Now I can walk the dogs
“I thought you’d be taller,” Annabella McCullagh said to a colleague last week. After two years of remote working, it was the first time she had met most of her team at consulting firm Capgemini — the day before Boris Johnson announced new guidance to work from home where possible.
The 36-year-old has had her hands full inputting data for pandemic-related public sector contracts from her home in Hampshire. She has been to Capgemini’s London office only a handful of times since the first lockdown and is relaxed about not going back. “It’s an hour-and-a-half commute versus I brush my teeth and am in the ‘office’ within five minutes,” she said. The key to enjoying homeworking is a routine — she takes her two dogs for daily afternoon walks and logs off at 5pm to fit in belly-dancing practice.
You can’t learn by osmosis
Auditing is very different from when Daniel Chan, 30, started at PwC’s London office ten years ago. He was required to be in the office five days a week, and enjoyed building a rapport with clients — the kind of connection that has been much harder to form in more “transactional” virtual meetings.
“You learn so much more about a business when you can just pop over to the client to chat,” Chan said. For more junior employees, it is also much harder to “learn by osmosis” when working from home, he added.
Beth Lishman, 19, who started with the Big Four accountancy firm entirely virtually from Manchester last September, agrees. Still finding her feet, opportunities to speak to more senior colleagues are less natural when you are scheduling an online meeting for two weeks’ time. Luckily, though, through Snapchat group chats, she is confident she will keep good relationships with her younger team-mates, even if restrictions last until next spring.
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Anxiety on the rise
As a receptionist at her local Kent GP surgery, Leanne Friday, 34, straddles the line between “key worker” and being able to work from home. Doing the latter for several months while shielding with colitis last year, she got increasingly anxious about always being online on Microsoft Teams: “You don’t know if anyone’s really watching.”
Friday found herself finishing work later and later every day, with her attitude of “I’ll just finish this off”. She said she will find more remote working “really hard”.
“You feel like you have to justify popping to the shops, which I’d never do in the office, and you lose that social connection,” Friday said. “Now I think I’d actually miss sitting in traffic and getting up at 5:50am, because that’s the norm.
“It’s when the norm goes that I struggle.”
Office life boosted mental health
Speaking on the last day in her London office for the foreseeable future, Nina Glynn, 22, a content manager for marketing start-up Bulbshare, said she has no trouble working from home. “It’s convenient and I love the lie-ins!”
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Her first full-time gig after university started last November from her kitchen table. As the country reopened in December, Glynn could still work remotely with a minimum of one day in the office each week. Going in was better for her mental health, socialising and networking — the last being particularly important after she was promoted in June. ”It’s going to be a real shame to lose the opportunity to go in,” she said. But working from home has some benefits. “Networking online, you need a lot more gumption, because there are fewer opportunities for it,” Glynn added.
I need those water-cooler moments
Chris Jones, 29, has a tricky relationship with home working. The legal associate at London law firm Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), who usually commutes from Swansea three times a week, would not typically have been at home when his one-year-old son took his first steps last March. On the other hand, he was left to deal with the crisis when his two-year-old broke his leg by stepping on a football during a virtual client meeting. Jones has enjoyed sharing “war stories” of remote working with colleagues at HSF, which provided “family networks” and wellbeing sessions for staff in the pandemic. But he finds WFH can bring on anxiety: “Having a chuckle with somebody by the water cooler plays a big part in keeping my mental health in a good place. Without that side of it, I tend to struggle.”