tickedon
Prominent Member
So at work I look after several teams, most of them deemed 'essential workers' and so able to keep their kids in school (interesting to note that a majority didn't!). We acquired a new subsidiary last year and they had zero plans (and zero tech) to work from home, so I had a fun 3 weeks getting laptops and introducing brand new systems to make that happen - but we got everyone setup to work from home by early April. Amazing how much internal bureaucracy can disappear in a crisis! For my other teams, we had been running a pilot for the last year to bring in homeworking tech, so we just ramped that up and was relatively straightforward with great support from our IT colleagues.
We've been told last week we won't be going back to our London office any earlier than September, and I think even that is optimistic. We've all managed to transition to homeworking quite easily, and none of us want to face crowded public transport. Even once into our building, while we can socially distance at our desks, our kitchens, toilets, and lifts etc. are just too limiting and it would be very difficult. Personally, until socially distancing goes away, I can't see how we can do it - and at the moment I am quite happy working from home as I have a proper desk, office chair, two large screens etc.!
Homeworking works best when everyone is at home and connecting remotely into the meetings etc. remotely. What doesn't work is when half the meeting are in a physical space together and another half are not (we had some of this in early March). So if we end up with some people in the office and some not, I think our effectiveness with homeworking will start to decrease significantly.
We've been told last week we won't be going back to our London office any earlier than September, and I think even that is optimistic. We've all managed to transition to homeworking quite easily, and none of us want to face crowded public transport. Even once into our building, while we can socially distance at our desks, our kitchens, toilets, and lifts etc. are just too limiting and it would be very difficult. Personally, until socially distancing goes away, I can't see how we can do it - and at the moment I am quite happy working from home as I have a proper desk, office chair, two large screens etc.!
Homeworking works best when everyone is at home and connecting remotely into the meetings etc. remotely. What doesn't work is when half the meeting are in a physical space together and another half are not (we had some of this in early March). So if we end up with some people in the office and some not, I think our effectiveness with homeworking will start to decrease significantly.