Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I work for an SME family run business, we’ve been back in the office since 2022.
Normal backoffice employees get 2 days home office a month, but they can only take one day a week. I am a manager and I get 1 home office day a week. To be honest, I struggle to get 2 home office days a month. Obviously, most of the staff don’t get any home office days, because we are a manufacturing company.
During COVID, we managed to get away with little presence - our department of 4 people rotated, so we had 2 people in the office at one time and did it on a rotating basis, then, when the lockdowns were at their toughest, we had 1 person in the office and each of us was in the office for 1 week a month.
Having the ability to be in HO a couple of days a month is great, if we have deliveries or hand workers, we can be at home and work there. But we just have too much that is hands-on to be able to work in home office.
We are currently rolling out 150 new PCs, that would be difficult in home office, for example. And we are setting up new servers, again, hard to do when you are in home office.
The other thing is morale, when the office staff were sent into home office during COVID, the production staff had to naturally remain in the production - we were critical at the time and swapped some of our capacity to producing disinfectant as well, so the production had to remain on site. That led to a tense atmosphere between the production staff and the “Netflixers” in home office…
Since we are back in the office, the turnover has been very low, less than 1% of office workers have changed jobs, the production is a bit higher.
But the company is very good to work for. We are forced to take our 30 days leave and if we work overtime (above our 40 hours a week), we are forced to take it off by the end of the month, or carry a maximum of 8 hours over. I got an exception this year, because we swapped out a lot of systems that couldn’t be taken offline during the week, so I had around 80 hours of weekend work over the summer and into the beginning of autumn and there is no way a manager can take those number of hours off in a month, so I take around 16-20 hours off a month, which, including the normal small amounts of overtimes I accumulate, I am now down to around 20 hours. But we are currently putting in a new cluster, so that will probably go back up again, as we move the critical services to the new hardware over weekends.
I still have 3 days leave, so I need to get special dispensation from HR to carry them over to next year, because I just don’t have the time this month to take those 3 days, and the 20 hours of overtime. I have the whole of Christmas and New Year off, so I have used as much as I can, so I have to use those 3 days before March.
But most people don’t have that sort of problem and most are very happy working for the company.
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Always great to hear Amy Webb, and the combination with Kathy Gellis is a good one. However, I don’t really think the topics allowed for the fullest expression of their respectively expertise. We got glimmers of that (in my opinion) with the discussion on return-to-office, but I think we only touched the barest of surface with it.
With that said - the discussion with Amy’s husband was great! I would love to see a step-by-step guide to how he did what he did.
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My grandkids (3 and 5) are allowed to watch 2 episodes of one of their programmes every day on Netflix, ZDF Togo etc. the rest of the time they have to play with each other, make stuff with Duplo etc. or be outside, they love riding their bikes up and down the street, for example and both ride their bikes to the Kindergarten.
They are good, when we have family gatherings, like birthdays, they sit at the table for about 30-45 minutes, but then they need to move and go and play with dolls, Duplo or whatever in the lounge, or listen to a Toni. I think they do get to watch an iPad on long car journeys, but, again, only 1 or 2 short episodes every now and then, not constantly.