OT - Going back to the Office

I have been going into the office throughout this entire thing but have taken advantage of working from home twice per week so I don't have to spend gas money with the metro shut down for the most part. People here in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia metro area) are in hysterics though you will see folks like me still out taking care of business, getting exercise, enjoying the sun and getting out on the river and having BBQs, etc whle not wearing a mask, thank you very much.

Life hasn't changed much for me though it has for all of the people our governors forced out of business and to be unemployed - ruining their livelihoods.  The three big takes for me are 1. Politicians love being authoritarians and will delete your rights whenever given the chance 2. Too many people are easily scared into submission and 3. We don't need to rent a large office space to have everyone show up to work everyday. We can easily get by with 80% of our employees working remotely thereby saving tons of money.

This includes temperature taking.  We'll be doing antibody testing at all sites.

That's awesome. 

When I lived in Japan and SARS hit, that's what they were doing to help manage things.

I hope more organizations do this to help take the burden off of local government to do so.

I am a teacher, and we are finishing the year from home.  Unfortunately, there is a possibility we could start next school using some social distancing measures.  There are a lot of scheduling ideas that are being floated around right now.  They have also cut the school budget by a great deal in the state, so no one is sure what the year is going to look like.  My hope is some company takes advantage of this time and creates quality computer programs that allow students to work on topics at their ability, and we no longer have to worry about end of year standardized tests.   

I work in a government job - software Admin/support on a vendor software product.  

We do not currently have a return date.  I go to the office about once or twice a month now.  I share a small office and I am about 4 feet from my co-worker.  Governments do not spend on employees.  I have a new chair, but my desk is from the 1970's.

This should be interesting because my management has always been VERY against WFH.  I am hoping we get one day a week in the future.  I may switch to 4 10 hour days.  That would mean only 3 days a week in the office.     

I work in channel partner management for a manufacturer. I was already partially remote before this and in discussions to go remote full-time eventually..so this really only got me something I had already been asking for.

My company has been able to continue operating 100% as it's deemed critical by federal and state definitions, but naturally we've been affected by supply chain issues and the fact that a lot of industrial and commercial projects got put on ice during this crisis. But I can feel business activity has been increasing again over the last week or two.

In terms of how the trend of working remote will affect our business? Our equipment is used in commercial buildings, but also factories, government buildings, warehouses, educational institutions, transportation facilities, research facilities and large residential developments. So while a reduction in commercial building usage will affect us, there's always going to be many other areas where our stuff is needed. Also, I suspect most places will still need a skeleton physical presence and whether you have 5 or 500 people working in an office, you need our stuff.

I am one of the lucky ones...downsized last summer with a buyout package.

Prior to that I worked at home for about 8 years managing institutional stock portfolios for a company in another state.  Even though the job is very intensive, I could usually get it done during a 40-hour week due to the greater productivity resulting from a laser focus on the actual job, with no commute, no face to face meetings, no office cooler chit chat, no long lunches with colleagues, little time spent on office politics, and as much information as possible (most) acquired via the internet rather than meetings or phone calls... occasionally I would get on a plane to visit hq or clients.

At the same time, there were about 25 people doing essentially the same job together on a similar product at headquarters.  Constant meetings, phone calls, socializing, lunches...

Even though performance was actually better, the drawback was that clients and consultants were reluctant to commit money because they were  conditioned to the way 'everybody does it' with the antiquated 'army of in-house analysts' model of Wall Street...bigger is better, safety in numbers, the wisdom of committees...plus, it is politically safer, because no one will criticize you for selecting a large, brand name manager, even if performance turns out to be mediocre.

It will be interesting to see if attitudes change now that working at home is so much more commonplace.

I work in Finance for one of the largest companies in the world and we were just told yesterday that Finance will be WFH indefinitely. We will be the last group to be brought back to the office and it could be more than a year. They need to take desks out to make space in the offices so they decided that Finance, Accounting, HR and other Administrative desks would be removed. So pretty much anything that isn't Operations related will be working from home indefinitely. This is fine by me as long as the kids go back to school in the fall. If they don't, then I may lose my mind

I've been going in to the office every day, but there's only a few of us, and we all have separate offices. We also have field crews that go out and survey every day then return to the office. At a certain point we'll have to face opening up again and whatever the fallout of that will be, but I think the workplace and schools actually have a smaller chance of spreading anything than grocery stores and restaurant dining rooms. Here in texas a few coworkers went out for lunch for the first time today, and I thought that was risky. Grocery stores have pretty routine cleaning patterns down, now, but restaurants can have just as many random people coming in and out quickly, and will likely have varied cleaning practices and disciplines. Work and schools have the same people coming in from the same groups every day, but restaurants and grocery stores have random people from a broad selection of groups comingling. 

I have been going to the office 1-2x/week for items that have to be reviewed in person.
I’m changing jobs, and my new boss is old school. He is of the mentality that you should be at your desk, on site, doing your work. The reality is about 40% of this new job can be done from home. But he’s come out and said straight up that he thinks the job is too hands on to not be on site all the time. He’s wrong, but I don’t get to decide that. Kinda sucks cuz it’s a long commute. 

I'm actually starting a new job in early June and they've already told me all of my stuff will be mailed to me and then I'll just jump onto calls as necessary.  It's basically the same as my current job in software development so I don't think the transition will be hard, and they don't foresee opening the office any time soon.

All that said, I'll never be fully efficient until my two grade-school age kids have somewhere to go.  We have two offices in the house but the kids can't be left alone and, frankly, I feel like I should be there to help them distance learn as much as they can.  I know the plans are to open schools last but until they do, about 35-40% of the work force is going to be juggling these competing demands and that's going to be tough on a lot of people.  Maybe that makes WFH easier for some but I have already had to speak up a couple of times in meetings that while it may be fun to call an impromptu meeting at 12:15 to talk about some new feature, people with kids are likely making meals, cleaning up, changing diapers/putting kids down for naps, etc.  Nobody has pushed back yet but at some point I assume there will be.

I'm an essential federal employee in Kansas, so I've been at work in an office everyday. Our workstations are far enough apart. Some where masks and some don't. There are extra cleaning duties.

I used to work for vandelay industries before covid.  Vandelay industries was a major player in the importing exporting industry.  But due to covid and the inability to import, I am now fat bald unemployed and live with my parents....

Go back to the office. You probably won't get infected. Even if so, you are unlikely to do serious harm to yourself or others.

Sounds like a good plan once cases are down

I work for one of the telecom megacorps. They are going to start re-opening offices soon, but if your job can be done from home, they want you to stay at home for now. So I have no idea when I'll be going back in. We have open floorplan so that won't help the situation. 

Pre-Covid, we had no telecommute policy, but my boss let us do it once a week.  Our CFO did say he doesn't expect full-time WFH in the long-term. 

I'm back in the office after 6 weeks remote. The first two days were really creepy. I know I can do everything from home now so I don't have to worry about that but as others have said when new people come into the office or in to employment they need to be trained visually by somebody there that can answer their questions and show them methodologies. You can't do that virtually I'm sorry. We had to let go one of our relatively new employees who was smart as a whip but without the constant daily sitting with someone to show them systems, she couldn't progress and made critical errors. It wasn't fair to anyone. Certainly not our customers. So that's what this is taught me. Do you need a whole office to train someone? Probably not but you are still going to have to have that interaction. Nothing will ever be virtual all the time. People need to be together at least for for a period of time. There are no simulators for real life.