Homeworking: Is it messing with your head?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Working from home could outlast the pandemic. But workers' experiences with homeworking in lockdown are not all positive. Manuela Saragosa speaks to some office workers who've struggled to adapt to home life, and to Dr Zofia Bajorek, research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies in the UK, who's been surveying workers on the pressures they've faced in lockdown. Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, explains why face-to-face contact is so important for innovation in the workplace, and why flexible working with a mix of office and home will ultimately make us all happier.
(Photo: A woman works from home, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:06.8 | Coming up is working from home, messing with your head. |
| 0:10.4 | When your home becomes your workplace, it's full on and it's hard to switch off. |
| 0:17.1 | Mentally, that's really, really draining. |
| 0:19.2 | And you're just at home trying to do everything. |
| 0:21.5 | As companies encourage employees to keep working from home, we ask, is it good for us? |
| 0:26.8 | People have never wanted to, when they've adopted flexible working arrangements pre-COVID, |
| 0:33.5 | never wanted to work 100% from home. The evidence is clear on that. |
| 0:37.6 | That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.7 | Remember this. |
| 0:52.3 | The sounds of an office. Some might even say the sounds of another era. You can download it from a website. It's called soundofcolleagues.com. And it's part of a project made by the Swedish sound designer's Red Pipe Studios. Tobias Norman is its co-founder. |
| 1:12.0 | So Sound of Colleagues is actually a website where you can find the sounds from your colleagues |
| 1:17.9 | that you might be missing when you're working from home, which means you can have some |
| 1:21.8 | clattering from the keyboard, some voices whispering or talking in the phone. |
| 1:28.3 | The office dog in the background and stuff like that. |
| 1:34.3 | Then you can create your own office environment sound-wise. |
| 1:42.3 | I think so far we had more than 600,000 people visiting the web page |
| 1:47.5 | from all over the world. And the funniest part is that the response is more or less the same all over. |
| 1:53.4 | People really recognize those sounds and they feel like it feels more comfortable when they're |
| 1:59.3 | sitting by themselves, working from home, |
| 2:02.0 | to have a bit of the office noise in the background. |
| 2:07.8 | It's that kind of thing that Naila Salam is missing. |
... |
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