The Alternative To A 2.5-Hour Commute: THE VOTER
I spoke to someone who was late on her first three-day-week day because of the LRT failure.
She then spent 4.5 hours on various Zoom calls, both with colleagues and in a meeting. Everything else she did that day was solo on her computer. Then she headed out for her 80-minute commute home. Very, very little of her 7.5-hour day was spent on any work-related personal interaction with other staff.
Other than the LRT unavailability, her next few days played out pretty well the same. She did eat lunch with some other fellow employees but that was personal, social time.
Had she been in her home office, she would have had virtually the same work experience minus the three-plus hours travel time and the transit fare. She also wouldn’t have been as tired and had more time with her family. Fortunately her children aren’t little so she has no child-care costs.
By the way, she spent nothing at any of the downtown shops or restaurants that the mayor said were going to be saved by the three-day week. Neither did any of her colleagues – she knows that because they were discussing it. With the added travel time and cost, they have no time or money to shop downtown.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog contributor who prefers to keep her identity private.
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
The painful truth
The Voter:
You can’t base one work day on a full working career.
Kosmo,
It was more of a representative day and she confirmed that her day working at home would have been much the same with the distribution of online vs offline work.
I didn’t mention that she works with people literally from coast to coast to coast. When she was working from home, she could accommodate the working hours in different time zones relatively easily. That won’t be happening as much when she’s in the office. She gave me a couple of examples such as a meeting being held at 3 pm Vancouver time. At home, she would just have an early dinner and take a longer lunch hour or start work later in order to be available at 6 pm our time to join the meeting. A 1 pm meeting in BC now happens during her homeward commute although, if it was a short meeting, she might stay downtown for that extra hour. It would be rare, she said, to join an east coast meeting at 9 a.m. their time since she’d have to leave home before 7 to be sure of getting in to the office in time.
Any of those meetings could easily be accommodated if she was working from home and she will continue to do that on her two days working out of the office. She does have the possibility of switching her in-office days to be available at irregular hours. She’s not offering that to anyone yet until she sees how it will affect her coordination with other employees at this end.
While I recognize that it’s not her whole career, I think it’s a valuable snapshot of how her days will play out. She did draw attention that if your in-office days and hers only overlap by one day, you will likely still have most of your contact by Zoom or by phone. She thinks it will be rare to have a whole team in the office at one time because, even if your days can be made to mesh, there aren’t enough work stations, including computers and telephones, for everyone.