re: Is there a chance any of your companies switch to being more open about work at home?

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I love working from home and feel I'm much more productive. I have an office set up but I move around the house. Some days I work in the office, sometimes I work from the dining room table. Now I'm working from the couch.

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It's pretty difficult for me to do my job without multiple monitors. So I'm pretty much confined to my office desk all day.

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I'd hope to see a change in the way education works with more videos for students and all. But probably be more of the same

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Hard to justify the costs of excess administrative jobs if we switch to mostly remote education.

The social aspect of education can't be understated, either. Kids need to interact with someone other than family.

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It really depends on the length of the commute. I walk about 10 minutes to my office, and that's quite nice. If I had to drive 45 minutes+, I'd want to die.

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Walking + subway my commute is about 30-40 mins depending on train etc
I enjoy it

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One is saying their productivity overall is up

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That's what it's going to come down to. Some jobs really just require a computer, a connection, and a desk printer. Those can more easily be done wherever you want with similar productivity.

If you need specialized equipment like large format plotters, high speed scanners, high speed printers, large format printers, high speed intranets, etc., it might not be as easy to match butts in seats productivity.

I certainly think smart companies should be looking at their performance during these times and identifying ways they might be able to transition long-term when this is all over to cut their overhead costs while maintaining their productivity and quality of product.

An ancillary to this is that when working from home, you do incur increased household costs. YOU are paying for the electricity to run the computer, the internet to connect to your job, the water that you used to use at work. These may all seem like small costs but when you work from home, the company's savings by not providing an office space have to be replaced by funds that come out of the worker's pockets. Does everyone get a raise to help offset this or does the company just keep it? Are people that much happier working at home that they willingly accept those costs of doing business with no additional compensation?

It's an interesting and complex issue, really, if you get into it.

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MightyYat will jump into this thread in a few minutes and bash everyone who blames anything on NOLA. It’s not their fault that NOLA does NOLA things.

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I don’t blame Nola for anything

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It's pretty difficult for me to do my job without multiple monitors. So I'm pretty much confined to my office desk all day.

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Ahhh I assume we are in the same industry?
My firm came in and hooked me up with a couple more monitors for this

My company could easily do 100 percent WFH and productively has risen during this time we’ve been forced to WFH


But they just bought a massive building last year to house the entire company in one roof so i don’t think they will be switching from that. (Granted they survive depending how long this thing lasts of course)

My hope is they will atleast become more open to WFH option in a more limited capacity, say once a week or if certain circumstances, as right now they are very much against anyone WFH

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Is there a chance any of your companies switch to being more open about work at home?

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No, my company has never allowed anyone to ever work from home.

They were late to the party, but I was shocked they did it now. Still keeping a skeleton crew and I got to come in once a week.

While normally is think so, but there will be some structural problems that likelier prevent an honest assessment of WFH.


First, productivity is probably going to be way down due to a myriad of factors. Hard to say wfh will lead to status quo/increased productivity when the hard numbers won't bear that out.

2nd, I imagine most companies were not prepared for this at all and their remote access is slow as frick, leading to decision makers deciding that it was a negative.

I'm wfh now and our bandwith or whatever is hilariously small so people are taking forever to do simple things because our computers are running at like 10% normal speed with everyone on the network at once.

Why? I don't even use the laptop screen. It's no different than using a tower