So how has everyone coped with Covid 19? Many people I know have just carried on as they did prior, and in fact, have come out better for not having to travel to work each day. There are many though, who have suffered hugely during the shutdowns. For example, many retail workers were stood down with no notice and very little reserves.
As an IT support person, you would think that working from home would be a no-brainer for me but in my case it was more important to attend the office than ever. This was not because I needed to necessarily be at the office, but more because working at home with 3 other people would have driven me nuts.
I am generally the only person in the office most of the time, as my manager spends most of his time on the road or working from home. During Covid this was even more so, as his wife is classified as "At risk".
The upside is that my office is a fairly safe place from which to work.
So during the fairly benign shutdown that WA had, I was still driving into work and visiting those clients that were still open. The number of clients was very small as most of them are in industries that were declared non-essential. By and large most of my work was assisting clients get their remote access working and setting them up to remotely access systems required for them to work from home.
Some clients just decided to shut the doors and wait it out, taking the time as an enforced "staycation", and catching up with home maintenance. Others decided they just had to be online every day and for these, we worked to ensure that the home working environment was as usable as possible. In most cases this was fairly simple to achieve and we were happy to assist both via remote control and via telephone.
One thing that has come out of the enforced stay at home orders, is that the ability of staff to work from home and be productive has been proven once and for all, and only the meanest spirited managers have failed to see the benefits in keeping staff happy. For many companies, this is a watershed moment, realising that they can still have a company that is cohesive and producing a great product without having to have huge premises in hugely expensive areas. It also means that for many employees, they can now claim their internet service and home office as a tax deduction, whilst saving both fuel and servicing of their vehicles.
There are many who still require the immediacy of working with others and others for whom the day is not complete without human interaction but for many IT staff, the ability to avoid people interactions is a bonus.
Another thing that has been highlighted is the need for a top notch internet service to all homes. Labour had the right idea when they first kicked off the NBN of making sure that the infrastructure used was the best technology available at the time and able to be easily upgraded on the fly. I still curse the people who voted for the LNP and their MTM (multi technology mix) as it was an excuse to cut the guts out of a project that I likened to the Snowy River scheme. By allowing NBN to devolve to a lowest common factor, we now have suburbs divided by the haves and have nots, when it comes to fibre services. If nothing else covid has forced the upgrade of FTTN to FTTP to be accelerated although I still have not heard that they are intending to do this in our neighbourhood, even though it was announced last year.
When I first started this blog post, I thought that 2020 would be it and that by 2022 we would be back to normal. However we are finally back to a new "normal", one that requires masks whenever meeting people and today was the first day that fully vaccinated people can come in from overseas or interstate without having to quarantine. They still need a G2G pass and to have had a negative test before boarding the plane.
So I have just reviewed this and note that we are now in a situation with >9000 new infections per day, although with the slightly more benign Omicron version
So the ability to work from home is still a necessity for many people.
--Update--
Unfortunately, many employers have seen this as a way for them to get unpaid overtime from staff, and immediacy when dealing with issues, so it is imperative that we observe the recently passed "right to disconnect" laws that allow staff to say no when asked to do out of hours work. Just because I carry a work phone, does not mean I am oncall 24/7 unless you are going to pay for that privilege.
