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Writer's pictureBrendan McGrorey

WFH: the good, the bad & the unknown

Updated: Sep 28, 2020

As state governments start looking to ease lockdown restrictions, we’ve started thinking about the future of work arrangements in a post-COVID world, while taking a look at some of the pros and cons of working from home during this time.

Project management working from home
Work in the time of Coronavirus

On the upside

For me personally, there’s been quite a few positives about working from home more, including the following:

Zero commute time

Under normal circumstances, I generally work a couple of days per week at home. On other days, I travel quite a lot between offices and sites, on average spending a few hours per day commuting. Now that I’m working from home full time, I obviously don’t have to factor travel-time into my week, which means I can spend that time more productively.

More time with my family

With my kids home from school, preschool and day-care, I’m obviously getting more time with them than I pretty much ever have. As part of our new family routine, we go for a walk around our neighbourhood each morning, we have lunch together and even just getting to see them intermittently throughout the day goes a long way in making me feel more connected to their respective worlds.


Goodbye work garb

Finally, all my wardrobe dreams have come true. In the tradition of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, working from home means there’s one less thing to think about in the morning with my new work uniform. Activewear or activewear?

Less meetings, but…

In the first few weeks of COVID, there were some memes going around saying; ‘I guess we’re about to find out which meetings could have been emails after all.’ Fewer meetings is of course great and normally this is one of the reasons I enjoy working from home. With less interruptions from meetings and other unplanned discussions etc. I feel like I get much more done at home, however…

Some of the downsides

More calls (than possibly ever)

The face-to-face meetings have obviously decreased but the calls – mobile and video – have certainly increased. Potentially, this is a side effect of not having the designated forum regular meetings provide to thrash things out, or maybe it’s a reflection of the urgency in the construction industry to keeps things moving. Either way, I feel like any time I was making up from fewer meetings is now getting chewed up on the phone.

Blurred lines between work and home

I’m fortunate to have a designated work area, which is somewhat separated from the rest of the house, but this certainly doesn’t mean it’s kid-proof. I recently had my own BBC reporter moment when two of my kids burst in on a video call and one of them demanded to know, then and there, where her pink tights were.


That’s probably been the worst of it, but there’s been countless other times when they want me to play with them when I’m working, and I really just can’t. They’re too young to understand a lot about what’s going on at the moment, but I sometimes feel not having a clear definition between work and home is only adding to the confusion.

Cabin fever

It doesn’t take long, right? As a culture that’s accustomed to being ‘on-the-go’ it usually means we’ve always got something to do and some place to be. Having a lot of that taken away certainly isn’t all bad, but there’s only so long you can stare at the four walls of your home-office (or four other members of your family) without going a little stir-crazy.

The unknowns

Obviously as COVID continues unfolding there’s a lot of uncertainty. It’ll be interesting to see what a post-Coronavirus world looks like, especially when it comes to work. All the reasons that companies may have previously limited working from home agreements – such as a perceived lack of productivity or an old-fashioned need for ‘bums on seats’ – have basically been thrown out the window during this pandemic.

Will companies continue to fork out massive rents for massive office spaces moving forward? Or will they head in the other direction and invest in more space to comply with social distancing requirements? Will work practices change to become permanently more ‘remote’? Will we see companies rotating staff on different days of the week? Is this the end of hot-desking? Who knows?

The only thing we probably know for certain at the moment is that when this is all over, things are going to be different one way or another.

In the meantime, we’d love to know what your personal working-from-home pros and cons have been or what you think the future of work holds for your industry, so let us know in the comments below or get in touch with us here.

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