LONDON (AP) — Office jobs are never going to be the same.
When workers around the world eventually return to their desks, they’ll find many changes due to the pandemic. For a start, fewer people will go back to their offices as the coronavirus crisis makes working from home more accepted, health concerns linger and companies weigh up rent savings and productivity benefits.
Director Martyn John said productivity is just as high as it was before the pandemic forced them to work from home, so he decided to give up the company’s office space to save on rent, one of his biggest expenses.
The rent wasn’t saved, just offloaded to the employees.
Some may have already had a home office, so using it for both professional and personal tasks is not much of a burden. For other people, working from home long-term could mean giving up valued family space or having to move to a larger home to be able to work productively.
The option to work from home is one I’ve always liked. A need to do it permanently means a need to permanently devote some space for the work.
There are going to be unforeseen changes, small and large, that we’ll experience. We’ll be years adjusting to this pandemic, imho, socially and economically.
I also predict that HR people are looking at COVID as an excuse to reduce headcount by not bringing staff back even when work returns to normal.
I’ve been WFH since March. I still get things done and the advent of better collaboration portals is key. However, I miss the office. I don’t have a dedicated office space. It’s the kitchen table and so everything is from my laptop instead of my multiple ‘big’ screens. What I find interesting is the management perspective. For years it’s been a tug-a-war between ‘butts in chairs’ as opposed to WFH. What the shutdown has shown is with very few glitches we are able to do our jobs from home. But this is IT. WE won’t be crowded next to each other anymore. Now is the time to figure it out for those who right now, don’t have a choice.
If I am expected to permanently WFH, shouldn’t the company pay for a portion of my mortgage? Shouldn’t the company be responsible for some of my electric/gas bill? My dining room table is now my office. It is unusable for its normal purpose.
So there are provisions for home offices in the tax code, but you need to be in the right income window for them to be useful. And you can get bitten on the back end because decades later you will lose part of the residential exemption when you sell.
The article discusses spacing, partitions, staggered scheduling, and working from home, but nothing about ventilation.
The IRS has allowances for “office at home” and that should be looked at to make sure the regulations that allow it adequately and fairly reflect the new reality.