Last week’s poll: engineers and remote working

The official line from Number 10 is that if you can work from home then you should do, but is this tactic in the fight against Covid-19 appropriate for engineers?

remote working

Over 700 people took part in last week’s poll and 67 per agreed that they can perform most tasks remotely. A quarter took the opposite view, and the remaining eight per cent said they could work from home but their employer doesn’t support it, a situation likely to change after Boris Johnson’s address on March 23, 2020 telling the UK to stay at home.

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For a number of respondents, a degree of flexibility was already being practised before the outbreak of Covid-19.

“As a Systems Engineer dealing with software and hardware based systems I could do a lot of work remotely but always at some point had to visit the coalface,” said Another Steve.

“There are whole weeks when I can work at home effectively,” added Gary Williams. “But there are times when I need access to equipment/systems which requires me to be at my workplace, and that can last for weeks.”

“My company has increased VPN licenses, invested in Zoom and more Zoom rooms for conferences, allowed people to work from home when practical, we trust our staff to make the right decision,” said Mike Beadman.

Unsurprisingly, UK has experienced a 48 per cent growth in the use of business VPNs. Employers might be interested to know that increased homeworking has led to an upsurge in the number of hours people are working a week, with employees in the UK, France, Spain and Canada working an average of two hours more per day. According to NordVPN Teams, homeworkers in the US are racking up an extra three hours a day from their homes.

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