Not Going Back

One of the surprising findings of the last several months of working from home is that productivity is actually up. One not-at-all-surprising finding is that morale has fallen, and continues to fall (though that may be less to do with working from home, and more to do with everything else also being closed). As a consequence of the latter, the powers-that-be are quite keen to reopen the office, at least to some capacity. To that end, today was supposed to be the day some people started back.

Personally, I was always rather torn about this. I have no concerns at all from a safety point of view - given the prevalence of the bug in Scotland it is highly unlikely that any of my colleagues have it, and the counter-measures put in place were pretty extensive. However, I was never sure what was to be gained - given that the meeting rooms would remain shut and so many people would still be working from home, the benefits of actually being present were already going to be diluted.

Anyway, it all became a moot point on Thursday, when tucked away in Nicola Sturgeon's update to parliament was a sentence stating that non-essential offices should remain closed until mid-September, or perhaps later. So that's that.

Longer-term, I think my intentions are to go back to the office as soon as the company specifically requests that I do so, but not to volunteer to go back any sooner than that. I'm also strongly considering requesting a shift to home-working three days a week on a permanent basis - on the days Funsize isn't at nursery my being here makes things that bit harder for LC, so there's clearly an advantage to being in the office, but on the three days FS is at nursery, it seems I could usefully skip the half-hour drive each way.

But that's still very much in the "thinking about it" stage - it remains to be seen how things will turn out when they do get back to normal... or, rather, move on to a new normal.