Are a lot of you working from home?

12 comments

1. most people i know are back to the office/ workplace. For myself im stuck at home atm, but i dont have a job since ive had finals until this week, so most things here in Germany are similar to how they were before.!

2. I could theoretically work from home but honestly I don’t get why anybody would like that. I mean, I see so many posts about the advantages, but they are just not for me.

   When I am at home I cannot concentrate at all, I end up working maybe one hour and the rest I am just doing household chores or trying to force myself to concentrate. Also the loneliness is kinda killing me and whereas in the office I have no problems calling people I absolutely dread it if I have to do it at home.

   So I always tried to be as much as possible at work and I am happy WFH finally ended here.

3. I work in IT and even though there’s no longer official recommendation to work from home most of my colleagues are still primarily working from home. For my team it wouldn’t really make sense to force people to go into office since my team is already divided into two different countries and most of the meetings are held through Teams regardless if we are in the office or not.

   I personally go to office maybe once or twice a week mostly to socialize with my colleagues and have a lunch together. There are more people there than during darkest covid times but way less than before pandemic.

4. My company is back to in office work, but they’ve decided that in the future we can work from home as much as we want because it worked so well for us. Personally I’m not going back again and I would quit my job over that. It’s just so much nicer to work from home.

   But I think my situation is not so common. What I see most often among people I know is working partially from home and partially from the office. So anywhere from 1-4 days a week at home.

5. Most people with an office job that I know are still able to work from home. Some companies don’t like it that much and they are allowed only a couple of days per month. Other companies, typically the bigger multinationals, allow and encourage a more balanced schedule.

   I will have 12 days from home per month forever, even if Covid completely disappears. My girlfriend has a similar agreement with 40-50% of days from home. We both work in multinational companies.

6. I think I only worked from home for a couple of months during 2020, that was about it, even though I do have an office job! However I did mostly work alone or with at most 2 other people in the office during 2020.

   In 2021 I got another job, working in a larger office, more people around, not a lot of people were working from home, the ones that did were the ones that had the longest commute and who would have been working from home either way, pandemic or not!

   The last COVID restrictions got lifted back in February but most people had returned to in-office work even before then. So most of (*but not all*) the people who are working from home today are people that would have been working from home anyway.

7. So I have a colleague who’s in a battle with our employer (CNRS) as CNRS is mandating that you can only work from home for a maximum of 3 days a week, even though he has very little reason to come into the office and he’d prefer to live with his girlfriend on the other side of the country. CNRS returned more or less to business as usual with regards to WFH rules around the end of last year, with a brief interlude in January/February during the Omicron wave. In practice, it’s up to my boss to enforce that rule, and he doesn’t. And basically the only way there might be an issue if you worked from home ‘illegally’ is if you have an accident at work.

   I’m personally very happy not to have to work from home, it got quite lonely and I ended up being far less productive. I’m for people having the *choice* to WFH on a semi-permanent basis, but I also don’t want it to be the *rule*.

8. I’m a pharmacist, so I can’t work from home. From October 2020 to March 2021 I’ve been doing internship in one pharmacy (which I didn’t get any money for as it’s a part of my studies, lol) and from May 2021 I’ve been working as a licensed pharmacist.

   I’ve heard that where I work right now late in 2020 a few people had to stay at home because of quarantine, so out of 7 people only 4 of them worked at that time, and because of that the opening hours changed from 13 hours to only 8 hours.

9. It varies a lot depending on the type of work you do.

   I work in IT, in London, and the vast majority of the company are still working from home most of the time. On the rare occasions I go in to the office there will be at most a quarter of the desks full, usually much fewer.

   However, on those few trips I do in to the office I’m noticing that the trains are getting busier and busier though, almost back to what they were like before Covid. Presumably a lot of other people are going back towards their old routines.

10. We have to go to the office 5 days per month starting this month and no one wants to. Our global policy comes from the CEO who is American and very keen on having people back in the office, but my bosses in Poland think it’s useless and a waste of employees’ time and money.

11. I work for an investment bank and they have determined that we will go two days to the office and the rest we work at home.
    To me is absolutely great, i love it. I hope they reduce it to just one day at the office.

    I don’t think that fully remote would work for me. There are certain parts of my job that I prefer to do in person, but one day a week would be enough

12. A lot of companies for the last 6 months or so have been introducing flexible systems, where you only have to work a set number of days in the office per week (often 1-2, but sometimes more), often with the freedom to choose which day that is.

    That said, as with everything there’s a mix. The company I just left felt no urgency at all to get people back in, so most staff were entirely WFH. In no small part this was considered to be because they are massive penny pinchers and they were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of not paying office rent any more. The company I’ve just joined, on the other hand, is a premium service company based in a prestigious part of London and has recently ordered all employees to be 100% office based – but then they also still insist on staff wearing smart trousers, shirts and leather shoes etc at all times. (Or at any rate, that’s the male dress code. The women in the office can largely wear whatever they choose.)