#976

And this is a totally fair point - the other day I was hosting an event on some research into how people found wfh during the spring lockdown, and one of the things I brought up was that during the heatwave in summer 2018 going to the lovely climate controlled office was really important to me because I was living in a tiny room in a shared house and it was unbearable in 30c+ heat.

I don’t think we should ever be 100% wfh because of stuff like this. And I don’t think we will. But at then same time, if I hadn’t been tied to going into our London office every day, would I even have been living in a tiny room in a shared house next to a main road? Proooooobably not.

1 Like
#977

Flagged

This is hate speech

#978

Someone’s going to end up living there though. If more people are wfh, you’ll probably get people moving to parts of the country where they can get more space for their money, but there’s always going to be a lowest tier of the most poorly paid “office” workers who live in cramped, shitty accommodation somewhere, because it’s there and because people need homes.

#979

Sure; I think it’s worth me saying that I suspect those that offer the worst pay and the worst conditions are going to be the least likely to jump on the wfh bandwagon. I can’t imagine eg the market research call centre I used to work at doing this at all. I expect they’ll go right back to normal, because their business model is based on breathing down the necks of their employees and it doesn’t work otherwise.

Which isn’t great obviously, but that’s a much wider labour issue.

#980

Companies don’t generally take out short term leases for office spaces, do they? So it’s not like people can just close up the office or downsize it come January.

It’s also a bit more of a longer term issue with so many other factors. For example, I couldn’t imagine being a 20 year old at a first time office job. You learn a lot from in-person interactions with people and learning the world of work is probably going to be near on impossible virtually.

I don’t particularly want to move out of London but I don’t feel entirely safe hedging all my bets against never going to the office again. If your employer did say that you had to work from the office and now your commute is 10 x longer due to moving out of London, that’s going to be much worse.

2 Likes
#982

No - leases tend to be long. But commercial landlords usually own large amounts of space, and they’re focused on the long-term. I imagine a lot will be looking at how they can use their buildings even if they’re tenanted right now - can they be repurposed, can they be redeveloped, working with willing tenants looking to downsize will be a large part of that. Like fundamentally these people will always make money and if they have to switch up their business model to do so they absolutely will. They’re very good at that.

Yes, this is a really good point. I don’t necessarily have an answer to this or how this would work in future. Like I’ve said though, I don’t think we’re going to be totally wfh forever. It’ll just be more of a choice.

#983

Or a tautology.

#984

the obvious answer to @meowington’s last point is that the 20 year old would be learning a new normal, learning a new world of work and all the old farts (like myself) would have to relearn/unlearn

but who knows - before yesterday’s vaccine chat I’d imagine that a lot of business were drawing up 3-5 year covid impact plans and might still be committed to them. Which links back to the first point … the place where I work has about half the office space on our floor. Right now there are 6-10 people max who have to be in the office each day, in a space that would normally have 70 people there at any given time, maybe 100 at peak time. There are plenty of other smaller office spaces available in the building and the offices we have are a huge cost. Wouldn’t be surprised if we downsized quite significantly

1 Like
#985

£1bn write off

#986

Some companies own their office space, so they’re not going to have much luck finding a buyer or tenant right now.

I agree with this. Working from home works well for people who have a quiet space in their house to work, plus adequate social connections in their personal life, plus, as you said, enough workplace experience to know what’s expected of them.

If you’re in a shared house or small flat, if you’re new to work, or if you’ve got small kids at home, working at home can be a nightmare or not even an option. And of course, if you’re in an abusive relationship or other unsafe living environment, it might be actively dangerous.

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#987

Typical length in cities (so where people have the longest commutes and are most likely to use public transport) is about 3 years, and within that, there’s usually about a year of searching and negotiations, so even firms who are tied into a particular office until spring 2023 will be thinking about what they want to do beyond that.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I do think that the changes forced by Covid have broken through a lot of the latent resistance to remote and flexible working, and I don’t think we’ll ever see city centre offices returning to anywhere near the levels of occupation that we were seeing in February.

That has huge implications for things like land use, local facilities and whether certain places just will not be able to trip over the threshold of gaining from the benefits of agglomeration. Sure, you might be able to work as productively at home doing your office-based job, but the other benefits of cities (eg cultural, shared networks) might end up becoming untenable if so many people have relocated.

I think that there are great benefits to be had if we shift to a ‘15-minute city’ model of living, but there’s a danger that it’ll instead just turn into a reversal of the Great Inversion, and people will move out to clone town, low-density car-oriented hinterlands.

1 Like
#988

WFH in UK hours while in a different timezone 4 hours behind is wild and confusing. It’s only 10am but I’ve already had two breakfasts and am about to eat some pizza as a late lunch.

Not complaining though, this is my desk

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7 Likes
#989

We had a guy who for a while was wfh in Colorado but had an arrangement to mostly keep local time, so was 7(I think?) hrs behind. He’d just often get dumped with urgent stuff that came in late on that nobody could handle, which I’m sure he loved :smiley:

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#990

Where are you?

#991

lol

6 Likes
#992

I was contemplating doing something like this for the bleaker months of Winter II in the UK. Head to somewhere within an hour or two of GMT and rent a flat or room somewhere warm and chill out there. Can’t see why it would be a problem.

2 Likes
#993

Barbs

#995

Might come back and do it at some point. Met a guy who offered us a house for £800pm.

1 Like
#996

This thread inspired the last half hour of wfh - searching for a nice house in the countryside for the same price as we could get for our flat

it’s both encouraging and soul crushing

#997

One of my colleagues was on holiday in Spain when lockdown came in and got stuck there for three or four months. We use google suite so he was able to keep up with work fine. My manager is Swedish and due to having some work done in her house and being worried about not being able to see family over christmas, she got permission to take 3 weeks working from her dad’s place in Malmo.

Hope they keep this energy going forwards.