I was doing a casual survey of around 40-50 colleagues and friends for last 2-3 weeks on how their WFH is going on.
The Good
1. Be with family and have family food. It is raining heavily and I just had a steaming hot idly, priceless! The food variety never ends and with YouTube, I can see that most of my friends and colleagues have become "Master Chefs". Hope they will not become perfectionist like Gordon Ramsey and shout once we go back to office "Unbelievable, your application is half baked and mushy. can I see the code".
![Uncontrollable Laughter](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/images/smilies/uncontrollable laughter.png)
2. T-I-M-E, there is lot of it and people spend that on various activities like work, reskilling , Netflix , YouTube etc etc and the best one “peacefully sleeping”. Team-bhp can be opened any time without worrying about someone peeking at your screen and thinking “when will this guy work”.
3. People have realized the value of things which were taken for granted. I see some careless blokes posting about "conserving nature" , "amount of work spouse / mother has at home once I go to office" etc.
4. Long forgotten habit of sunset prayers/rituals are back.
The bad
1. Auto enthusiast miss driving to office though majority of them would prefer a long drive over cramped city roads wasting their time.
2. The team meetings are bit weird. While looking at the screen and talking, you won’t have the much needed "eye contact". You cannot counter the person on call but in a meeting room the body language will give an indication on "how comfortable are audience with the discussion point". Though there is virtual white board available in apps, they are not a substitute for "marker and white board" people like me.
3. No doubt home food is good and several of them used to get home food to pre-lockdown office but we had good amount of cheaters (including me) who used to get "diet food" from home and grab a "fried pakoda" , "Gobi Manchurian" for lunch.
![Big Grin](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/images/smilies/biggrin.png)
4. Background noise is a nonsense to deal with. We can easily tell who has joined the conference call by background noise. There are pet Indian street dogs 2 houses away. As a birth right, they bark at trivial random things squirrel jumping on compound wall. Every time I get a call, common question is "do you have pet dogs near you", so much so that I have started hating dogs.
5. Log in and out time are undefined and you are not sure if person has left for the day or still working when you see "away for 10 minutes" at 7:00 P.M. At office you can peek and confirm "ok laptop is not there, manager has left. Let us also go", at noon "ok there is no lunch box, must have gone for lunch" but in WFH it is an assumption "mostly gone for lunch", "mostly on another call, messenger shows away for 5 minutes". This can be managed to some extent by using collaboration platform like MS teams / Slack etc. but there is no substitute for "get up , go and talk" which avoids lot of communication gap than "I pinged/ called you" for "ok I missed the ping/call" response. But again people who work on multi-location , onsite-offshore mode it is not a major challenge but an occupational irritant.
6. Not having an ergonomic setup at home with closed room causes issue while trying to concentrate on work. Thank God, I have one albeit not very ergonomic.
The ugly
1. If you are in a hot humid place, you will feel sticky throughout the day. Some of them were looking for cheap and best AC which don’t burn hole in their pocket but yet to find one. Some of them are using combination of mild fan + A/C to fight the A/C bills.
2. While some of them have managed to do exercise and maintain same weight as before some have gained weight due to sedentary life style. Careful jogging and some exercising should fix this but it’s a health risk on long term basis. People have to start moving around and should walk minimum 30 minutes per day.
3. Bachelors "dearly" miss the office. I was talking to one today and he told "I can finally see some colors in my life though they are masked" and one other person thanked me for choosing her as "office goer" from this week.
4. The internet goes blank unannounced so is electricity in monsoon and cyclones. I am sure this will be biggest challenge in Tier-II cities or people living in "single internet provider" area. One of the team member had both phone signal and internet issues at the same time during weekend support. Though we had a backup plan in place, it was an unpleasant and anxious moment till that person took parents SIM of different operator and did a one day data recharge. One other person who had frequent power disruption got a power backup for Wi-Fi router which saved him from awkward drop offs from client network and WebEx calls.
5. Cyber security and client information security is a threat across the job levels. I am sure in future data masking solutions to hide sensitive information will be in demand due to increased work from home culture.
TL;DR
"Homo sapien" is a social animal and it would definitely like to move around than sitting at one place.
So like someone has suggested here , it should be 70/30 WFH with flexibility to visit office couple of times a week to get much needed Vitamin-S (Social interaction). At the same time, with companies like TCS announcing ambitious massive scale down of "office for every one" and many of the tech giants looking to optimize real-estate costs, exciting time ahead for people who wish to escape from hustle-bustle of choked cities.
All said and done, big thumbs up for "Work For home" I mean "Work From Home"