How has the pandemic impacted your work/life balance?

[hepcat]

On 5/19/2020 at 10:03 AM, Inimicus said:

Yeah we are no where near that big, at our largest we were 30 but currently in the lower 20s.

However your comments got me thinking about what a long term policy would look like since every subsequent convo the leadership team has is taking us to a more and more flexible and distant schedule.  Things like moving away from owning anything but the laptops and then providing an annual office stipend so people can upgrade/replace things in their own home office.  This avoids us owning the gear and having to keep track of it or store it when its not in use.

Yesterday the CEO said he wants us to stop referring to our office as such and prefers we call it a "lab" to emphasize that its a place to go if folks need to do some group work or need to get out of the house, but the expectation is you primary workstation is at home.

I was in a salary discussion on another board and it turned to how will this affect salaries for office based employees when the stay at home becomes the norm and things like commuting, parking, and in some instances attire costs are removed.  In Denver if you work downtown and drive in every day those costs could be north of 500/month.

I think a lot of companies are having those discussions. Some like yours might have more flexible office arrangements and can achieve that easier and faster. Unfortunately for my company, we just signed the lease to build for a new 4 story building next to our current one in January. Construction just began this week. I think if they could go back and not sign that lease....they would. 

So here's my team prepping to build out 40+ new conference rooms, a $1m+ executive briefing with video wall, and a new network operations center....and the company has successfully been operating fully remote for 2 months. 

As far as equipment for end users, I think the BYOD model is becoming more and more sustainable. Issuing a laptop can still make sense depending on the level of security needed, but letting employees expense their home office and never have a true office space saves the company thousands.