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QOTW: Has your workplace seen post-lockdown upgrades?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 30 October 2020, 16:31

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The spectre of Covid-19 pervades everyday life. It's become more prevalent recently as cases continue to rise.

Many people are taking simple precautions to mitigate the spread. Responsible workplaces have also invested in upgrading their infrastructure in recent months.

It's to this context we ask if your workplace has seen any upgrades - technology, health, security, distancing, etc, - over the summer? And given we're on the cusp of another larger-scale lockdown, what, if anything, is your workplace doing to keep you safe?

Feel free to comment in the section below.



HEXUS Forums :: 25 Comments

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Basically shut the office, been in once to pick up some gear since mid march and no one else was on prem at the time.

They are going to review the situation end of January 2021 so home working till at least then.

One of the lucky ones I guess.
I work from home, alone, so…

I do plan to do some upgrades but that was on the cards with or without lockdown, just more towards the end of this year at the earliest, stock issues might be the main delay now lol.
My workplace has made a lot of changes with respect to distancing & cleaning, but no tech changes. We've had to buy headsets for videoconferencing ourselves and bill work for them because the IT depart seems unable to get hold of any.
The office I work in has been fully upgraded with A4 printed signs that point people in which direction they should walk, with a few portable workmen barriers to assist people to know which why they should be walking. Generally every other desk has a sign on saying out of use. There is some hand sanitiser scattered around the place. There was talk of a post-it note system to use the toilets, but I'm not sure what got implemented, I've generally avoided being on site for more than a couple of hours in the last six months.

Only about four or five people are going into the office because for whatever reason (more convenient to work in the office, some tasks occasionally need to be performed on site). It's a large site that is generally empty. Ironically it's been left to rot over the last few years and they finally caved and started to invest in the building, we now have working heating!

Our main operational call-centre is a bit different, they're more eager to keep people on site because who can make sure that the staff are doing their job if they're at home? As a result, they've had to close a couple of times for deep cleans as people catch covid.

From a technology perspective, there has been a reluctant roll-out of teams outside a few select IT people. Management are doing their best to avoid using it on principle.

The board has adopted home-working as a goal (which was previously outlawed pretty much entirely), but 3 months after this revelation, nothing has been actioned by individual companies and directors.

In summary, everybody has changed and yet nothing has.
As always, my work has been spamming the heck out of our email inboxes, with the latest news on what they're doing, what teh new regulations are, what the government said about the new regulations, what the CEO/HR/H&S Dept said about what the government said about the new regulations, what we're all doing about the new regulations, etc etc etc….

It's like a constant Twitterfeed, but with the added actual Twitterfeed of customers praising, condemning and outright damning us to hell and back, over all this Covid stuff.

Tech was basically more of the laptops we were in the process of issuing, along with several upgrades to the network and VPN system (which inevitably fail).
There's a whole bunch of stuff put in all the offices, like the stuff Dashers has, but with very little footfall as we're mostly WFH wherever possible.
I'm split between WFH, and field/site visits which never take me within 100yds of another human, unless they want to get run over by a train or drowned in raw sewage.

We get PPE as a matter of course, so this is just costing you bill-payers the company more money due to the Covid-inflated prices.