It is a sad reflection of our economy and labour market that the loss of a single day's pay can cause someone hardship. But it can.
I wouldn't entirely agree with that; whilst working from home will sometimes be possible when ill, not every illness will lend itself to that. The entitlement to sick pay therefore shouldn't depend on whether the job can normally be done from home.
No.
I can choose to work at home if I want to, but don't because I find it too difficult to get work done. I'm also familiar with the policies of enforced working at home during mild illness, but I'd be strongly against making that the law because for a small number of people like me it could make things far worse. That said, I have struggled through it where that's been the only option, but that has been based on an honest and open conversation with work which I've been lucky enough to be able to have about my lower than usual productivity on such days.
I think that in general there's no change in how health-conscious people are between 2019 and now. People inclined to be more conscious then will still be now, most people aren't and haven't started. Also at the system level there are lots of actions we could take to reduce the likelihood of further zoonotic pathogens developing, such as restricting the live caging of animals and minimising unnecessary close contact between people and animals, but we have demonstrated absolutely no interest in doing that either. A different virus, such as an influenza one which causes disease with a far higher case fatality rate than Covid, could still spread just as easily to or between people. We've got no better mitigation in place now than 2019. The government would be likely to react with exactly the same chaotic and bewildered mess that it did three years ago. Another pandemic is quite likely in the coming decades, it's just a matter of when exactly, and how fatal it is.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable (though people shouldn’t put themselves to major hardship to do so, whether financial in terms of losing paid work or losing paid travel/ticket reservations, or social in terms of being excluded from major trips or gatherings).
I think the underlined bit is demonstrably untrue (though I’m sure it’s true of a minority!). I know numerous people who took pretty stringent precautions from 2020/2021 who have since fully reverted.
That's fair enough, but if they've completely gone back as if nothing has happened, then I guess it only makes it more likely that, when exactly the same thing happens again in the future, we'll be ill-prepared.
I suppose this is for another thread but I don't think you can say that categorically based on your personal experience. For a start who deliberately tries to guess who around them in public is ill? Seems very unlikely that you did this.
Obviously there is no conclusive test for any individual person (and you’re right, I didn’t try to guess on a person by person basis, that would be weird!) but collectively the amount of coughing/sniffing/sneezing seemed higher than the UK. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial observation
Including your customers?
Not quite. I am a customer of quite a number of office-based companies whose premises I never attend in person. Some of them (I would hazard a guess at the majority of those I have needed to contact) provide appalling customer service as a direct result of WFH (for example, the lady in a bank's "call centre" who I finally got through to after 45 mins of listening to inane music, to be told she had to break off because it had started raining and she had to get the washing in). Most of them answer customers' calls with "We're experiencing an exceptionally high number of calls etc." They're not, they're employing an exceptionally low number of staff or a number who are not working as productively as they might. Then there's the question of whether tasks needing "collaborative" work are best done by people working remotely. They may not be and the end result may be worse service for customers.
Having worked in Japan I believe this to be incorrect. There is a 'presenteeism' culture in many Japanese workplaces, which leads to people attending work (wearing a mask) when they really shouldn't.
Proof? They likely have genuine staffing issues, every contact centre in my area is struggling to get staff.
That is a management issue. Behaviour like that should be picked up on random call monitoring.
Although to be fair, many companies started that during the credit crisis over 10 years ago. The message has been routinely played out 24/7 as well, irrespective of how long callers have to wait. crisis
Where in the country is this?
Where I work we've noticed an uptick in the number of calls we're getting and that we're getting from other agencies. One of the running theories we've got for this is that it feels like we're one of the few places in our line of work locally that answer the phone. A lot of other places you go straight to voicemail and get a call back in two or three days(!). Word gets around that Organisation A answers their phone, or if they don't calls you back within often within minutes, whilst Organisations B, C, D, etc never answer and may or may not ever call you back.
Evolving technology - many phone systems now run in the cloud and even for those that don't, the old ISDN lines of yore are being phased out in favour of SIP* trunking (basically a phone "line" over an Internet connection)
I think that the surgery had a conventional PBX until the early days of the pandemic. There were comapratively few calls then (I and many others used Patient Access to book appointments plus there was always the opportunity to drop in and ask the desk). Then with the first 'stay at home' period it was rapidly changed to what it is now. Judging by the way that the queue lengthens in the first 5 seconds of it opening at 08:30, the calls must be intercepted somewhere in the (virtual) 01727 exchange. Call a few seconds later and I can be at the wrong end of a 50+ queue. There's still a 1:30 list of announcements as well, before the irritating music starts.
It may just be coincidence that it tied in with the pandemic, but the demise of the old phone lines has been in progress for a good few years now so they may have had plans afoot (possibly hurried along by the need for mor ephone calls from March 2020)
I think they're still in somewhat short supply still. Don't forget that there are several billion people in the world.
