Telecommuting During the Pandemic

A perk offered at some businesses before COVID, working from home, allows for a more flexible schedule. During the pandemic, many people experienced telecommuting for work in full or for the first time. As more places open back up, questions surrounding how to return to work and whether to continue telecommuting vary widely.

For #WorkFromHomeDay, I decided to talk to a few people about their experiences working remotely over the past year and their preferred work method.

Charlene Campbell – Full Shift to Remote Working

Charlene’s Experience

For Charlene Campbell, a quality assurance associate for a popular app, her company worked in an office before the pandemic.

“When the stay-at-home order hit, we were able to transition to work-from-home in a matter of a few hours,” she said. For the first time in her two-and-a-half years at the job, she worked remotely. She found very quickly that she much preferred working from home than in the office.

With the exception of a desk and chair, her company successfully set her up with “all the tools to work from home.”

Sharing what she likes most about telecommuting, she said that she enjoys working in her safe place. “I truly love everything about working from home,” she said. “However, it’s extremely easy to get distracted by family.”

Moving Forward

While her company takes a “very conservative stance and are in no rush to bring people back to the office,” she said that the thought of returning to the office makes her “quiver.”

Campbell hopes that her company allows her to continue telecommuting for work even when the office reopens, as she’d “absolutely” accept the offer. She added that she enjoys the idea of visiting the office periodically for a “team-sync” day.

Lucy Slattery – Previous Mix of Telecommuting Before Fully Remote

Lucy’s Experience

Working for an office furniture dealer the past two years in Boston, Massachusetts, Lucy Slattery experienced a small mix of telecommuting before the pandemic.

“Pre-pandemic, I personally only worked from home one day a week,” she said. “Other employees had the option to work from home more frequently.”

Once moved completely online, Slattery explained that her workload remained about the same, but the focus of her tasks shifted.

“The pandemic affected my job in that there were many clients that had put a freeze on purchasing office furniture or designing new spaces,” she said. “[My] daily tasks were less about project work and more about building standards, typicals, and procedures that would make various tasks more efficient when project work did pick back up.”

Part of that shift involved working less on real-life projects. Instead, she spent more time researching what the future of the office will look like.

“It’s been challenging because I find all of the information out there to be speculation, and I believe there’s no way to predict what the future will hold,” she said. “We will need to experience it to find out.”

Regarding how she feels about working from home, Slattery said she loves everything about working remotely. In particular, she doesn’t have to commute to and from the city on public transport. This saving her hassle, time, and money. In addition, she loves having her fridge close by to make fresh meals instead of having to meal plan or pay for a costly city lunch.

“I can tend to my garden on my lunch break and eat the fresh produce that I grow,” she added. “I have more time to do the things I love and have all of my belongings in close proximity. And, I love that I can be home with my partner and our kitties, which brings me joy.”

Furthermore, Slattery said she doesn’t dislike anything about her experience working from home, though there are challenges.

“The most difficult thing about not being in the office is that I’m unable to pop over to a colleague’s desk to ask a quick question,” she said. This causes a longer response time in her work. Other than that, she reported no complaints about remote working. Though she said she’d like a better office setup, she’s had no problem with her current setup this past year.

Moving Forward

As places reopen, Slattery’s company hasn’t discussed how their return to the office would look. Due to using a hybrid model previously, she feels they’d be more accepting of employees working remotely in the future. This, especially after seeing it play out over the past year. It helps that many of their clients have hybrid models, so it makes sense that her company likely will.

Ideally, Slattery said she would like to work remotely full-time as long as possible.

“If my company requires us to be in the office more frequently, I’d like to work from home four days a week and go in one day. That’d be my ideal situation,” she said. “I’m going to request it regardless because this is working for me in so many ways. I can get my job done just the same, if not better and more efficiently.”

Slattery concluded by praising her company’s dedication to their employees, which ultimately made the situation of the pandemic much easier to deal with.

“My company is amazing. They allow us to share our comments and concerns in an open and non-judgemental platform, and they are flexible to individuals’ needs,” she explained. “They constantly communicate when things change and often allow for discussions before they change. And, they want feedback from employees at all times and listen to what we have to say.”

This, contrasted with her last employer, where she still has friends working there who report their pandemic experience was the complete opposite of hers.

“I’m already grateful for everything that my current employer does but having the perspective of what my life could be like, had I not left my previous employer, makes me even more thankful.”

Callie Daleo – Started Her First Year of Teaching Doing Online School

Callie’s Experience

For Callie Daleo, a first-year teacher at Canyon Springs High School and Law Preparatory Academy in North Las Vegas, working online was a completely new experience.

“My job has never involved working from home until this year,” she said. “I have never had to teach online before. The pandemic shut down the schools for the entire year.”

She reported that due to the shutdown, her job changed a lot.

“The schedule, teacher responsibilities, student expectation, grading, class sessions, programs we use, and more all had to shift to accommodate the kids being at home,” she explained. “I would say my job is easier this year, but the results from the kids are far worse.”

For Daleo, she reported enjoying the benefit of sleeping in every day until her first class started at 9 a.m. Now she is back to waking up at 5:30 in the morning to get ready and head to the school for a day of hybrid teaching.

Aside from that, she said she dislikes pretty much everything else about remote working for her profession.

“You do not even know your kids; three-fourths of them have never shown up to a Google Meet, they don’t turn in work, and the quality of work is so much worse than ever before,” she reported. “All around, it is just not a fun year to be a teacher. The motivation just isn’t there.”

While she prefers teaching in person, she only wants to be if the kids are there with her.

“It feels pointless to have teachers come back and sit alone in their classrooms when all of their students sit at home in their beds.”

Moving Forward

As the present school year ends, the schools are finishing up their hybrid learning model they rolled out about a month ago after Spring Break ended. At the moment, there are some kids back in-person full time, but not the majority. Parents decided whether to send their children back to school or stay online for the rest of the semester.

“We plan a full return to in-person learning come August when the next school year begins,” Daleo said. “We’re hoping that more people get vaccinated and that they continue taking the pandemic seriously so that we can have that reality. The kids really need to come back.”

In general, Daleo said that her experience was fine; it was just that the kids didn’t care this year. Though, she said, she doesn’t necessarily blame them.

“They were all dealing with their own struggles,” she said. “I think we should’ve canceled this entire school year and started from scratch next school year, back in person. There was no learning happening this year anyway.”

In general, she expressed that if the kids are back, she wants to be back, too.

“The whole reason I am a teacher is to be here with these students.”

Working Remotely: Finding What Works Best

From these three accounts of working from home, it’s clear that there’s no across-the-board answer to the question of telecommuting. Some jobs are well-equipped for the work-from-home completely, or hybrid model, like Campbell’s and Slattery’s, and others aren’t, like Daleo’s.

Ultimately, it depends on the type of job and the experience of the people doing the work. The pandemic allowed much insight into the remote working experience. In turn, this aids employers in determining the best ways to utilize people’s productivity. That is if they’re open to the opinions and suggestions of their employees and others involved when making those decisions.

Finding what works and what doesn’t enables people to improve their work-life balance. It also opens the doors to new possibilities regarding how workers conduct various jobs.

It’ll be interesting to see how companies return to their regular routines, adopt hybrid models, or even offer people to work entirely remotely over the coming months and years. And, it will be interesting to see how telecommuting becomes an added benefit that employers provide to prospective employees. People who enjoyed working from home will likely seek out similar job opportunities in the future. Those who didn’t might instead look for jobs less likely to have to go online in a similar situation as the pandemic created.

Only time will tell, but the next few years will an excellent case study for how jobs shift their focus.

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