While many workers have embraced the flexibility of being able to work from home, Richard’s* experience is a reminder that some people prefer the interactions that only an office can provide.
Before, and even during the pandemic, he never worked from home. Richard’s job as a policy manager qualified him as an essential worker, so despite lockdowns, he commuted from Ringwood to the company’s CBD headquarters every day.
Richard has the option of working from home but prefers to be in the office.Credit: Illustration: Aresna Villanueva
Now that’s all changed as his workplace moved with the times and embraced a culture of working from home.
“I never worked from home before COVID. Never, never, never,” Richard said.
“It’s only since the lockdowns have ended, that I’ve actually started working from home more.
“Where I work, working from home has become a more normal occurrence. People are geared up for it.
“Certainly my employer is not rushing people back to the office. They seem quite happy for people to be working from home.
“I think it might be a bit of enlightened management. I know our chief executive likes to work from home. It probably flows down from there.”
In the Working from Home Diaries, we asked anonymous contributors to detail exactly what they do in a working day, from juggling online meetings and emails to school drop-offs, second jobs, the laundry and unloading the dishwasher. Scroll to the bottom to read about Richard’s working day.
Latest census data shows that since the pandemic, more than 20 per cent (2.5 million) of 12 million employed people have worked from home. Richard says that most people at his work spend two days a week in the office.
While he’s enjoying the convenience of spreading his time between work and home to fit around a closure on his train line for level crossing removal works, Richard plans to be back in the office four days a week soon.
“I go in more as I think I feel the need to be physically in touch with work sometimes,” he said.
“You need to have a bit of a presence in the office, too. It’s part of being more senior. It’s to be more present and to be physically available.”
There are advantages of working from home, he says: “A huge benefit of work from home is getting the laundry done. It’s also a lot easier to go the gym because you can just go home afterwards and shower. You don’t have to take all your clothes in and shower there.”
How I divide my day:
5.50am: Generally the dog wakes me up, even though the alarm is meant to go off at six. The dog comes and wakes me up because she wants some breakfast, she’s very reliable like that. I get up, unstack the dishwasher, that domestic-type stuff.
6.50am: Go to the gym for some torture from my personal trainer, generally cardio exercises.
7.30am: Have breakfast at a local cafe on the way home. A cappuccino and a bacon sandwich. That’s my weakness.
8am: Drive home, shower and be online by about 8.30. I start looking through my things to do for the day, just getting organised a bit.
9.15am: I have a daily [online] meeting. It’s just me and another guy who lives in country Victoria. He comes into the office once a week. I’d say over COVID, it’s become much more natural to have online meetings. In-person meetings seem a bit odd now, anachronistic.
9.45am: Get prepared for further meeting, sending emails, chasing things up, occasionally I need to prepare some other documents.
10am: Stop for a coffee. We have a coffee machine, but I’m too lazy to use it, I just have a Nescafe. I have an [online] meeting starting immediately. It’s a pretty big meeting, maybe about eight people.
11am: I send some emails.
11.30am: Another half hour [online] meeting. It’s a small meeting with another two or three people to talk about some problems with a product.
12.00pm: I do some more emails, including a very urgent one that has come in during the morning, from a lawyer who was seeking for us to take a particular action, so I respond to that.
12.45pm: I stop for some lunch from the freezer. While the leftovers are heating up, I check if the postie has been and if the washing is dry.
1.20pm: Sit back at my computer and respond to some more emails.
2.00pm: Another [online] meeting, this one about funding a particular project, there are about six or seven people involved.
3.15pm: After that meeting ends, I am immediately into another one, where we debrief on the meeting we’d just had and what we were proposing to do. It was a day when I had more meetings than usual.
3.30pm: A few phone calls to make, a bit of correspondence to work through.
5pm: A final meeting that went for about 20 minutes about an operational issue that happened during the day.
6pm: Finished. I tend to work until my wife gets home from her job as a school teacher. She generally gets home about six, but if she’s home later for any reason, I tend to work until she’s there. I pack up the laptop and papers from the kitchen bench and take the dog for a walk.
Read more in this series:
How working from home saved a corporate mum’s career
The music technology whiz who started a side hustle while working from home
The marketing boss and foodie who cooked a feast (while working)
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