just reading/writing various other paper work. Work for a social services regulator, most external organisations we work with are all working from home too. Used to travel a lot for work now it’s all done via teams.

Project management.

We have a schedule of status updates / wtf is happening for each project on Teams/WebEx calls.

Between calls I write up / follow up with people to save time during the sessions when we have everyone together.Alongside doing budgets / proposals for new projects, checking actual costs to the original budget.

When working, There is absolutely no difference between being on site or WFH. We are spread across many sites/countries so that the teams are hardly ever in a room together.

I really miss being on campus , where we could have coffee/breakfast/lunch together and call it a project meeting. I don't miss leaving the house at 7am to fight my way though traffic. I've noticed just how much time we spent informally chatting over food and drinks.

NHS operations (not the medical kind )

At the moment it’s 95% doctors phoning in sick, filling gaps in the Rota, trying to make sure the skill mix is safe, monitoring and reporting on ED performance (we are still being judged on our 4hr performance target!)