How effectively Can you WFH

[duchy]

Unlike many people here my job is permanent work from home and I’ve done it for over a decade.
We already had fairly strict rules in place to ensure any one working from home sounded professional to customers and kid or any other domestic noise isn’t acceptable and certainly not impacting on meetings .The staff we’ve moved across to WFH follow the same regime .

I’m seeing posts implying you don’t need to be professional working from home that kid noise, interruptions etc are acceptable. Do employers really feel that way ? Could or would you want to WFH permanently ? I know some staff thought we had it cushy before they had to do it and are discovering new challenges that they had never even considered before !
How is it for you ?

[caro]

I often worked from home before all this happened. It's actually harder for me now because of having to homeschool/look after a 7 and 8 at the same time. Work has actually been really busy, so I feel very much under pressure doing far more than I usually do.

[Megandllsmum]

I'm a shop worker so furloughed but my OH is working from home at minute and he's finding it easier than he thought he would, I'm finding it harder him being at home than he is but I've adapted to that now too, he's hoping when things are back to normal he can negotiate working from home part of the week. He does have to do a few conference calls my job in that is keeping the dogs quiet, to be fair he's heard kids chattering and dogs barking in background of other people's calls and they make a joke of it.

[Mexy02]

For us sending everyone home in a 48 hr period without the correct set up guidance and equipment ( which has been rolled out since) then an employer cannot expect a fully professional atmosphere . Most of us with kids were thrown into this situation and expected to be teachers as well as parents , entertainers , food gatherers and workers . This is certainly not a normal wfh experience . If only the nations wifi could work properly might be a start !

[justacey]

I'm struggling to work from home with SussexFamily's quizzes distracting me

I prefer the interactions working in an office with a team I really like. There's no chatting over making a cup of tea when you are on your own.

After 5 weeks of wfh, we've had a wellbeing leaflet saying take plenty of micro breaks including checking your personal phone (so I'm allowed to do the quizzes haha)

[duchy]

Originally Posted by Mexy02

For us sending everyone home in a 48 hr period without the correct set up guidance and equipment ( which has been rolled out since) then an employer cannot expect a fully professional atmosphere . Most of us with kids were thrown into this situation and expected to be teachers as well as parents , entertainers , food gatherers and workers . This is certainly not a normal wfh experience . If only the nations wifi could work properly might be a start !

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The broadband infrastructure has held up extremely well. NI has a big outage last week and of course Virgin had problems this week but overall it has held up very well and no capacity issues. An awful lot of people though have wireless that could be set up better with a few tweaks and assume it’s the pressure on the system when it actually isn’t !
I get a lot of calls about this, sometimes it’s an old hub , sometimes it’s too many devices all trying to access really limited broadband (had one with 18 devices on a 3 meg connection the last week ) , sometimes a line fault that slows the speed and is easily fixed and sometimes wireless settings. Don’t struggle on , talk to your broadband provider ! You may be suffering for no reason.

[Beth_Disney]

I've worked from home for the past five years and applied for the job knowing that it would be home based. I have a home office with a proper office style set up to allow me to do work comfortably. I applied for the job knowing that home working would have certain expectations (and benefits) and it suits me.

The big difference now is that people are working from home and they didn't choose to do that; they may not have the space, they may have other distractions at home, flat-mates, parents, children, rubbish wifi connection etc. Throw children not being at school into the mix and it's hard. Really hard.

My friend has a 2 year old and is working 3 days a week from home, looking after her daughter, cooking, cleaning, washing etc. and her husband isn't really much help as he's locked himself into the spare bedroom to work so he's not distracted!

We have more people in our organisation working from home than normal as the office staff are at home. We've had e-learning modules to do on WFH health and safety and mental health. We've had to do a WFH risk assessment. And we're having more frequent conference calls, including a weekly all staff virtual 'water cooler meeting' with the big boss.

[baggers]

Both my husband and I are working from home full time now. Previously we worked from home 1 or 2 days a week. Before we weren’t allowed to have children at home and people would expect no background noise on calls etc. With everyone working from home and children being at home it is now accepted that you might have background noise or interruptions. It has also helped people to reassess what the working day looks like. It doesn’t need to be a solid 8 or 9 hours, we can work differently to suit our needs but also achieving what the business needs from us. I work for a large retailer and even our Exec have the same challenges with children etc. I think it has given us a more relaxed feeling but we are still achieving what we need to. I can’t wait to get back into the office though and have a different environment to work in. I don’t expect things to go back to how they were before and we will spend more time away from the office and approach the working day differently.

[BucksBugsy]

Going back to the OP I would hope a lot of employers recognise that these are very unusual times and although when we WFH we try out best to to cut out other noise it's not always possible.

I was on a conf call earlier this week when the customer I was talking to was trying to keep their baby and dogs quiet and they were finding it a struggle !

[RachaelC]

Similar to everyone else, the usual rule is that it can’t be combined with childcare, but the rule book has been thrown out with Covid and schools/nurseries closed.

I have many colleagues juggling both and my company has been very understanding about it. I am fortunate that I am not having to look after my children at the same time, but they do sometimes pop into my “office” when I’m on a video call.