We just need to make the office an optional place that people can gather when they feel the need to. I have no problem at all working a 5 day 40 hours work week from home. But this nonsense of everyone waking up at the same time, sitting in traffic, and cramming into "open plan" work spaces has to go.
For those living (and planning to stay) in areas with high wage standards (like most of the Western world!), keep in mind that remote work also opens your job to competition from much cheaper places.<p>Great for the people in those places, but your happiness to be able to skip the commute may quickly turn into a lot of unhappiness because you can't make a living wage anymore.
How many of us don't want to commute to the office 5 days a week, but also don't necessarily like the idea of working from home when not at the office?<p>My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office space.<p>The issue with working from home for me is that I feel my personal life and work life become messy and entangled if I do too much work at home. Similar to how good sleep hygiene involves doing as few activities other than sleeping on your bed as possible, I feel for my mental wellbeing it's better to physically separate my work life and home life as much as possible.
Offices are hardly the problem areas to reopen - most of them can go remote.<p>It's the places that can't go remote that is the problem, and those are exactly the places where they need to be open many hours, in order for customers to be able to come.
Applying the concept of hot racking on the offices sounds like a good way of embracing the "new normal"<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kashaziz/status/1257012120090292226" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/kashaziz/status/1257012120090292226</a>
Anybody else feeling like if we're young and healthy we should actively try to contract this thing, self-isolate for a few weeks, and be done with it?<p>It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do: reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.<p>I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is talking about.
Social distancing to stop the spread binary version:<p>Loop:
1) Work monday-friday 6 hours practise strict social distancing. Work remote if you can.
2) Weekend rest from social distancing see friends.<p>Its like a binary four square wave with on / off.<p>Reason: If we practice good social distancing the spread time of the Covid is five days.
Ok, good point, there is just one small detail: the "without cutting salaries" part.<p>Employees will love it, that's for sure, but I don't think employers will get even. You are basically giving your employees a 25% raise on their hourly wage.<p>There are success stories of companies that pay their employees above market value, either by paying them the same amount for less work, paying them more, or giving them particularly good perks. It is the idea of quality over quantity: by giving out preferential treatment, you get the best employees, and keep them motivated, and their increased productivity will make up for the higher cost. But there are success stories going the other way too: cheap, borderline slave labor and a high turnover. Sometime a high volume of low quality work is effective.<p>But in most cases, the usual market value is what works best, that's why it is the market value.<p>I am not saying that working less is bad, but it is a bit unfair to have the employer shoulder all the costs. Maybe make it half/half: 10% less pay for 20% less work.
If everyone started working fewer hours for the same pay you would be effectively devaluing the dollar. You wouldn't actually be adding more value to the economy.<p>Value in the economy is created by work and there is simply no substitute for that. Shortening the work week would simply make less value in the economy, making us all poorer and more idle.<p>Too much idleness I can tell you leads to stress, even more stress than too much work. 40 hours is not too much work.<p>To solve the problem in the article one could still cut the workforce by half that was present in the office simply by adding more work-from-home time for the workers which I find to be healthy my own experience anyway. our office is made similar overtures, saying when we go back to work lots of us. Be working from home as a way to tackle a space issue.