Read more.And what are they doing to keep you safe?
Read more.And what are they doing to keep you safe?
Basically shut the office, been in once to pick up some gear since mid march and no one else was on prem at the time.
They are going to review the situation end of January 2021 so home working till at least then.
One of the lucky ones I guess.
I work from home, alone, so...
I do plan to do some upgrades but that was on the cards with or without lockdown, just more towards the end of this year at the earliest, stock issues might be the main delay now lol.
My workplace has made a lot of changes with respect to distancing & cleaning, but no tech changes. We've had to buy headsets for videoconferencing ourselves and bill work for them because the IT depart seems unable to get hold of any.
The office I work in has been fully upgraded with A4 printed signs that point people in which direction they should walk, with a few portable workmen barriers to assist people to know which why they should be walking. Generally every other desk has a sign on saying out of use. There is some hand sanitiser scattered around the place. There was talk of a post-it note system to use the toilets, but I'm not sure what got implemented, I've generally avoided being on site for more than a couple of hours in the last six months.
Only about four or five people are going into the office because for whatever reason (more convenient to work in the office, some tasks occasionally need to be performed on site). It's a large site that is generally empty. Ironically it's been left to rot over the last few years and they finally caved and started to invest in the building, we now have working heating!
Our main operational call-centre is a bit different, they're more eager to keep people on site because who can make sure that the staff are doing their job if they're at home? As a result, they've had to close a couple of times for deep cleans as people catch covid.
From a technology perspective, there has been a reluctant roll-out of teams outside a few select IT people. Management are doing their best to avoid using it on principle.
The board has adopted home-working as a goal (which was previously outlawed pretty much entirely), but 3 months after this revelation, nothing has been actioned by individual companies and directors.
In summary, everybody has changed and yet nothing has.
As always, my work has been spamming the heck out of our email inboxes, with the latest news on what they're doing, what teh new regulations are, what the government said about the new regulations, what the CEO/HR/H&S Dept said about what the government said about the new regulations, what we're all doing about the new regulations, etc etc etc....
It's like a constant Twitterfeed, but with the added actual Twitterfeed of customers praising, condemning and outright damning us to hell and back, over all this Covid stuff.
Tech was basically more of the laptops we were in the process of issuing, along with several upgrades to the network and VPN system (which inevitably fail).
There's a whole bunch of stuff put in all the offices, like the stuff Dashers has, but with very little footfall as we're mostly WFH wherever possible.
I'm split between WFH, and field/site visits which never take me within 100yds of another human, unless they want to get run over by a train or drowned in raw sewage.
We get PPE as a matter of course, so this is just costing you bill-payers the company more money due to the Covid-inflated prices.
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Originally Posted by Mark Tyson
Pity the poor IT support staff having to deal with numpties and requiring full PPE clothed callouts because the internet is broken.
Well, as I'm all but fully retired, and worked from home for the last .... lots of .... years anyway, my "workplace" is now my den/media room/mancave, which is to say, exactly as it was 20 years ago, with newer gear in it.
Upgrades? Amazon Echo and remote lighting, if that counts?
Thought not.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Thinking back on my comments a bit for the technology perspective, it's quite interesting for a company that didn't like home-working. We already have VPN solutions and remote desktop services, all our staff work on terminal servers. Phone system has been VOIP since the early days and whilst we used physical phones on desks, they work over VPNs or we can just deploy softphones. The only thing we did was buy up stocks of laptops at the start and increased our VPN licensing.
So like Saracen, might home work place has changed the most!
I put a splash of paint on one of the walls and switched out an Argos special bookshelf to some proper wooden wall-mounted shelves. I've got a stack of carpet tiles to put down to replace the carpet that isn't doing too well under my increased chair usage.
I was already working a bit from home before so I invested in a second-hand aeron chair, a 40" monitor and an Ergodox keyboard. I was kind of well prepared when lockdown hit. A lot of my colleagues are working on kitchen tables and what not, which isn't great.
My local office, about a 100 people, is shut since the 17th March. We're a software company so everyone is working from home, a small number of support staff go in on odd days. We'd already started looking at hot desking so everyone had laptops prior to this, along with headsets and phone and video conferencing software.
Some servers and services have been opened up so we don't need to be connected to the VPN, or works laptop, to access them since this began.
Currently the talk is about going back to the office in July, on some sort of rota.
Offices in other countries are being remodelled to allow people to keep their distance and staff have returned, in very small numbers, to some of the regional Head offices.
Not me as I'm retired but my wife who works in a tech dept of a university has seen a huge investment in online teaching equipment.
While no doubt utterly necessary, given Covid, Ii can't help but feel sorry for those going through a Uni experience where " online learning" is a major component.
My experience, admittedly in the '70s, was that the whole inu experience, both in character development and contacts made, was as important (if not more) than the actual academic side, which was effectively (for me) little more than a key that opened the door to my first job. Granted, if someone's degree is directly supporting their chosen career (medical, physicist, engineering, etc) it will be far more relevant, but in my case, entry into Chartered Accountancy pretty much required a degree (and a decent one) but they didn't much care what the subject matter was. My lot had everything from pure maths to zoology, to geography and classic languages, from psychology to modern art and economics to engineering.
If my degree had been largely "online" I would wonder why I bothered being on campus and not just at home doing Open Uni (while working, and earning) and why I was incurring the colossal fees kids do today. I would certainly be thinking long and hard (and far harder than I did) about whether I wanted to do a degree at all given that, in academic terms, it unblocked that first door and did beggar all good beyond that, to this day. If I had known then what I know now, and given that it turned out I hated accountancy) I probably wouldn't have bothered with Uni at all.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
No one there. My boss went for shufti and said it looks like the opening scenes of 28 days later.
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
No layovers in China (Yay) or Hong Kong (Boo). Premium hazard pay for many countries. Access to testing at any time. Company paid hotels available during time off to avoid exposing family. Cleaning procedures.
Havent been into the office since March, no talks of going back at all and doesn't look likely until March at the earliest.
Within a couple weeks they had arranged a expenses process for people to purchase home office equipment and there have been numerous changes in process to help those who can work from home to continue to do so.
Been genuinely impressed with how they've dealt with the process tbh.
I work at B&Q ...... we still use pc's that are slower than a bloody abacas
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