Working From Home Megathread

Backstreet Moyes

We opened back up yesterday and it looks like a good few went in.

They have done it up really well and put in a games room and a small gym which will entice people to go back.

But we are allowed to be full time work from home which suits me.

I can see why for younger crowds or older without kids why the office is a nice option.

Personally for me the school is a 5 minute journey with work 20 minutes.

I can do the school run and start work at 9 versus rushing to work for half 9.

Then taking in the rushing and stress to do the pickup and drop off and get back for meetings.

For me between rushing and the stress of the school run I am certain my productivity would massively drop if I had to go back to the office.

Luckily my employer is not old school where sitting at a desk is more important than your staffs productivity.

I have got more promotions in the past two years than the 6 years before it.

I dont think I could ever go back more than one day a week and even at that I would be happy to never go back.

I have great friends in work and we socialise outside of work to catch up.

Young_gunner

From what I can observe, the great return to the office isn't really materialising as some envisaged / feared / hoped. Most offices seem to be <50% capacity on Tues - Thurs and <10% capacity on Mondays and Fridays.

Backstreet Moyes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119594065#Comment_119594065

Ye from our place I was talking to someone who goes in most days.

She said a few hundred went in the first day back and it's been 20 or less most days since, besides Fridays where people catch up for breakfast and head home at lunch time.

I was a bit surprised by how low the numbers are in our place although other places might be different.

Ohmeha

Seeing and hearing similar. Noticeable increase in numbers going back April and May, dropped off in June believed to be blamed on combination of brighter Summer weather, the Covid wave, increased transport costs or people thinking there is no point I'm able to do the exact same work at home. Monday's and Friday's some offices resembling lockdown attendance levels

Fuel costs and another expected covid wave will probably see even emptier offices this autumn/winter

Quin_Dub

Certainly in my office , people aren't going in to the office to "work" , they are going in to meet up and network.

The building nearest to me would nominally have a headcount of about 900-950 associated with it and in a typical week it's probably averaging 100-150 people per day at best.

What the company are doing though is having more regular "company days" where they organise for multiple events to take place on the same day - Company All-hands meeting , Guest speakers , Charity events etc. so that they can get a larger group onsite on the same day.

There's one next week and that will probably attract 500+ on the day.

Again , no one really there for actual day to day work , but in attendance to meet other staff etc.

Young_gunner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119615882#Comment_119615882

That sounds like the future of it to me.

Sunny Disposition

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119615882#Comment_119615882

This is the kind of thing that's happening a lot, large office buildings are unused a lot of the time. If there are shops, cafes, etc near that building they're really going to feel the pinch from that much of a drop in footfall. Suburban/rural alternatives are going to boom for the next few years at the very least, but town and city centres are going to be in trouble.

If an average person who worked at that building spent €5-7 per day close to their workplace, that's a drop in spending of several thousand per day in the streets nearby. Of course the money will be spent elsewhere, but businesses close to the building are clearly going to feel a pinch.

TaurenDruid

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119616253#Comment_119616253

Thing is, the money isn't being spent elsewhere to the same extent. Between morning coffee/breakfast and lunch, I spend €20 when I'm in the office. When I'm WFH, I'm not popping out to the shop for coffee or lunch, I'm just using what's in the larder/fridge, and "spending"/consuming maybe €2 worth.

A tin of granules costs what, €5 or €6, and makes 60-something mugs of coffee. The same would cost me €160 if I was to just buy from cafés. (That said, the local café to work always seems busy enough every morning - but there's a good mix of buildings in the area, it's not just bleak office block after office block).

The result for me is I've made decent savings over lockdown. Which I then spend in other ways. Currently, it seems, on fuel and energy bills.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119616474#Comment_119616474

Absolutely..

Working from home might add €20 to the weekly shop as you are buying more lunch items and more coffee/tea etc. but nothing in comparison to what you might be spending in the cafe near the office or in the office canteen etc.

But like you say that money isn't lost to the overall economy it's just being spent on other things.

Christy42

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119616253#Comment_119616253

It's weird that this stuff is never brought up when people give out that young people spend "too much" on Avocado toast or coffee to afford houses but as soon as they do stop spending it on these things there is suddenly a big issue for businesses!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119617780#Comment_119617780

It's always been a point that is made by the "back to the office" brigade, the local economies that grew up around office worker's lunchtime habits have taken a real hit with WFH, reducing footfall.

But is that our role in life, to provide business for others, we do need to live as well.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119618559#Comment_119618559

the business didn’t disappear…..it moved to the suburbs. City centre businesses need to adapt. It’s a nonsense argument in my view

Young_gunner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119618592#Comment_119618592

Completely ridiculous argument. if you follow the line of logic, we'd all still be using horses and carts.

Trade and money flows evolve over time. Those city centre cafes may just not be viable anymore, or perhaps city centres will evolve into places where people actually live rather than office blocks that are empty after 5pm and devoid of any life at the wkends.

downtheroad

Was told recently about one of the Big4 accounting firms in Dublin that has about 2,000 employees, they no longer open the canteen on Mondays or Fridays. Prior to Covid the canteen was absolutely packed.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119619168#Comment_119619168

Have you really never noticed how many people already do live in city centre apartments? Really???

Sunny Disposition

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119618559#Comment_119618559

No, of course it’s not anyones role to spend their money someplace that doesn’t suit them.

But the effect will obviously be huge. Online shopping has been lessening activity in central urban areas for years, now remote working will hit it even further.

Cities are going to be different places in 20 years, far fewer people will need to live in them. The internet has already reshaped society in lots of ways, the fact it allows remote work is another huge one. Rural areas are going to get the revitalisation that has been long sought, many urban areas could fall into serious decay if there’s not measures to prevent it.

TaurenDruid

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119619265#Comment_119619265

Far fewer people live in the city centre now than 80 years ago. Take a walk along George's Street, Henry Street, all the streets off them. All of those shops used to have people living on the first, second, third floors over the shops. Families, not singles or couples. That's all gone. Sure, there are lots of apartment blocks, filled with tiny 1- and 2-bed apartments. Most filled with people renting, desperately trying to save enough for a deposit to get them out of there. The quays and Gardiner Street aren't the examples of thriving apartment life you might think they are...

Young_gunner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119619265#Comment_119619265

But large swathes of the city centre are dull, lifeless and empty after 5pm.

City centres could become places where students and young, creative people actually live, not somewhere where middle-aged (like me) people are forced to spend hours travelling to, to do less work than they could do at home.

In the long-run, I believe it will lead to much more vibrant and creative cities. Have you seen the IFSC office blocks at the wkend? grim.

jimmybobbyschweiz

It goes to show there were too many offices compared to homes in the first place which is why the burbs thrived and town and city centres have been decimated. This is just change, it's neither all good or all bad, but it shows that our towns and cities need much higher density of working people living in them.

Sunny Disposition

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119620433#Comment_119620433

Am not an urban planning expert but I think the coming years could be very challenging in city centres in Ireland . Some of ye wouldn't remember the decades pre 90s, but inner cities would have had a very bad reputation, which has kind of been changed because of their gentrification.

There was an example earlier in the thread of an office building where 900 people used to work that 150 or so regularly attend now. Obviously, with staff not attending, the owners of the company or companies there are going to look to end their lease in the long term. With the rise of remote work, you'd have to think it'll be very hard to find a replacement. That's the kind of building that could be purposeless, and there must be loads of similiar cases in every urban area. Also, there are many city centre businesses who were based on serving office workers. With many of the office workers gone it'll be hard for them to survive, leading to more vacancies.

All of that is very negative, but on the plus side, the whole thing will help rural businesses and areas that were always at risk of depopulation. So at a national level it is swings and roundabouts. It probably comes at a good time when urban property prices were going off the scale.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119619941#Comment_119619941

Without drifting too far OT, commercial property owners are the greatest opposition to WHF due to the fact that it devalues their property, thus reducing the rent they can extract from tenants (coffee shops/convenience stores etc).

As for urban living, that an ecumenical matter! Environmental concerns will be trending towards more urban living with fewer living in the countryside and more suburban/urban accommodation being built and severe restrictions on rural development continuing to be applied. But it is looking like the "business hubs" are going to be a thing of the past.

Sunny Disposition

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119621205#Comment_119621205

This remote work is really upending a lot of business models alright. Commercial property has never faced a threat like this in my time in business. It was always assumed that if you wanted to run a large business in any industry you'd need offices, no one thought literally all of the office work could be done from people's homes. Anyone who doesn't own their own building has the potential for a huge cost saving by going fully or partially remote, and I can't see many of them passing it up and closing offices or downsizing.

I think the implications are really underestimated, population structure, social life, business practices, assumptions about all of these are going to be upended by remote work.

martingriff

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119553404#Comment_119553404

WTF I have 2 friends (both work in public service) out for serious reason for about a year and a half now both at work and working as hard as ever. What does the 2019 leave matter it could have been for something completely different.

TaurenDruid

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119621302#Comment_119621302

Don't know about the private sector, but in the public sector, you're only allowed a certain number of absences and a certain number of days' sick leave before you're put on half pay and then ultimately taken off the payroll. They look back over the previous four years to calculate the absences/days. They can and do discount 'one-off' things such as, e.g., a broken leg, and/or things that obviously won't recur.

kippy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119618592#Comment_119618592

While a portion of it has moved to the suburbs its definetly not as much of it as many would think.

Instead of having a concentrated area where many hundreds/thousands of people worked (and as such a concentrated footfall at lunch and other times these hundreds of people have dispersed to many different towns and villages where their presence isn't in high enough numbers to make a number of businesses viable. More so you see that people working from home tend not to want or indeed feel the need to leave the house for coffee/lunch etc etc

These two factors mean the same level of consumption isn't there and the business that used to have the higherfootfall end up closing as footfall is reduced and the footfall hasn't increased incough in many other locations to justify additional business.

It is a complicated scenario but there are and have been many knock on effects that are both pros' and cons'

It has bought life back into certain areas and the very existence of it as a solid long term option will make peoples decisions on where to live much more straight forward. It would be great to see young families settle in the west of Ireland again for example but there are other considerations that come into it also.

My own organisation mandated all staff back to the office since March this year and there are a large percentage of staff that could work from home 5 days a week without issue and another cohort who can't. The organisation have promised to publish a WFH policy this month - no sign of it yet but will be interesting to see what is in it.

The outflux of staff to other Civil/Public/Private sector organisations who have a WFH policy in place has been dramatic the past 6 months.

martingriff

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119621423#Comment_119621423

Your right I work in the civil service 92 rolling 4 years. I got hit by a car back in 2009 was out for 3 months the next 4 + years were hell anytime I was sick (as they the keep accruing). Income continuance protection is a god sent if your out long term

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119621205#Comment_119621205

Nothing wrong with Urban living if it's done right.

I suspect that we may see a number of the larger Office buildings re-purposing themselves as larger apartments etc.

Any planning request for conversions should force them to create "family sized" apartments with 3+ bedrooms along with the other facilities that families need like child care and schools.

We don't need lots more shoe-boxes in the city centre , we need to make it viable for longer term residency.

PaulJoseph22

Of course they want to ‘WFH’ rolling out of bed and in their night attire all day…..disgusting…..

WFH equates to cleaning the hovel and hanging out their y fronts all on their employers time, no wonder the country’s screwed.

Young_gunner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119624301#Comment_119624301

lol 😴

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119624301#Comment_119624301

Why would you need to wear anything other other that tidy whities?