Will life return to normal after Covid

Following on from Road Closures and the idea of work changing post Covid.

While I take @marymck’s point about work being a lot more than sitting in front of a screen I think we might just see a change moving forward with shrinking office spaces and less travel to and from work. I have spoken to so many people online who don’t want to go back to the 5 day slog with hours of travel and additional expense of lunches and coffees. I have been at my desk at 7am as I can just wonder downstairs and check in, see our helpdesk, check our services are up and running and then go get a coffee. I take my lunch when it is quiet and I can pop out to the butchers if I have a spare 20 mins…
This may sound detestable but I have enjoyed lockdown, specifically I have enjoyed the working from home aspect - the collapse of society and the economy not so much. I have more time and I have been more efficient…
One of my neighbours has been banging on for years about decentralisation of work spaces (for office based jobs) - huge great offices are madly expensive and are a disaster recovery nightmare. Much better to run everything from a smaller more versatile space with people dropping in and out and throw as much IT stuff into the cloud as possible…
Having said all that, as someone who is back to mostly working on site it was lovely to see friends and have a laugh with colleagues I haven’t seen for months…
Do you think people will just go back to the way it was or will there be a sea change

I think for every one enjoying it there have been people that really struggled.

Next week my work is opening a small part of our building to bring back people who are finding it really hard to work from home.

There is an acknowledgment that people’s mental and sadly in some cases physical health is really suffering.

Yes I am perhaps not that typical which is why I asked. I work in IT, have loads of kit and great internet. Plus I am not young, I am married,I have lots of outdoor space and I am moving soon anyway. I know people who have struggled with tech and those on their own will have had a totally different experience

I feel that working from home has been positive for my mental health.

Working from Kent is more relaxing than travelling for three hours a day to and from a congested, polluted and bustling city.

But I am incredibly lucky that my work can be done remotely. So many jobs can’t, and I fear the “WFH era” is going to create yet another societal divide, with winners and losers visibly diverging

My problem is I am a key worker and the pace and volume of work has been relentless. Video calls are exhausting. Being at home can be very isolating.

I also only have the space to work from my dining table, my shoulders and back are a mess.

That said, not having to commute or dress.for the office are a big bonus, especially in this weather!

I think it depends entirely on what sector you work in but I can definitely see a shift in favour towards the employee/freelancer when it comes to how much leverage they command in the wake of the lockdown. Looking back, although you can earn a decent living from them, I’m gonna go out of my way to avoid the big construction sites in central London where the foreman prowls around shouting at anyone who has made the slightest mistake. You get less money - or more if you’re on a price - on the big housing sites out by the M25 corridor but for the most part the atmosphere is more relaxed and you get to wear shorts in the summer, etc. I’ve also noticed a ‘you need me more than I need you’ emerging. I won’t mention the name but I got a text from the subcontractor I was working for before the lockdown and the day rate they offered was a third less than they were paying before. Greed has got the better of them, though, as after receiving the text I went on all the London builders groups on Facebook and they were all ridiculing the subcontractor and there’s book running on how long they’ve got before they go under.

Yeah, I’ve been looking at moving further out. Once the dust has settled and I’ve bought another set of wheels I’m looking to move out to Sevenoaks.

Sevenoaks is a lovely spot and well connected to London when you need to get there.

Cheaper and you get more for your money. That, and I desperately miss the countryside.

Our shoes may never fit us again! I have gotten so used to going barefoot that I look at my shoes now and wonder how they ever fitted!

Having worked mostly from home over the last few years my wardrobe is now almost entirely a mx of casual with an emphasis on sloppy and formal evening event type stuff.

We did buy our house with the priority on having separate workspaces for both me and my husband. And a driveway because we both worked really unsociable and unpredictable hours back then and had to carry heavy equipment (in his case) and scripts, wet weather gear and all sorts of paraphernalia etc (in mine.). But our garden space is just a courtyard and a balcony, which I thought I would find frustrating but which actually suits us fine. Lovely airy views help. At our old house we had a huge garden and I could never leave it be and just sit and relax. There was always something to do. Now it’s more relaxing … apart from all the pot watering, but even that you can do with a glass of wine in your other hand.

We could have had a bigger garden in the area but without the off street parking and we wanted to avoid roads with lots of cars lining the streets, which was a problem even then … nearly 20 years ago.

I think it’s good for families. Working parents can spend time with children. Not so good for single people.

Trying to work from home with 2 working parents and 2 young children has been almost impossible and a huge stretch which hasn’t been good for any of us.

I still can’t believe we have pubs re-opening before the schools are sorted out.

pubs are an ‘inalienable free-born right of people’ just as much as schools are.

Ha Ha my colleagues with children would disagree - it has been really hard.

Sadly house prices being what they are now a separate kitchen and spare bedroom was a luxury for us, let alone office space!

Yeah - they should be mandating home brewing for drinkers if parents are expected to home school

Because the parents need the pubs more urgently?

I mentioned in a previous post that my old company closed our London office effectively in August last year, and everyone started working from home and commuting to our other office in Hampshire one a week or every 2 weeks generally.

The cost of office space was much cheaper at our new location, for the the few members of staff who decided to move, living costs were much cheaper as well in terms of housing etc. However very people moved and most worked from home.

There are some obvious benefits to people working from home (WFH) - generally reduced travel costs, more spare time with family \ hobbies \ just relaxing with saved commuting time. In some ways the move generated some innovation and made us more paperless than before and there was more focus on effective communication, more video calls etc. There are some drawbacks (the proximity of the fridge being one!), but I do think it’s important to have a work area where you go to work and not everyone will have this. You also need to try and have good desks and seating to avoid back problems, have contingency for internet going down, perhaps amend some IT security requirements if PCs \ laptops will no longer be kept in the office etc.

I don’t think central London will empty of office space, but I think we will see far more expandable office space where you rent meeting rooms etc on a daily \ hourly basis for when you want to meet clients or colleagues.

When I started at my last company back in the 90s we did nearly all our sales, training, software installation etc onsite - I used to travel all over the UK and world doing this and upgrading databases etc, though a lot was in London. At some point in the 2000s this started to change and it’s now completely reversed for all of these as most are done virtually. You still want to meet colleagues and clients face to face from time to time when required, but with reasonably reliable and fast connections nowdays and cloud infrastructure most things are virtual, meaning much less office space is actually required. When I would interview Tech roles, many people had an expectation of working at home at least 2 days a week and I think it’s more of a factor in hiring now and will continue to be so.

So I expect as leases expire over the next 5-10 years we will see a huge change with large companies and small ones alike reducing their office space requirements, perhaps rates going down and maybe less commuting into central London. What will happen to those empty spaces who knows, I suspect they would get filled - maybe all our wonderful key workers will get some affordable accommodation in those areas! I’d hope in the long term more people WFH might give a benefit to local high streets as people will pop out at lunch, after work to get stuff they could not normally do.

edit - I meant to add that if people do WFH say 4 days a week, then moving out of London becomes much more attractive of course. I still like London and what SE23 gives us, and have family here in London (it’s where I was born), so probably won’t move out, but who knows what the future holds later down the line.

That’s the worst. I used to track 1500+ calories a day with a cycle commute and running around the office to meetings. Now I’m lucky if I hit 500. Hard to motivate myself to get out of the house and easy access to snacks and beer o’clock starts earlier too! All bad.

Sorry I didn’t mean to imply anything untoward. It took us a lifetime of two incomes and two steps forward one step back to get to where we could afford the house we have now. And we are very old. Even so we had to take on a crippling mortgage to do so, having moved from a much bigger place in the Midlands.

I remember being laughed at by the Halifax Building Society when I as a single woman tried to buy my first property: a studio flat in a pretty rough area. I had scrimped and saved a ten percent deposit, which I then spent travelling instead. Put me off buying for years and it was only the massive orange fungi growing in my post divorce rental that made me try again years later. Interest rates were horrendous then and going up every month. One month the rate went up twice in one month. 16.9% it ended up as.

We put our house on the market last year and everyone who came to view were either first time buyers or on their second buy. You and I @HannahM must be in the wrong jobs!

Having been thoroughly messed about by the people we’d accepted an offer from, we took it off the market. But it will be going back on soon if anyone wants a house with two studies for home working! (Plug, plug, shameless plug (

Thanks for establishing this as a new thread.

When someone, somewhere mentioned broadband I thought that was an interesting tact.

Universal access to high speed broadband appears on the wish list of most governments regardless of hue. Generally a commitment for those outside urban areas who may not have any access or terrible speeds. Yet know government has been able to delivery on that.

I had the pleasure of a meeting pre-Covid with the Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission Sir John Armitt (yes name dropping). Our discussion was largely on public transit, though he was very keen to discuss broadband. He recognised that creating a sufficient network for 80%* of the population would be quite easy and came with a good business case. It was the the costs to add that final 20% which was prohibitive in cost to network providers, and without government assistance unlikely to happen. Sir John though felt government needed to rethink their strategy and where the business case could be found. He noted the potential savings to the public purse by accelerating the use of distance medical technologies which are revolutionizing health and access to health in many other countries, like my home country Canada with truly remote communities.

The value to public health, and potential savings to national health services could reasonably justify the government investment in the at final extension.

Of course we now are living through the Covid-19 crisis. And even without this discussion on distance working we have seen the important of good broadband for work, for education, for play lending to our overall health and well-being.

If this pans out, then absolute access to high speed broadband isn’t a wish item anymore. It is a necessity. Whether paid for by the private sector (with new revenue streams) and by government with potential savings from elsewhere.

*It may have been 90/10. I can’t find my notes.

Oh it wasn’t a dig! Things are different now. It’s just the way it is sadly.

Re: your buyers - we’re not in the wrong jobs, they just had the right parents!

The one thing that I missed about working was the cycle to work. It’s only three miles so I have to adlib and often did 20 odd miles a day. I have had to force myself out on the road but I also bought a smart trainer at the back end of last year which was a life saver after 12 hours of remote support - quick blast round Central Park and I was feeling fine again.

Some really nice replies here - cheers!

Really interesting comments here and we’re having a very active conversation at work about this for those who are offices/call centre based rather than physical customer facing.

@HannahM makes great points about mental health and how WFH isn’t always right for everyone. I do think having a ‘space’ to work in that can be separate from relax space helps enormously for that. I’ve managed to ‘convert’ a corner of my living room into a workspace but have been conscious of making sure I can replace ornaments etc at weekends/evenings so that it goes back to looking like a relaxation pace. No good if you want second screens etc but it helped after camping out at coffee table, kitchen bar table, bedroom for the first month.

Personally, I love my commute (although miss the cycle), my view (trees and sky rather than glass office) and my canteen. Video calls are great for touching base and talking but can feel really draining by the end of the day. It seems to take a lot more energy to focus and be focused on while scanning reactions etc.

Unless you really have to or want to, the company I work for has said we won’t be back there until September - and even then, it will be about reduced time. They are closing one of the buildings (already in the pipeline but brought forward) and there’s talk of reconfiguring several floors to create bigger collaborative workspaces for breakouts/workshops which are harder to do virtually and leaving all the ‘desk’ jobs for home.

I was planning on moving in the next year or so anyhow - to somewhere a little bigger and/or with a garden. This has made it clearer that it would be the right thing to do… but has opened up my horizons. Rather than staying with a reasonable travel time/cycle distance of Victoria, I’m now seriously considering moving down to the south coast which is nearer my sailing hobby where I could get a much bigger property for the money I was going to spend. I can live with a longer commute a couple of times a month.

I do think everyone is quite genuine at the moment about wfh more and this being the ‘new normal’ but I do wonder, if there’s a vaccine found, how long it might take to revert back. So one day a fortnight, becomes once a week, becomes three times a week, becomes ‘you won’t be given opportunities unless you’re here every day’ as the memory fades.

I agree that video calls are draining. At the busier times I was on five or six calls a day, I was exhausted.

Working from home will be the norm for us for a lot longer. My workplace has offered to pay for equipment - monitors, desks, chairs but I don’t have to room without making a big change to our flat (essentially changing the spare bedroom to an office).

I also crave some more face to face human interaction than I am getting at the moment.

Yes. I ended up with a surprise op yesterday and had to have a friend come and ‘babysit’ me after the general anaesthetic. We’re both singletons who live alone and it was so lovely to spend a ‘normal’ evening with a friendly face. As we’ve now become a ‘bubble’, it is likely to happen more often!

I used to work in TV Production, where there was always a young team of researchers passing through. This kept me up to date with new tech, music, all sorts. Infuriating at times. “Get your heads out of your texts and email and go out and TALK to people!” was my frequent cry.

I’d like to make two points I learned from this.

Firstly, if people lose or never learnt the skill to actually talk to people they don’t know, they can lose the confidence to even try.

Secondly, just by being around those young trainees and researchers I knew what was going on. My nephew tells me email is old hat (not his phrase). So probably are texts. Now I’m not in those Production offices I have lost touch with new technology too. It’s scary how fast that can happen.

Wierdly the lockdown has encourage my teen daughters to continue to use new tech to communicate but actually face to face and not TikTok, Twatter etc. Zoom, House Party have encouraged more “real” communication.

Personally I spend 9hrs a day on a laptop working for a charity, which has been quite stressful. As much as I didn’t enjoy the crush on the Overground, at least it provided a break and an obvious end and start point. I find even if I have a day off I am expected to be on call and answer emails and calls. We will probably have to lose staff next year, so that does hang over us… Several houses have been doing major building work though lockdown so it’s been quite loud and our broadband struggles to reach all of our (quite small) terrace.

One of my down stairs neighbours has started serious rennovation work in the last few days. It has not helped my working from home.

That must be painful. Two doors down started installing a basement in November and it’s still a major building site. Thankfully the pile driving and excavation of soil stopped in April before it got warm enough to keep windows open but there’s still a racket as they fit girders and go through concrete. In the house itself though you can ‘feel’ every drill even with noise-cancelling headphones on. Hope it goes quickly for you!

When we moved to WFH for the company, we had a long form each member of staff had to complete indicating they had appropriate work space etc, and we provided tables, chairs, extra monitors if required - we had more time to prepare of course. At some point, if not already done, I think employers will have to do some sort of evaluation of how people work from home (we allowed people to self certify which gave everyone a bit of leeway if required).

There is a certain IT and management overhead which is unseen but manageable. the overall benefit of a mixed approach of WFH and time in the office is optimum I believe for both the company and staff in terms of productivity and quality of life - though everyone has different circumstances and wants of course.

To some extent we did foresee the need to work from home in advance and could prepare a bit although didn’t expect it to extend for so long. So now changing short term fixes for medium term changes. Certainly senior members of staff all were of opinion it was easy and straightforward to send everyone a bunch of equipment. I did have the raise the point that some staff live in house shares or just small flats and don’t have spare rooms and sometimes already spend a lot of time living in bedroom. Working there now as well only adds. My spare room has been converted to a working space, at present can’t have my family visiting from Germany anyway. Won’t work long term.

Although on a lighter note I have seen some people use iron boards as a good working space!! Height adjustable and heat resistant end for mugs of tea. Not tried it myself as just have a little table top one myself precisely as a space saver

As a middle aged person who is already trained up in their profession and has job security, I realise that’s a luxury the majority of the population does not have.

I think overall society is going to change for the better after this covid nonsense. Or maybe I’m being too optimistic and people will still believe what the media and Government tell them.

I’m an academic and worked at home a lot already, but teaching remotely is not very satisfactory. You can’t see body language, you can’t read the room, and usually you can’t see the faces of all the students. As for the reading and writing we have to do much of the day, it’s been fine for me (except for lack of access to the 5000 or so books in my office at work, and the inability to go to libraries and archives), but for colleagues with young children it’s been a nightmare.