Just a little English? Must not be an English Bulldog. Has a dog ever had a good day? Everytime I ask one how their day was, it was always "Rough".
Working From Home Proactively Due to Weather
- Thread starter agcy68
- Start date
I'm a pretty extroverted guy if I'm being honest. I love people and talking and stuff. But one thing I've noticed about going into the office, even just once a week, is that day I'm really tired and I don't have the juice I normally do when hanging out with my family or real friends. For those people who have strong relationships outside of work, I think work saps you pretty bad. When I'm done for the day while WFH I'm kind of ready to hang with my family in a way I am not when working.
I work in a small insurance agency 6 employees, working from home for us is possible, but much more difficult so we do not but could.
What we have seen in the Insurance Tade from our end is the folks that work fir the carries, underwriters, adjustors, marketing reps who have and in many cases still work from home have had a severe knack for having no accountability. Days between communicating which in the past took hours at most, never returning clients phone calls when they have claims, many things that cause problems in this industry. The companies are struggling to keep adjustors inpaticular so there is very little accountability for them as they just quit.
JMHO on how Remote working has not been the best for the Insurance market.
Working from home today to avoid the weather. Our company policy for 2022 allows WFH for 800 hrs, but you need to request -- you can't just not show up to the office.
My son-in-law's company has all their employees working from home indefinitely, and he LOVES it.
My son-in-law's company has all their employees working from home indefinitely, and he LOVES it.
At former company had coworkers go to their home country for several months during covid to work.
We have daycare pickup still so that acts as a "commute" but days where I don't pickup I try to go for an end of day walk.
Output not hours. Well, output within hours or employers will expecting more output to force more hours. We should really go to a 4 day workweek. If you're getting done what you need to, I don't care if you are popping out for the gym, errands whatever. I've seen some do core hours so you're expected to be generallyavailable between say 10 4 or 9 to 3 (latter is my current situation).
That's basically how we operate. You're generally expected to be available during regular hours. However, you are free to do what you need to during that time. If someone texts me and I'm at the gym or not in my office, I'll text them that I will call them back later, unless it's urgent. I've never gotten any push back on that, but I also get my sh*t done. I think the only sort-of-official rule we have is that if you're out for a whole day or completely unavailable, you let the team know ahead of time.
We are also allowed to block off up to 2 hours no questions asked during our "regular" hours of 9-6. Gonna go to the gym 11-1? Just put "Busy" on your calendar. Tends to work well that there is the freedom to take care of things you want/need to do, but the rest of the team knows when you won't be available.
I like people ok until I actually am around them.
Seems like it would be way easier to work through a large boring meeting that doesn’t pertain to you but they make you go anyway if you weren’t actually in the same room.
We still are 100% work from home for COVID. When we go back it will only be 1 day per week to start (and hopefully to stay). Prior to COVID we were working from home 2 days a week and generally were allowed to switch days when the weather was crappy.
When COVID first hit we had flexible hours and you were encouraged to take care of kids, etc when needed. I think they are going to transition to more of a core hour schedule where everyone has to work from 10-2 and then you can adjust your hours to make up the other 4 hours. But a lot of that is going to depend on your manager and the teams you were work with.
I keep VERY regular hours from home mainly b/c I like to telework and I don't want to lose the ability to do that. I've seen some instances of people really taking advantage of things and that's not going to fly for too much longer.
When COVID first hit we had flexible hours and you were encouraged to take care of kids, etc when needed. I think they are going to transition to more of a core hour schedule where everyone has to work from 10-2 and then you can adjust your hours to make up the other 4 hours. But a lot of that is going to depend on your manager and the teams you were work with.
I keep VERY regular hours from home mainly b/c I like to telework and I don't want to lose the ability to do that. I've seen some instances of people really taking advantage of things and that's not going to fly for too much longer.
I’m at a place where I can work from home on these days and it’s the best, spent many mornings in just awful conditions on the interstate trying to get to work on time. It’s a miracle I was never that guy with a totaled car waiting for a tow.
My peak “why the **** am I doing this” moment was when I was coming up on a 6 lane section on the interstate where I saw multiple people just spinning in circles from black ice.
Not sure why this is the minority opinion. Possibly because proponents of 100% WFH insist that “remote work is the wave of the future and anyone who thinks otherwise is just holding society back.”
I’m not at all an extrovert and prefer to be introverted most of the time. I’m not middle management and I have a job that, by and large, can be done remotely. But working from home five days a week sucks. It’s great that everyone who loves it has employers that trust you to get the job done, but trust me when I say that if offices are abandoned, corporate surveillance for almost everyone with a normal office job is going to go through the roof because upper management will need data that proves their employees are just as productive out of the office as they are in the office.
What needs to happen FIRST (and what the demand for remote work has highlighted) is that we must normalize the concept of a three or four day work week. People are so stressed out of their minds because of the five day work week grind, and then you only get two days to recuperate. It’s no freaking wonder everyone wants to stay the hell away from work if given the chance.
My company at the moment is WFH 100% while COVID cases are still high. We were supposed to go back 3 days/week this month, but that has been postponed. To be honest, I'm actually actively job hunting because I would like to switch to 100% WFH. It also doesn't help that I've found out I'm one of the lowest paid people on my team even though I have as much or more experience than a lot of others in our group. Plus the owners of the building our company rents from raised the parking from $35/month to $80/month. I know some people don't think that is much but paying for parking in our city is not common.
I need the separation from work and personal life so the WFH thing is not for me. I have been working in the office during the pandemic and this last fall when 1 of my kids and my wife both got Covid I had to quarantine and WFH for a week and it drove me nuts with all the distractions going on in the house that after 3 days of it I took 2 days of PTO and got a Covid test to show that I was negative so I could go back into the office again. Some may be productive from home but others are not and while I can be productive from home I am not happy doing it and need that separation for my own mental health.
I do IT support and I have picked up on some tendencies on who is motivated to get back up and working as soon as possible and who will milk their IT issues for every minute they can get out of work. If someone has an issue we can't resolve remotely because their device failed or their VPN software is not letting them connect we have the option of offering them to come to the office to fix it or ship them a replacement device. The in person option is the quickest way to get back to work and those who take me up on that are usually are back up and running the same day or next day. Some that live just a short drive from the office and tell me they won't come to the office and want me to ship a replacement I have had some conveniently not be home for a delivery they were given a tracking number and know it is coming that requires a signature or they will receive it then not call into our help desk promptly to get setup. I have even had some instances where they stopped answering my phone calls and voice mails or lied to me that they didn't receive the shipment even though we have a signature on file that they did.
I'm pretty down the middle on the whole WFH vs in the office work model based on what I have seen personally in my job. I think there are some that are just fine working from home and are just as productive if not more productive that way. I also think there are some that abuse the crap out of it to try and get by doing the bare minimum and need to be in the office where they can be held accountable when they have peers or a manager nearby. Ultimately I think for larger companies the best operating model will be some kind of hybrid where employees can work 50% in the office and 50% remote with some flexibility that depending on their performance and what is going on at the time that they may get more day to WFH but still need to come into the office as needed for tasks or meetings that are more efficient in person.
I work in a office where there are some large customer service call centers and most of those call agents are working from home right now while new hires and others that can't work from home are still in the office. One manager told me he can't wait till we finally open up the office to return because over half his team has been significantly less productive at home than they were when they were in the office before the pandemic. These are probably lower paying entry level jobs so I'm sure there is not a lot of motivation to go above and beyond.
Depending on what kind of metrics companies are tracking I think there are scenarios where after the dust settles on the Covid pandemic there are going to be jobs that will need to come back into the office while others will stay at home in order to be the most productive.
My team at work has been remote since March 2020. It was fully U.S.-based. We have been adding more and more people in India (probably 2/3 of the team now?). I am surprised how much worse this has made work from home. The expectation is to be available for meetings at something like 7am every day and then the whole morning potentially. This kills the ability to do a flexible schedule. On top of that, there is limited time to really collaborate with the part of the team in India since we are typically in meetings during the small amount of working hour overlap. I kind of figure the U.S.-based part of our team is a dead man walking at this point anyway...
My previous employer had an interesting setup (pre-pandemic) where there were multiple offices and you could sort of choose which one to go to (at least our team operated this way) and they were super flexible on hours (like, it was okay to come in at noon or even later and work into the night). There also were lots of alternate places to work in each office where you didn't need to be at your desk. This was really nice for just changing scenery from time to time. If I really needed to focus on something, I could go someplace that was empty and where I was basically anonymous. I also could just go someplace else in the office for a change of scenery if I was in a rut. Thinking about it now, this somewhat blended the best parts of being in the office and working from home (except the commute was still there).
My previous employer had an interesting setup (pre-pandemic) where there were multiple offices and you could sort of choose which one to go to (at least our team operated this way) and they were super flexible on hours (like, it was okay to come in at noon or even later and work into the night). There also were lots of alternate places to work in each office where you didn't need to be at your desk. This was really nice for just changing scenery from time to time. If I really needed to focus on something, I could go someplace that was empty and where I was basically anonymous. I also could just go someplace else in the office for a change of scenery if I was in a rut. Thinking about it now, this somewhat blended the best parts of being in the office and working from home (except the commute was still there).