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Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#121

Post by piva00 »

aseerdbnarng wrote: post #120

I have two comments on this: a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer…

On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work.

It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym.

We are just trying to work from home now, not really living through a proper experience of that with all its benefits.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#122

Post by Natfan »

krageon wrote: post #47
sn_master wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.

> lonely single guys like me Just like every other human being you can socialise with the people around you (unless you live in the middle of the desert with nobody around, in which case I apologise). If that's pathologically impossible due to fear or something along those lines, you need therapy. Working from home isn't taking a toll on you, it's the problems that already existed but that you have ignored.

Sure, let me just pop down the pub.

Oh wait, everything is closed, because we're in a global pandemic.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

endymi0n wrote: post #53
el_benhameen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I “worked from home” for several years before covid, but I never worked exclusively at home until covid. I’d usually spend a few hours of a few days a week at a coffee shop, library or park, and not being able to do that during covid has definitely made remote work feel more isolating.

While there‘s truth to that, it doesn‘t bring home my own issue with WFH: It might be okay to much better for individual contributors, but it‘s harsh for me as a manager. Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone. This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but…

> I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.

Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.

What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).

But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.

Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.

> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.

I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.

For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

soneil wrote: post #46
turbinerneiter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being home alone in a tiny apartment, the desk placed next to my bed - that's not the home office I want to spend all my time in. With family and house, sure. But I literally don't have the real estate to make a nice home office. Mixed mode works very well tough, I can go to the office if I want and stay home if I want, so I mostly spend 4 days in the office, 1 at home.

I'm in a similar solution - 1br, 1 living room, 1 kitchen, 2 people - so while everyone's been showing off their fortress of solitude, I've spent 12 months at the kitchen table. Watching people on youtube build stylish and spacious home offices has become our new fantasy porn. I've heard a lot of people saying that companies are going to realise this means they can cut down on their property costs, but far, far fewer…

It's kind of a ratchet, possibly still underappreciated. If WFH was to become the norm, the rational thing for a person in your situation to do would be to find that 2-3br place in a location where it costs 1-1.5x your current rent. There's no point in living in cramped, overpriced apartment in the city, that was bought on the assumption that everyone living in it will be out at work/school for most of the day, when there's no work to go to! And once enough skilled workers move away, it might be tougher for the companies to bring them all back, reinforcing the pressure for WFH.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#125

Post by TeMPOraL »

piva00 wrote: post #121
aseerdbnarng wrote: post #120

I have two comments on this: a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer…

On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work. It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym. We are just…

> On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work.

Mine was too, and I really appreciated that they made a point of it. Lowered expectations led to lowered stress, people did their best without fear of negative consequences for decline in productivity - and, as it turned out after management reviewed the issue few months later, productivity did not suffer.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#126

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dx034 wrote: post #108
xvector wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting boundaries is your job , not your job’s job. Almost everyone I know works normal hours or less even during WFH. To be perfectly clear, this is true regardless of WFH. Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.

I disagree. The company has a responsibility to set rules around when it's ok to call people. Especially for junior employees it's very hard to decline calls from their managers late in the evening. This has become a bigger issue as all communication is via phone or computer. Before, a lot was via personal interaction which just wasn't possible once you left the office. Now, no one really knows if someone is working…

Get a work phone/computer. Make it clear that you won't be available outside of business hours unless it's actually an emergency.

My Dad resisted getting a mobile phone from his company from the mid eighties to the 2000's, on the principle that if they can't contact you, they'll figure it out themselves.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#127

Post by rkangel »

Is there a risk of wide adoption of home working becoming discriminatory against people with low incomes?

I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will be because they prefer to or need to live in a big city where it is affordable to very few.

If you're in that situation working from home is going to be a less pleasant, less attractive option. If a large portion of workplaces become remote-first are you going to be at a disadvantage if you prefer an office?

We're not there yet - there aren't many remote first companies, and most companies offer the option but I worry that what for a lot of us is a blessing will become a curse to some.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#128

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

kmlx wrote: post #94

i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home. so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why. since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure. what i foun…

I have been working from home for about 10 years. I have been a top performer in most companies I worked with, promotions, etc.

My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents).

Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me.

I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal.

So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#129

Post by alibarber »

llampx wrote: post #91
alibarber wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like taxation regimes have scrambled to keep up with the fact that you can order something from abroad and have ambiguity of where the sales tax will be applied - this is the next big thing about to happen: High skilled, (comparatively) rich, healthy knowledge workers will leave the place they reside, move somewhere like Dubai (no tax, few free public services - doesn't matter they're not going to need them) to…

I think only a fraction of people would move away from their home country just to gain some tax benefits. Doesn't seem like most people I talk to are interested in that.

It's not really the tax benefits. I'm using Dubai as an example because I can't think of anywhere else, but plenty of people move there because it has: Better weather, better housing, better roads, lower crime etc than a lot of, say Europe.

Of course, it also has a dark side such as no real social support net or anything (criminals, the sick and unemployed can just be deported), but the people moving there don't need that.

Yes of course, society, solidarity, etc etc - but in the past that model kind of worked because people didn't really have the ability to just pack up and go - whereas now they can just bring a laptop and their credit card and have a plane ticket, airbnb, leased car and new, and to them better, life with barely any effort.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#130

Post by Dma54rhs »

krageon wrote: post #47
sn_master wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.

> lonely single guys like me Just like every other human being you can socialise with the people around you (unless you live in the middle of the desert with nobody around, in which case I apologise). If that's pathologically impossible due to fear or something along those lines, you need therapy. Working from home isn't taking a toll on you, it's the problems that already existed but that you have ignored.

Where should he socialize? Everything's closed and some have even curfews and rules against socializing anyone outside their household? What options does it leave to a lonely guy like op? Pretty much none.
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