As a counterpoint people with young children seem to spend at least some time each week during work hours taking care of their kids while their partner (whose on maternity leave) is doing something else. Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.
Cannot tell if the parent is missing /s or not... just in case not.
- Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.
- Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Anyway, person-to-person and day-to-day differences in productivity are pretty large in my experience. Of course you could be in a bust-your-butt-for-a-promotion kind of situation, but you could also take the attitude that you're getting paid for what you actually do, and the fact that you are not top 1% productivity is reflected in your current "help-at-home-when-I-am-needed" salary.
> Noise cancelling headphones work as well at home as they do at work. I love mine.
This is actually the bug, not the feature. These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.
>Imagine: I definitely spend time outside of "work hours" doing work, so it might balance out.
Why are you doing work outside of working hours? That does not make sense.
> These people have bought noise cancelling headphones, so when they join a meeting everyone else it bothered.
Noise cancelling headphones have directional mics that typically do a very good job of only picking up the wearer's voice.
If people really want to sound clear, a headset with a mic boom is every better. 0 background noise gets through.
These are all very well solved problems.
Heck my laptop back in 2005 (!!!) had a directional mic array. I could use an included utility app to control where in the room I wanted the mic to record from, I could record from in front of my laptop when going to lectures, or have the mics pointed at me when recording myself.
It might. If your office is in your home you may have more flexibility to get things done on an ad hoc basis if that were necessary (like something takes down production or someone needs something urgently).
If that were the case when everyone was at the office it just couldn't get done.
If you are one call, that is completely different and doesn't make sense in this argument.
If you are just picking up a call from your boss to work without being paid overtime then don't do the work. Only exception is if you have flexlible working time e.g. 32 hours per month then you just do a shorter day at some point.
> As a counterpoint people with young children seem to spend at least some time each week during work hours taking care of their kids while their partner (whose on maternity leave) is doing something else.
That is me, and I account for time off during day to play with my 10 month son by spending an extra hour after dinner finishing up work.
WfH gives me the flexibility to do that. WfH also means I don't have to take an entire day off if my son has a mid-day doctors appointment. Everyone wins.
> Also the constant background noise of kids crying or some kids show playing it pretty annoying.
Your company should spend the few extra $$ on good headsets for everyone.
Company has given out headsets to everyone, but people are impossible to please so most people (myself included) aren't using the official ones for variety of reasons. Plus a lot of it is about the MS Teams which has no software support for noise isolation or cancelling. I can see it clearly when I'm using Discord; if I don't talk, I don't broadcast. In Teams if I am quiet Teams will keep cranking up the volume until some sound AC hum, typing, whatever gets picked up and I am constantly broadcasting.
