If some widespread pestilence had compelled me to work from home 25 years ago for a long duration, how would I have reacted? With immense happiness, no doubt; for one single, stupid reason. Simply because all those absolutely redundant and most unproductive conference calls would have vapourised. Those where one logged in with a sickening feeling, could say one's name to mark presence pretty much like a kid does in the class room and then hit the `mute' button forthwith. Only to un-mute it after an hour, without any guilty feeling of deprivation of knowledge. Actually, there was an even chance that one would have unwittingly avoided some impairment of knowledge because one meticulously shunned the proceedings. This benefit usually accrues if certain types of people participated in the call and they invariably did. And all those no-content, all-trash short meetings that surfaced every hour in the office would have vanished as well.
Surprisingly many people whom I interviewed for this piece this week, expressed similar sentiments about the plethora of meetings, conference calls etc which prove to be routine impediments to a productive day at work. Nothing seems to have changed for the better despite the passage of time. Someone even told me that a few managers today keep the phone engaged for up to an hour at a stretch, just to get relief from annoying, unscheduled conference calls. It is another matter that Zoom and Skype have evolved to deny people a similar escape route. Perforce you have to make an appearance with a serious, thoughtful face on the screen and are obliged to pretend to listen to a truck load of bunkum, because you can be seen and are subject to scrutiny.
Come to think of it, WFH has been in vogue for many jobs and households are used to this for many years. With all those professions where the primary work is in the field or duties involved working the phone or computer all the time and the practitioner goes to an office for a few hours once a week to file some reports, show the face to the boss and convince he is alive, therefore deserves the next pay cheque. Such households are probably silently smirking about the new WFH regime, wondering what the heck is new about all this. Women in such homes are probably the best candidates to mentor and provide psychological succour to all those clueless and harassed wives of today, who find themselves suddenly married to their husbands' jobs also besides their husbands, full time at home. As my dear wife says, such wives deserve all the empathy because not only have they lost their freedom to air themselves a bit for shopping, pow-wow with friends and kitty parties, but are also coerced to baby-sit the husbands apart from real kids. Multiple jeopardy, at one go!! House work increases manifold because everyone is at home with heartless and hefty demands while women folk lose whatever little leeway they had.
Many respondents clearly preferred the current blissful state of affairs, WFH. No commute (big relief in almost all the cities), they said and lot more productive days because there are no disruptive meetings (mercifully, nobody to meet), no frequent chai-coffee breaks (one has to make one's own coffee or tea at home, so carefully avoided), no chit-chats and gossip (wives seldom entertain such trash). Even other folks at home tend to carefully side-step those who are staring into their computers all day with severely screwed up visages and have massive, forbidding head-phones attached in order to keep intruders away. Of course, it is entirely possible that the husbands are watching You-Tube clips or even a TV show, but then why fiddle with something if that can be left well alone for the common good? Other advantages are, there is no need to waste time in grooming yourself much, no pressure to dress up for office. Unkempt looks are fashionable now and also convey the message that you are working so hard from home, you do not have time for routine chores.
There are some problems, of course. Not everyone is equipped to handle work from home. Space, presence of too many suffering and therefore, volatile family members, inappropriate home location etc become irritants and issues, which prevent a good day's work being executed. The WFH candidate ends up ruffling too many feathers, with major long term consequences. Some managers find it tiresome to co-ordinate meetings (one should assume they are the unavoidable and useful ones, otherwise why would you go seeking a meeting?) with all the constraints, real and imaginary, of the participants. A few people believe there is always the risk of getting immersed in work and losing track of time, thereby work-time encroaching family-time. This is disastrous on a normal day, but with the wife already bristling under pressure due to WFH, such an outcome is not in the interests of the well-being of the home-worker.
Then there are the others who would not do WFH for a day more than dictated by the current stifling circumstances. They miss the workplace magic, the buzz in the ambience, the constant interaction with colleagues, the lunches and coffees with buddies etc. The extra perks that landed on their tables, like commute by Uber, dinners if you work beyond 8 pm and the like are powerful incentives to be at the work place, especially if you are a solitary reaper and no-one is waiting for you at home. For many such people, this working-inside-a-vacuum feeling is not very appetising.
A technology wizard rightly points out the serious danger of home wi-fi networks being vulnerable to malware which can infect the corporate networks; and, privacy of customer data can also be compromised in an unsupervised WFH environment. How far can companies go to keep an eye on the employee working from home or monitor him otherwise without the rest of the household going up in arms against what they would see as terrible intrusion into their homes?
In the midst of all this, I happen to stumble upon one curious case of an individual who was doing the reverse of WFH. She was cooking and sleeping in the office. Nothing to do with Covid. Her apartment was involved in a fire accident and she had to temporarily switch to some temporary residence to continue living. The organization was good enough to accommodate her needs and she was a Living At Work specimen for a few months. So, I realised that occasionally it works both ways. But imagine some hundred employees asking for accommodation and food at the office simultaneously for legitimate reasons.
As usual, the bottom line is if people working from home are going to be compensated for all the additional expenses they incur as well as the hardships they impose on the other family members in this process. A few companies have already commenced sending some moolah their way, but I am not sure that practice is going to be universal. If the money is good and people are happy, would companies start getting out of rentals and sell their furniture and equipment to settle for WFH permanently?? Moot point, as my dear wife decrees and no further debate on that, since she usually tends to be right.
