Work from home guidance comes into effect in Essex from today
As part of the Government's Plan B to deal with the Omicron variant of Covid-19, the recommendation is for those who can to work from home
Employees and workers in Essex will be asked to work from home as part of the latest Covid-19 guidance issued by the UK Government. The measure is part of their plan B response to dealing with a recent outbreak of Covid-19 caused by the Omicron variant of the virus.
The order will stay in place until 5 January, when it will be reviewed and changed subject to the number of Covid-19 cases and the pressure on the NHS.
As a majority of the 661,300 people in the county who are employed (Essex County Council Open Data) get ready to start working from home again, we caught up with Professor Friederike Mengel from the University of Essex. She was part of a team that studied the impact of remote working on productivity and found that although it resulted in an increase in working hours (by 30 percent) it wasn't matched by an increase in output.
She explains, "I think there's a huge degree of heterogeneity and some people don't mind having distractions in the background. For others, it's a disaster.
"They get lonely or frustrated. And then you know their productivity service suffers as a result of that. So I think everybody has to see what works best for them, if we have to work from home."
Interestingly, they also found that large group calls contributed to this fall in productivity. "We found that what is quite unproductive, is sort of longer, bigger meetings with you know the the whole group, and you know where in these meetings tend to create too much sort of interruptions and distractions for people working from home.
"If there can be a system like a chat or something that people you know can work together as if they were in the same office, that probably will help."
Ultimately, she says employees must be given adequate resources to support them, whether they enjoy remote working or not. "Some people actually love it, they enjoy it and they feel much more comfortable working from home but others find it quite a strain on their mental health.
" So year, I think it's important to keep communication up between employers and employees and and to see you know who's coming down on which side and and what works best for for each team or each each employee."