Hopefully never! You can rip my luxurious potter about the house in the morning getting odd jobs done from my cold dead hands but it’s this kind of attitude which leads to the belief that most people who work from home are nowhere near as productive, because they’re at home they think they can be doing odd jobs, a bit of cleaning, maybe a bit of tidying when actually, during their contracted hours they’re meant to be working.
Customer service for one has taken a complete nosedive since WFH became the norm. There has to be middle ground.
Personally i think there are several pitfalls to both. Full-time working in the office means spending much more time out of the house, which is time not spent with family, and which costs. Added to that there’s the cost of work clothes/lunches/coffees etc which all add up.
But working from home means that no-one will ever have personal relationships with their colleagues any more and work environments run the risk of becoming very impersonal.
My eXH works for a company in the city and they have been WFH since the beginning of the pandemic. During that time he’s hired staff who have joined and subsequently left who he has been managing but who he has never actually met. Surely that’s not a model we should be encouraging on a full-time basis?
And I speak as someone who would love a WFH job because as someone with a disability it would work incredibly well for me.
But interestingly I see very few jobs now advertised as WFH, so while I think the scope to work from home will increase, I don’t think permanent working from home is likely to become the norm.