Coronavirus and working from home

nlogax · 19 Mar 2020

Zoom can be a weird one. Over our VPN I find that out of nowhere on a whim it likes to suck all the bandwidth dry, causing a 'Your internet connection is unstable' message even for audio-only sessions.

Bletchleyite said:
Can you not just switch the video off? I've near enough never used it. We do do a lot of screenshare but that is quite low bandwidth as it doesn't change as much as video.

I know that for some companies or business units there are often team directives to use video wherever possible. I've never understood that stance, personally. If you want to force the point home that you don't want to be peering down the business end of a laptop camera for every internal call, use something like Snap Camera as your Zoom cam. They'll soon get the idea.

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Puffing Devil · 19 Mar 2020

Using video is important with the team at the moment - they're spread from London to Sydney and it really helps to see everyone and connect at a personal level. Whatever the circumstances it's good to be able to see real people. At the moment, five of my team are on full-on lockdown, two of them live by themselves and have very little other personal contact.

For sales calls it also makes it more human and helps to be cognisant some of the non-verbal cues.

When running bigger calls/events it keeps people on the call - less temptation to drift off onto email or phones.

With Zoom I know what you mean about it sucking up bandwidth randomly and throwing out stability warnings. IMHO it's still a much better platform than Webex for video conferencing. Easier to schedule and easier to run the sessions.

I remember sitting in a computer networking lecture in the late 80's with my prof being very confident that video calling would be impossible with the limits of processing and the telephone network Here we are with copper and video calling - even possible over ADSL using the old copper infrastructure. How times have changed.... I can remember cranking out work on an Amstrad PCW256 and writing code in Z80 Assembler and Pascal on the same machine.

bussnapperwm · 19 Mar 2020

Part of my (employed) job requires scanning, printing (on controlled stationary) and opening/sending mail as well has having access to systems of which a limited number of licences were brought for, dealing with complaints and taking payments.

Funny thing is my office has 8 members of staff (35 in the department but the remainder are based in offices elsewhere), and only 3 laptops. They've told us we can use our home laptop to work from home... but they cant put the licensed software on a Citrix server, and can't let us take payments from home!

Ironically we have to work to laws such as TMA 2004 and stuff linked with it.

yorkie · 20 Mar 2020

bussnapperwm said:
Funny thing is my office has 8 members of staff (35 in the department but the remainder are based in offices elsewhere), and only 3 laptops. They've told us we can use our home laptop to work from home... but they cant put the licensed software on a Citrix server, and can't let us take payments from home!

Why not?

And a workaround would be to ensure the relevant PCs are on and then simply launch a terminal services client from the Citrix server onto your PC. It just requires the relevant user to have permission to remotely access that PC. We did that to cover us for next week until a more permanent solution is implemented.

Andrew S · 21 Mar 2020

The company I work for is just starting to use Office 365 in the cloud. A handful of us have been hastily migrated onto it this week, enabling us to work from home, and to share new information across geographically divided departments. Personally I find MS Teams one of the most irritating, distracting applications I've ever seen. It seems to take up so much time that could be better spent just doing real work.

Ianno87 · 21 Mar 2020

Andrew S said:
The company I work for is just starting to use Office 365 in the cloud. A handful of us have been hastily migrated onto it this week, enabling us to work from home, and to share new information across geographically divided departments. Personally I find MS Teams one of the most irritating, distracting applications I've ever seen. It seems to take up so much time that could be better spent just doing real work.

MS Teams is fine provided you have a strategy for *how* to use it.

Bletchleyite · 21 Mar 2020

Ianno87 said:
MS Teams is fine provided you have a strategy for *how* to use it.

My view (from daily use) is that it's not a particularly well designed tool, but the conferencing facility is slightly better than Skype for Business.

The main issue I have with it is that it encourages you to send a message to everyone which is highly disruptive. With Skype you have to set up a group conference manually if you want one so you're discouraged from the faff of doing this unless it's really needed.

This does need some discipline - think about it as "unless you'd stand up in the office shouting the thing you're about to type, or you would be in a meeting room with all those people now were it not for lockdown, don't send it to everyone".

nlogax · 21 Mar 2020

Teams is a big miss from my perspective. A kludgy faff of a product. I prefer to use the Sharepoint ui that sits behind it. It's ok *if* you can use as part of the wider 365 toolset - Flow is a very powerful example and one I'm hoping to get full value from it in coming months.

Skype for Business going away / being folded into Teams is probably a good thing. Not sure about your S4B experiences but our company had.. mixed results at best. Hence we all use Zoom instead

Bletchleyite · 21 Mar 2020

nlogax said:
Teams is a big miss from my perspective. A kludgy faff of a product. I prefer to use the Sharepoint ui that sits behind it.

I would agree that it is meant to include Sharepoint and a decent calendar but does it really badly.

S4B being rolled in I'm less convinced about as I find S4B is a better product in terms of the basics.

deltic · 21 Mar 2020

In the past I have only occasionally WFH with laptop on the kitchen table. With 3 of us now trying to do the same it’s a nightmare. Have ordered a WiFi booster because reception is so bad in the room I’m using. Desk I have is not really big enough and being scrunched up over a laptop when I am used to having 3 screens on a desk is not doing by back any good and my output has collapsed. Keeping this up for 3 months is going to be tough

3rd rail land · 21 Mar 2020

I work in IT and and recently set up Mattemost/Jitsi for use on programme/project laptops running Linux. It's basically has all the functionality of Skype and really easy to get used to the UI.

My employer's corporate laptops run Skype for business.

Any company that doesn't provide lsptops to all its staff or at least most of them these days are mad. Also its silly not to have plenty of VPN capacity in case of an office closure/sudden demand for home working capabilities.

deltic · 21 Mar 2020

deltic said:
In the past I have only occasionally WFH with laptop on the kitchen table. With 3 of us now trying to do the same it’s a nightmare. Have ordered a WiFi booster because reception is so bad in the room I’m using. Desk I have is not really big enough and being scrunched up over a laptop when I am used to having 3 screens on a desk is not doing by back any good and my output has collapsed. Keeping this up for 3 months is going to be tough

its also not cheap as just had to go and buy an office type chair for my wife - its not as if I am saving on commuting costs as I walk to work and the loss of a 4 mile walk each day wont do much for my waist line

3rd rail land · 21 Mar 2020

deltic said:
its also not cheap as just had to go and buy an office type chair for my wife - its not as if I am saving on commuting costs as I walk to work and the loss of a 4 mile walk each day wont do much for my waist line

Is your employer not able to provide the equipment needed for home working? Mine does although the only company items I have is a laptop and docking station. I think my employer will provide a suitable chair if I didn't have one, if you are a home/mobile worker like myself, but I can't be totally certain of that.

Last year I bought a 2nd hand task chair at a cost of £275 + £12.50 for delivery so not cheap as you rightly point out. Certainly worth the investment though. I sit on this chair for many hours a day and a good quality chair with lumbar support is important.

deltic · 21 Mar 2020

3rd rail land said:
Is your employer not able to provide the equipment needed for home working? Mine does although the only company items I have is a laptop and docking station. I think my employer will provide a suitable chair if I didn't have one, if you are a home/mobile worker like myself, but I can't be totally certain of that.

Last year I bought a 2nd hand task chair at a cost of £275 + £12.50 for delivery so not cheap as you rightly point out. Certainly worth the investment though. I sit on this chair for many hours a day and a good quality chair with lumbar support is important.

We have laptops but nothing else - dont think our company would survive long if it had to provide office chairs and the like to everyone - I'm expecting short time working to be introduced or "voluntary" pay cuts in the not too distant future. Survival is the key issue at present. I'm just thankful that I am in a much better position than those who are self-employed or who are on zero hour contracts who are really suffering.

Bletchleyite · 21 Mar 2020

deltic said:
We have laptops but nothing else - dont think our company would survive long if it had to provide office chairs and the like to everyone - I'm expecting short time working to be introduced or "voluntary" pay cuts in the not too distant future. Survival is the key issue at present. I'm just thankful that I am in a much better position than those who are self-employed or who are on zero hour contracts who are really suffering.

I don't think anyone is likely to develop severe back problems by sitting on the sofa or dining chair for 2-3 months, to be honest. Particularly as depending on the type of work you do you can spread things out a bit during the day - one of the benefits of home working.

A move towards longer-term home working would introduce those responsibilities, but they're really not a great issue for now. If it's that much of an issue for specific individuals allowing them to borrow one of the chairs from the actual office would be best.

route101 · 21 Mar 2020

Anyone had this problem with their internet?
On chrome , when you load page ,comes up webpage not secured or no internet . If i click refresh or back back it will load . Its something to do with our new bt hub.

deltic · 21 Mar 2020

Bletchleyite said:
I don't think anyone is likely to develop severe back problems by sitting on the sofa or dining chair for 2-3 months, to be honest. Particularly as depending on the type of work you do you can spread things out a bit during the day - one of the benefits of home working.

A move towards longer-term home working would introduce those responsibilities, but they're really not a great issue for now. If it's that much of an issue for specific individuals allowing them to borrow one of the chairs from the actual office would be best.

When you already have back problems and RSI - correct equipment is pretty important. Our office is shut and not sure how you would get an office chair home on the bus or a taxi. Out of London staff in my company have been allowed to ransack their offices and take equipment home

Bletchleyite · 21 Mar 2020

deltic said:
When you already have back problems and RSI - correct equipment is pretty important.

I'm sure it is, but most people don't have back problems and RSI. Also, most people spend most of their evening and weekend sitting on the sofa.

One thing this Forum has a habit of doing is saying "you can't do X because 0.05% of the population can't do it". This is sort of understandable given things like PRM TSI, but it is worth understanding that it isn't universal.

pdq · 21 Mar 2020

A shout out to IT teams everywhere. I work at a Uni and liaise closely with our IT guys. In the last 7 days they have procured and imaged 250 new laptops, provided dozens of new mobile phones and associated contracts, upgraded the Parallels client and VPN, bought and configured Zoom etc etc. Absolutely brilliant work.

edwin_m · 21 Mar 2020

nlogax said:
Teams is a big miss from my perspective. A kludgy faff of a product. I prefer to use the Sharepoint ui that sits behind it. It's ok *if* you can use as part of the wider 365 toolset - Flow is a very powerful example and one I'm hoping to get full value from it in coming months.

Skype for Business going away / being folded into Teams is probably a good thing. Not sure about your S4B experiences but our company had.. mixed results at best. Hence we all use Zoom instead

We used Webex previously and it was better for basic conferencing than either Skype or Teams, both of which I find don't keep the things I need all on the screen at once and also display smaller than they could if designed better (and therefore hard to read).

Clearly Teams does a lot more but I find I need to turn most of the notifications off and look at it periodically instead (same with email), and the workforce as a whole needs to have some training in what means to use to communicate. I find any form of instant messaging incredibly distracting, as the notification window pressures me to break off from the current task. Then I'm either in suspended animation waiting for the other person to reply (if they're going to) or I get back to work to be interrupted again a few seconds later. I ask people to send emails for routine queries and if they really need to interrupt me, pick up the phone. I even put this in my Teams status message but nobody seems to read these.

3rd rail land · 21 Mar 2020

pdq said:
A shout out to IT teams everywhere. I work at a Uni and liaise closely with our IT guys. In the last 7 days they have procured and imaged 250 new laptops, provided dozens of new mobile phones and associated contracts, upgraded the Parallels client and VPN, bought and configured Zoom etc etc. Absolutely brilliant work.

I work in IT but on specific programmes for my employer not the corporate IT department. I've done loads of corporate IT support in the past and I can say imaging 250 laptops in 7 days is a truly staggering achievement. I was once lined up to rebuild 80 desktops in 3 days until the job got cancelled. It took me quite a while to make management understand that this was a nigh on impossible task in just three days on my own. I said, actually insisted, I would need at least twice as long primarily due to all the updates that need to be installed.

From experience getting anything procured always takes longer than expected. I always run in to issues with suppliers making mistakes or simply not understanding rather clear requirements. I can't imagine 250 laptops were sitting in a stock room waiting to be utilised.

Whoever made that kind of operation work needs to teach a lot of IT departments in this country how its done.

tsr · 21 Mar 2020

3rd rail land said:
Whoever made that kind of operation work needs to teach a lot of IT departments in this country how its done.

Indeed. At an IT department of which I’m aware, as soon as they heard about coronavirus (long before the big announcements this week), they all disappeared to “work” at home and basically can’t be contacted, even for business-critical stuff.

I can understand the working from home bit, indeed I’d rather they did, but a number of other teams are working from home FAR more effectively.

Some of the support stuff also needs local floor-walking / on-site support from time to time. I can’t imagine that will ever return at many organisations, except during complete equipment replacement programmes.

pdq · 21 Mar 2020

3rd rail land said:
Whoever made that kind of operation work needs to teach a lot of IT departments in this country how its done.

I will pass it on. The laptops arrived on Wednesday and it was basically all 2nd line desktop support and much of 1st line support on a production line using however many switches, rooms and staff they could get their hands on, applying a standard image then setting up encryption and adding to Sophos. The purchasing and admin support to make it happen was equally staggering.

3rd rail land · 21 Mar 2020

pdq said:
I will pass it on. The laptops arrived on Wednesday and it was basically all 2nd line desktop support and much of 1st line support on a production line using however many switches, rooms and staff they could get their hands on, applying a standard image then setting up encryption and adding to Sophos. The purchasing and admin support to make it happen was equally staggering.

All I will say is my employer could never pull anything like this off. Not even close. Then again they issue laptops to all their staff anyway so they wouldn't need to. They also have sufficient VPN capacity for everyone to work remotely.

bussnapperwm · 22 Mar 2020

In my office (a local government office) we have 5 PCs which have 3 different specialist software (one of which has an additional piece), plus 1 which is payment only with a Chip and Pin machine. We have 3 laptops with 1 piece of specialist software.

We have to print on controlled stationary on 3 of the PCs and two of the laptops with the stationary locked up. We have to scan mail and log cheques in on those 5 devices.

From home computers we cannot access our specialist software on the remote Citrix server as we don't have the funds to get licences even for cloud operation, let alone use on Citrix. We can only get on Office.

We also have to deal with customer enquirys via person, phone and email, with card payments being taken via all 3 methods (and cheque via post/cash in person.). These payments have to be logged on controlled stationary.

We also process outgoing mail for other offices in the same building.

One of the PCs is also hooked up to a network of handheld devices for when they need downloads and another is hooked up to the maintainance technicians hand held device

The only people who don't accept payments are the team manager (by virtue of his job) and maintainance technician (who has to go on site to do maintainance/inspections).

How exactly could my office be done from home? 8 members of staff, 3 laptop's?

Bletchleyite · 22 Mar 2020

Sounds like it's time to start a project to streamline your operations. It sounds like you are living and working in about 1995.

mike57 · 22 Mar 2020

I have been told that for me working from home will probably continue even after coronavirus is over. I usually visit offices in the NW once or twice a week and this would resume, with home working the rest of the time. This means my rail usage will never go back to pre coronavirus levels. Company saves money by not having to provide office space, I save money by not commuting to a local office 3 or 4 days a week.

It will never work for everyone, but if even 20% of the working population reduce their commuting then it is going to have a big impact on the transport infrastructure requirements.

It will also reduce carbon emissions and pollution.

The Ham · 22 Mar 2020

3rd rail land said:
I work in IT and and recently set up Mattemost/Jitsi for use on programme/project laptops running Linux. It's basically has all the functionality of Skype and really easy to get used to the UI.

My employer's corporate laptops run Skype for business.

Any company that doesn't provide lsptops to all its staff or at least most of them these days are mad. Also its silly not to have plenty of VPN capacity in case of an office closure/sudden demand for home working capabilities.

I work using AutoCAD and some fairly powerful design software, whilst it's possible to do on a laptop you will pay a LOT more for a slower computer.

As such, whilst I agree that laptops tend to be better, you're still going to find some uses where a desktop is still the best option.

Having said that we're all working remotely with our work desktops being able to accessed remotely.

The Ham · 22 Mar 2020

mike57 said:
I have been told that for me working from home will probably continue even after coronavirus is over. I usually visit offices in the NW once or twice a week and this would resume, with home working the rest of the time. This means my rail usage will never go back to pre coronavirus levels. Company saves money by not having to provide office space, I save money by not commuting to a local office 3 or 4 days a week.

It will never work for everyone, but if even 20% of the working population reduce their commuting then it is going to have a big impact on the transport infrastructure requirements.

It will also reduce carbon emissions and pollution.

Indeed, all our travel patterns are likely to change (well maybe mine less than others as I walk to work and have limited space at home, due there being 5 of us in a 3 bed house), as indicated in this post from another thread (which has been suggested that the conversation continue in this thread), was in reply to a post suggesting that we needed less rail infrastructure spending (chiefly HS2):

The Ham said:
I'd argue that if more people work from home then we'll need rail projects even more than we do now.

Why you may ask? Well if you are going into work each day then the high upfront cost of car ownership makes sense as you can spread it over the ~225 days a year that you work.

However if you drop to 4 days in the office you increase the per day cost of your car (for work purposes) increases by 25%, whilst 3 days in the office increases the costs by 66%.

That's going to make a big difference in the equation as to whether you own a car or not, of there's two of you in a house and you're both working 2 days from the office then those people would likely share a car.

However, there will still be trips which will require those two people traveling to different locations and so they will likely opt for rail for one of those trips.

You also have to bear in mind that air travel is likely to be in dire straits and might not be an option for some time. As such there's likely to a shift from air to rail as well.

As such it may not be as clear cut, as it's unlikely that the dramatic fall in passenger numbers will be sustained. (As I doubt that anyone would be suggesting that we don't invest in motorways as they are a lot quieter than normal as well).

MP33 · 22 Mar 2020

It was announced that last Tuesday would be a trial working at home day for everyone. The future arrangements would be ½ in ½ out to maintain seperation. This has changed to all home working at all sites except one site which is remote and even then the few people working there are being spread out.

The amount of work is starting to dry up however. We were told that no one will be let go, however I bet that there will be a strategic review later in the year. We have one every five years and the next one due is less than two years away.

I wonder how the people who attend various consulation group meetings and conferences are going to get on without their free lunch.

I see that Citrix has been mentioned. I require Citrix and a VPN has been set up and I have a card that I press to get the magic number to log in.

Coronavirus and working from home

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