I'm fortunate enough to have a job, in this era of pandemic, that lets me work from home. I'm in the roughly 1/3 of the workforce that is now doing so. It's a white-collar office job in a State Government bureaucracy.
For years I'd said our job could be done by telecommuting, that there was no reason we couldn't work from home. For years, I'd been told that was "absolutely impossible" or "utterly unthinkable" and was eventually told to stop asking or even mentioning the possibility of working from home. I was told it was never going to happen.
In March, they made the unthinkable happen real quick. On March 6, they pulled out a policy plan for working from home (apparently approved years ago and promptly shelved). . .where we'd all separately fill out written requests to work from home and send them up the chain of command to get approved (expected to take weeks for approval) and sign some lengthy telecommuting agreement IF our requests were approved, we'd all be issued laptop computers, we'd all be issued work phones, we'd all have to buy, at our own expense, locking filing cabinets for our home offices, and we'd still have to come in to work at least 1 day a week.
A week later, that changed. On March 13, suddenly they are asking if we have our own PC's with internet access at home, handing us flash drives and asking us to load all our work files on them, and asking everyone to share their personal cell phone numbers, and we are told at about 2 PM on Friday that, effective Monday morning, we're working completely from home for the next two weeks.
Those first two weeks were fine. Hands-off management, just make sure to fill out your timesheet online every day, e-mail in your finished paperwork to the one person left at the office who will upload them to the server (since we didn't have VPN or any other way to access the server), and fill out a status report form every week.
At the end of the two weeks, they said this was going to keep going for a while. . .and there aren't enough laptops to go around since the bulk of the civil service is all now working from home. . .and the IT department says VPN connections from our home computers are NOT going to be happening, so come and move your work desktop to your home and set it up there!
Also, around that time, they started to get a lot more micromanaging. E-mail your boss every day to clock in to work, e-mail them to clock out, e-mail them when you go on lunch, e-mail them when you come back from lunch. Status report forms are now daily, and they're watching with a hawk's eye what's on there and if you said you spend X time on something and they think that's too long, there will be hell to pay. I got assigned a case that was part of a program I'd never worked with or touched before, so I put on my daily status report one day that I'd spent the day reviewing the policies, laws, and regulations around that program. . .only to be chewed out saying it shouldn't have taken all day to do that and I was wasting time. Yet, if we were in the office that's still how long that task would have taken and nobody would have noticed or cared if I spent all day reading regulations and laws and policies about a new program I'd never had to work with before.
Informal office communications are a thing of the past. No more friendly telling someone something, everything is now a formal, stern e-mail (since it's on the record). Conversations that would be handled amiably and off-the-record in the past are now stern and formally worded e-mails for the record.
. . .and on top of the stress from the coronavirus pandemic we're all under, my father is dying. He's got advanced bone cancer, he's in a rest home that's under a strict quarantine lockdown due to the virus, so I can't even go to see him. He's been diagnosed with "weeks" to live, and they said that about 2 months ago. Every time I talk to him, it's clear he's fading, he's always more and more tired, sleepier and sleepier, and while he says he's "feeling fine" and "no issues", he's visibly wincing and grimacing as he says it, putting on a brave face. Barring a true miracle, I've seen my father for the last time in person and will most likely be burying him in the next month or two.
They now do a weekly conference call staff meeting, we're told this is the status quo "in the long term" and that even initial discussions about returning to the office aren't happening and won't happen until there's a vaccine, herd immunity, or a cure for the virus.
I know this has taken a toll on my productivity (and quite bluntly, my mental health), I think it would on just about anyone. . .so when they chew me out for not getting a lot of work done and I try to explain that, I'm told in no uncertain terms that if I'm on the clock I'm expected to be at 100% functionality and lost productivity due to worries or stress is NOT acceptable, that if I can't work at full capacity due to my father or due to stress over the coronavirus, I should take sick time off work.
Note that our job doesn't have paid leave for bereavement, when my father dies, I'll have to take sick leave for that too.
While I like not having to spend an hour and a half each day commuting, the increasing micromanagement, breakdown in office communications, and absolute lack of any empathy or compassion over what's going on with my father is making me very stressed.
