How are you doing working from home?

Anyone who's read my blog will know I'm a data nerd. I'm extremely grateful to all the business professionals in my network who answered this survey for me earlier this week and who are continuing to answer the survey. 

If there are any major shifts in insight, I will update this blog based on your new responses. I hope you find the results as fascinating as I do. Please click on the charts, and they will enlarge. This should help you to see them properly, particularly on mobile devices.

Companies seem to be doing a good job of enabling their employees to work from home effectively. You can see some of the challenges that they face, including social isolation. Some of your other responses that stood out for me included:

• Seeing people live, interacting with them. Feeling the vibe in the team.
• Not being able to have face to face meetings with clients and in some cases colleagues too.
• I prefer working from home so no issues
• People and mental breaks with others.
• Co-worker engagement. Time and space to separate work from home.
• Nice to work face to face particularly at the start of new assignments
• Physical stand up desk, appropriate chair, internet reliability and performance.
• Direct contact with coworkers- ability to meet in person to go over drawings.
• Frequent and informal communication.
• Contact with others, commute, Coffee breaks with friends

Everyone seems pretty happy about their WFH arrangements and not any more pessimistic about the future than they were back in March. 

The top challenges you are struggling with include Social Isolation and Internet connectivity. I get the struggles of wifi, for sure!

As before, under 'other' you've put given us some wonderful insights into how you're coping with working from home during this pandemic. I found some of your responses funny and others, a bit ominous.

• Efficiency of others - this is a bit scary!
• Difficulty staying focused because I am at home all the time
• Missing the face to face communication, which can mean better communication overall.
• Too much meetings  - Love this one!
• Informal communication is harder,
• Creating a good work life balance
• Sensing other actual demeanour and appetite for the work is more difficult when not face to face.
• I work more, with less breaks so the burn out is around the corner...
• Difficulty repairing staff computer when either of us are not in the office.
• printing - Who doesn't get frustrated with printers? Luckily my home HP printer is working fine right now!

I've also been running this same poll on Twitter. So far 1,285 people have answered. Here are the results:

In the charts above, I was first pleasantly surprised at how open everyone was about talking about their mental health. I was expecting to see this result that your mental health has suffered through the pandemic. There's been a lot of discussion in the media this year. However, poor mental health did not look nearly as much of a problem as you'd imagine by looking at all the media reports on this.

What I thought was great news, was that your physical health and wellbeing seemed to be actually improving whilst working from home. Perhaps you have more time to exercise and you do not have to spend so much time sitting, stuck in cars or trains, commuting to work?

It was interesting how your work patterns have adjusted to a purely work from home situation.  I imagine some of you who are almost entirely not working to a regular 9-5 schedule has the type of work that supports that 

- Perhaps architects or software programmers? - I know from working with them, that they (software programmers) often love to work late at night, for example.

You can take the survey here.