From here
There are a lot of businesses that are struggling to support customers these days. Many let people go during Covid shutdowns and now can’t get them back because they’ve moved on. Just look at the chaotic commercial aviation situation in Germany these days …. Lufthansa, airports (baggage, etc), ATC, etc. The people left minding the shop are often completely drowning trying to handle the day-to-day business.
Indeed, and the “working from home” was in most cases a license to skive off work (because most people can’t actually work at home, for various reasons) and that habit will die hard. Not working while getting paid is the world’s second oldest profession 
Peter wrote:
Indeed, and the “working from home” was in most cases a license to skive off work (because most people can’t actually work at home, for various reasons) and that habit will die hard.
I’m in IT services, and our productivity has gone way up during Covid. Almost all my 50+ people are still working from home.
@Peter, I’ve been amazed at the proportion of people who openly refuse to come to work, don’t now produce much other than talk on the phone, meetings and emails, and seem to genuinely think this is their new reality. Meanwhile the tight labor market makes companies reluctant to cut the dead wood because with productive employees having become harder to find, those that are productive are changing employers for 20-30% raises at a totally unprecedented rate and companies hope that someday inactive people will somehow snap back into some kind of action. Yes, some of them are laid off but it’s amazing the cynicism they display in calculating that it likely won’t happen to them and that the paychecks will keep coming for some time regardless.
My observation of the public sector is that the same thing is happening there, only worse.
Peter wrote:
the “working from home” was in most cases a license to skive off work (because most people can’t actually work at home, for various reasons)
That certainly doesn’t seem to be the general experience.
We currently have massive worldwide inflation, which is self evidently caused by not enough supply of labor/goods and artificially injected money creating demand. So I think low productivity is exactly the current general experience, and it isn’t a coincidence. Inflation is the symptom that balances the books by stealing the savings of those who were responsible enough to save over their working lifetime.
The only good thing about it is that those who are still actually working are getting big raises (beyond inflation) by moving around to employers who have stiff enough demand to underpin high production costs. I’m ‘familiar with’ a guy who just went from $170K to $220K after looking for two months, and according to what he told me he didn’t choose the highest offer. Productive mid-level engineers are now getting over $200K in my area, and we’re not talking about software or the extreme economics of e.g. the SF Bay Area. I’ll miss him.
Of course it depends on the nature of your business, but I’m with Peter on this one.
There may well be businesses where employee productivity can be measured remotely, though this does not seem to include call centres whose performance seems ever worse. The only reason that large organisations (eg civil ‘service’) appear to cope better than small ones is their prodigious innefficiency masking any change in ‘productivity’.
In any kind of creative business direct personal interaction is crucial IMHO. I can say this as the inventor of a few things that needed very strong team effort to realise. While some stuff can be done on zoom, the creative spark simply doesn’t fly there for me. In my own world, most valuable ideas came out of impromptu ‘corridor conferences’ and these are just not happening any more. Instead, you get meetings (physical or zoom) where people are figetting to get away and don’t want to launch off the shoulder ideas that could prolong the meeting.
Even worse, how do you induct a new person into the company’s philosophy without the other employees being there?
On the other hand, out of hours customer support has been transformed. If only they were paying for it!
Peter wrote:
Indeed, and the “working from home” was in most cases a license to skive off work (because most people can’t actually work at home, for various reasons) and that habit will die hard. Not working while getting paid is the world’s second oldest profession
Not the case where I work. We’ve been doing our office shifts from home mostly even before Covid and it is much easier and productive than sitting in a climatized mass breeding ground for all sorts of germs and coughing into each others faces. I can work from home doing exactly the same thing I would do at my workplace, with the difference that I actually have my own workplace (the others need to find a different desk every day) but can have lunch at home and am massively saving from not having to drive with these fuel prices and having to buy expensive food at the airport.
Being accused of skiving off is probably what most people working deskjobs get by those who simply think that anyone not making things with their own hands out in the wild are lazy idiots. And certainly there are some who take advantage, but employers are also not stupid enough not to check what is going on.
chflyer wrote:
Just look at the chaotic commercial aviation situation in Germany these days …. Lufthansa, airports (baggage, etc), ATC, etc. The people left minding the shop are often completely drowning trying to handle the day-to-day business.
The whole thing is a total disgrace. Thankfully there were companies who kept their people on some sort of minimal pay even while not working (Kurzarbeit in Switzerland) and now have enough, however most aviation companies have lost people unwilling to vaccinate while unvaccinated people can’t be used to do the job (e.g. long haul flights and others for which 3G was compulsory and soon will be again). Add to that, the current situation at airports is an ideal breeding ground for the covid wave which right now causes lots of people to fall ill and missing at the workplace for up to 2-3 weeks. IMHO, the competent authorities should get after the airports and airlines and make sure that no more slots are given out than can actually be handled. But it looks the horse has truly bolted already and most airports and airlines are going to collapse over the holiday season, unless renewed covid measures put a stop to quite a few destinations. And this is a real possibility to happen very fast now.
Silvaire wrote:
We currently have massive worldwide inflation, which is self evidently caused by not enough supply of labor/goods and artificially injected money creating demand. So I think low productivity is exactly the current general experience, and it isn’t a coincidence. I
It is not a coincidence and triggered mainly by two massive factors: 1) transport capacity and 2) artificial shortening of energy supplies due to the Russian crisis. The current high crude oil prices and the profit oil companies and tax lords are drawing from it is staggering. Transport capacity has been down ever since China closed their ports due to Covid. This causes lots of production to stop for not having parts or ressources not getting shipped. Add to that massively increased production of military goods (e.g. drones have a huge impact on GA part sourcing) and so on.
If Russia completely cuts of Germany and most of Europe from gas and oil over the winter, we may actually see a massive crisis as people won’t be able to heat their houses, drive their cars, get goods delivered for the lack of fuel or price increase to the trucks and so on. Hopefully Germany and others who in hysterical movements shut down their nuclear power plants manage to get some of them back on line before that. Otherwise the next winter may well see oil and gas prices explode yet again, to maybe 10 Euros a liter gasoline and 5 for a liter heating oil…. That would definitely cause massive civil unrest.
One answer to this will be that countries need to be able to go back to own production and stop relying on the international market so much. Food and other produce can be and is produced at home but more expensively so, yet the ressources are there. Quite a few countries even have gas and oil deposits which were deemed too small to be used, which hopefully will change now. Domestic production needs to come back, which will also cause inflation due to higher prices, but it is a lot better than relying on goods which can’t be transported to the customers or are used to hold whole countries hostage.
We saw no evidence of “skiving off” when we were all WfH during lockdown. Now we have a flexible arrangement, as management found that WfH works, and it means they can turn over office space for more productive use if not everyone’s at their desk all the time.
In any case, many office workers can “skive off” in the office just as easily as they can at home. Any decent manager should be able to tell whether the work is getting done, whether the person is in the office or WfH.
Intelligent and self-motivated people can work from home, but only if
orWhat % can do this? I reckon much less than 10%, but they will be over-represented here on EuroGA.
I think the future will be more of “distributed working” where you go to an “office” but it will be just down the road, and there will be facilities in there for meeting up with others in some sort of central “cafe area”. And video links to other workers. Commuting 50 km just to sit at a desk at the company base, just writing software, is a bad use of people.
CV19 has destroyed working practices all over the place, enabled a lot of skiving, and crap customer service is just one manifestation.
