Retirement Planning - Lessons Learned

[RickB]

Article written June 2020. Makes better sense now.

I'm not gonna be convinced that there were almost twice as many folks working full time from home than from a dedicated workplace at any time during this pandemic. Retail, service, transportation and manufacturing account for too many jobs.

 

[Oaktree]

A few companies prohibit employees working from home if home is a different state...

Happened to a friend that moved to his Tahoe cabin on the Nevada side...

Something about differences in state employment laws?

The state I live in has no income tax, but all our neighboring states do. There has been some friction between the states regarding whether remote workers whose employer is in another state, and whether these employees owe income tax in a state they no longer commute to.

So many companies are now facing the reality that they can toss their employees a few dollars more to stay home and it costs the employer less money in the long run, as they don't have a physical plant to maintain. Think about it. No heat, no lights, no I.T. staff to maintain no network. No desktop workstations. No restrooms. No office to clean.

My wife works for a financial institution. She's been working from home since March. The only time she goes in is if they need a physical thing done, like loading money on plastic cards. That only happens 1 day every few weeks. I think she's had to go in less than 10 times in 9 months. She has a card table set up in the corner of the living room. That's her office. They gave her a laptop and a 2nd monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. Her boss said they've been more productive than ever, and doubts they'll go back to working in the office anytime in the foreseeable future. No reason to.

I suspect they are more productive, because they aren't right next to each other gabbing all day. Everything is done via web calls and zoom meetings.

Of course zoom meetings can be a big time-waster as well, even more so than in-person ones. Audio and video can be quite variable in quality, from OK to almost unintelligible.

How does it work as far as work equipment goes? Can an employer require a remote employee to have a computer that meets certain requirements (ie-OS, virus protection, performance, etc.), and if so, who is responsible for the cost? If your computer crashes, are you suspended until you get a new one? What about internet service? What may be perfectly adequate for home use: email, browsing, etc. could be woefully inadequate for remote work. Are employees expected to foot the bill for upgrades? Kind of a gray area to say the least.
To work from home also requires a certain amount of discipline...way too easy to do personal stuff when you're on the clock, as well as an implied expectation of working outside of regular business hours.

Also, humans are social creatures. How long are we going to be happy being isolated away from anyone but immediate household members?

 

[riptides]

Not as gray as you would believe. Some companies adapted to the new working environment rather quickly. And some employees looked at Remote Work as an opportunity not to be missed. Stipends and equipment were negotiated between the parties and off they went.

....

Of course zoom meetings can be a big time-waster as well, even more so than in-person ones. Audio and video can be quite variable in quality, from OK to almost unintelligible.

How does it work as far as work equipment goes? Can an employer require a remote employee to have a computer that meets certain requirements (ie-OS, virus protection, performance, etc.), and if so, who is responsible for the cost? If your computer crashes, are you suspended until you get a new one? What about internet service? What may be perfectly adequate for home use: email, browsing, etc. could be woefully inadequate for remote work. Are employees expected to foot the bill for upgrades? Kind of a gray area to say the least.
To work from home also requires a certain amount of discipline...way too easy to do personal stuff when you're on the clock, as well as an implied expectation of working outside of regular business hours.
....

 

[MossRoad]

The state I live in has no income tax, but all our neighboring states do. There has been some friction between the states regarding whether remote workers whose employer is in another state, and whether these employees owe income tax in a state they no longer commute to.



Of course zoom meetings can be a big time-waster as well, even more so than in-person ones. Audio and video can be quite variable in quality, from OK to almost unintelligible.

How does it work as far as work equipment goes? Can an employer require a remote employee to have a computer that meets certain requirements (ie-OS, virus protection, performance, etc.), and if so, who is responsible for the cost? If your computer crashes, are you suspended until you get a new one? What about internet service? What may be perfectly adequate for home use: email, browsing, etc. could be woefully inadequate for remote work. Are employees expected to foot the bill for upgrades? Kind of a gray area to say the least.

Also, humans are social creatures. How long are we going to be happy being isolated away from anyone but immediate household members?

Speaking just from my experience with my wife working from home and one of our kids working from home mostly... the company provides them with laptops and any peripherals they may need. If there's a problem with the company equipment, the company repairs it. Software issues are handled mostly remotely. Most hardware issues are actually user issues and those are handled remotely as well. Sometimes they have to take the machine in. Or they send a replacement in the mail and you put your malfunctioning one in the return box.

As far as internet service goes, that is an unknown for us. We already had it, there's no data usage that would exceed our normal monthly usage, and the same goes for phone. If it did, and we had to upgrade our connectivity, I suspect her employer would either provide a stipend for that or give her a pay bump. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

Zoom meetings, like in-person meetings, are only as good as the person facilitating the meeting. My wife's manager is an excellent motivator and after the coffee-talk, they get down to business. It's the new normal and my wife and all of her coworkers like it.

They don't have to wear business casual anymore. They can wear pretty much whatever they want from the waist down. Acceptable top. They all pretty much wear slippers now instead of business footwear. Their cats and dogs come to the meetings as well. Some have children and once in a while they pop in. For the most part, they are all family-like anyway, so it's not a distraction, but rather, a team building experience, when they all see what the others go through at home.

My wife is mostly on a call-desk helping internal employee service requests. When she's not doing that, she's doing her daily tasks. She's self-motivated, as are most of her coworkers. The management could see if they aren't getting their tasks completed in a timely manner.

I don't really have any more to add. I haven't met anyone that works a desk job from home that hates it.

 

[MossRoad]

Not as gray as you would believe. Some companies adapted to the new working environment rather quickly. And some employees looked at Remote Work as an opportunity not to be missed. Stipends and equipment were negotiated between the parties and off they went.

Yep.
It's kinda like when I was put on call 35 years ago.
They gave me a company pager.
Then a pager and the bag phone.
Then a dumb terminal
Then they paid for a 2nd line at my house and a modem and a computer.
Then they took away the pager and bag phone and gave me a company cell phone.
Finally they gave me that phone, put it in my name, and gave me $50 a month and I'd use my own cell phone.

 

[MikePA]

I read the entire article. It left me with a lot of questions. 42% seems awful high and is it sustainable. There's a lot of shortages and disruptions right now. It would be sad to believe that only 26% of workers are 'essential', must be a lot of waste out there.

Assuming I am reading the article correctly, and allowing for rounding, the following adds up to 100%.

42% - Essential and working from home. (If they were not essential why would they be working from home?)
33% - Not working
26% - Essential service workers who are working but can only work "...on their business premises."

The company I recently retired from, a health insurance/hospital system, sent everyone whose job allowed them to work from home, home. If that meant providing them with a laptop, or even a desktop, they got one. Initially, some WFH people had to work second or third shift since there was not sufficient remote access capacity (VPN) for everyone to work first shift. Once capacity was added, everyone could work first shift. Note this included conference calls and video conferencing. As MossRoad indicated, this was possible because the remote access had been in place for decades, it only had to be expanded.

People were then grouped into; (1) Full Time WFH (2) Full Time in the Office (3) Had to be in the office one or two days / week. Excluding the hospital system, 80% of the work force could WFH either full or part time.

The last I heard, people would not be back in the office earlier than July, 2021 and, odds were, people categorized as Full Time WFH, i.e., they had no business reason to be back in the office, would permanently work from home.

A small group was formed to identify the issues, e.g., the township/cities where we have offices received tax revenue from every employee who worked there. What entity receives this tax revenue now that 1,000s of people were no longer working in that township/city? How will payroll systems need to be changed to support this?

Finally, productivity went up because many people were actually working more than 8 hours a day and not because they had to. Grab a sandwich from the kitchen instead of going out to eat. Shorter walk to the coffee maker. No chats in the halls. Obviously, some of these also represent a potential problem. Lots of information and business knowledge is exchanged during 'chats in the hall' or someone dropping by your office/cube.

The pandemic has resulted in a huge workforce experiment. I imagine many companies are evaluating the ongoing need to maintain office space and real estate when a good percentage of their workforce is WFH.

 

[MossRoad]

When I asked my wife why productivity went UP when they all went to working from home, she rolled her eyes at me. Why? Because they were all stopping by each others' desks and chatting several times a day.

 

[MoKelly]

When I asked my wife why productivity went UP when they all went to working from home, she rolled her eyes at me. Why? Because they were all stopping by each others' desks and chatting several times a day.

If you have 10 employees doing the same thing and each persons productivity goes up by 10%, doesn’t that mean you can fire one employee and still get the work done?

MoKelly

 

[dmccarty]

...
The pandemic has resulted in a huge workforce experiment. I imagine many companies are evaluating the ongoing need to maintain office space and real estate when a good percentage of their workforce is WFH.

I have been working home since mid March as had everyone in my company. I read that a company site, in a different state, is already rearranging the open office space, to support WFH. Not sure what they are doing as it was only mentioned in passing.

We have had the technology to WFH for many years and for a number of years it was encouraged. Management then took WFH away with the excuse of productivity and innovation. It was back to the office or loose your job. It really was about a method to get people to quit so the company would not have to lay them off and pay severance. We lost some really key people because of this...

Which is ironic, since we are now all WFH, and will continue to do so for most of this year, if not all year. I really do not see us returning to the office full time over the next couple of years. The company can save a bunch of money getting out of leases which they have already done. The interesting question is how will they sell buildings that nobody wants to buy but which they no longer have a use?

Later,
Dan

 

[dmccarty]

If you have 10 employees doing the same thing and each persons productivity goes up by 10%, doesn’t that mean you can fire one employee and still get the work done?

MoKelly

Could be, but the big problem is we have, is that we do not have enough people to get work done and they certainly are not going to hire people. Many companies have been working under the Moronic Management Mantra of Do More With for too long.

Later,
Dan