• Question: When we was in isolation, was you still working from home?

    Asked by Aroney s on 10 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Femi Olushola

      Femi Olushola answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      Yes, I was working from home over the isolation period. A lot of my design work has included computer simulations, drawings, review of documents, report writing, and engineering calculations. These kept me busy alongside meetings/teleconferences on various media platforms.

    • Photo: Antoni De Vincenzo

      Antoni De Vincenzo answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      Yes. I was still working as the company I work for is regarded as essential. This is because we are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of data centres

    • Photo: Dave Horner

      Dave Horner answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      Yes, I had to switch to working from home, whereas normally I would travel a lot for work. We had to quickly adapt the approach of how we work, instead of being able to visit sites during construction for review and issue identification. This meant a lot more video calls, interviews with vendor staff over video calls, and lots of photos to review building work progress on sites. Other aspects of my job didn’t change too much – we were still able to complete drawing designs, document creation and review with vendors remotely via email and video chats as we had done prior to the isolation period.

    • Photo: Steve Bowes-Phipps

      Steve Bowes-Phipps answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      In the lockdowns, I worked from home – which meant I spent a lot of time on zoom calls! Sometimes I would have them scheduled back-to-back all day long – it was very tough and I experienced “zoom fatigue”

      Much of my work can be done online at home, but I like to collaborate with my colleagues, to bounce ideas and questions around to be creative and not narrow my thinking. That is quite tough to do spontaneously by zoom. I also needed to visit data centres in person, but that was not possible in lockdown and so I had to rely on questions and remote workshops but this took a 5 day piece of work more than 3 weeks to complete!

      In-between the lockdowns I travelled into the City of London to work in our office about 3 days/week

    • Photo: Amber Villegas - Williamson

      Amber Villegas - Williamson answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      Yes I worked from home during lockdowns in 2020, although I was working from before then. Most of what I do I split into 2 types of jobs either a Home Job or an Away job.
      When doing a Home Job I review documents, write reports, have various online meetings, presentations, Twitter etc When I do an Away Job I travel to a country and concentrate on one site (either looking closely at their operations or doing demonstrations to prove the site works like the design) for the whole week before coming home and writing up the report with everything that happened.

      When I work from home my schedule is my own and apart from meetings I can start / finish when it suits me 🙂

    • Photo: kristina kerwin

      kristina kerwin answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      During the first wave, we all had to work from home. Last winter, because people working in research were considered critical workers and because I needed access laboratory to do my work – I was able to go to work. It was nice not to be stuck at home, but very lonely because there were no students on the campus – it felt like a ghost town at times.

    • Photo: Steve Wright

      Steve Wright answered on 30 Nov 2021:


      A lot of the teams in the sector were classed as Key Workers – so while we worked from home when we could, the physical nuts and bolts of buildings still needed to be taken care of.

      I am lucky that our teams who do 24 hour support were able to continue working and carefully looked after each other to make sure we avoided Covid.

    • Photo: Kamran Lateef

      Kamran Lateef answered on 30 Nov 2021:


      In short, yes.

      The sector we work in supports Critical National Infrastructure in the UK – meaning people working in this field are effectively considered ‘Key Workers’. You might of heard of this term being used to refer to NHS front line staff and the Police forces across the country.

      Therefore key personnel throughout the data center sector were allowed to travel to a place of work (including Data Centers).

    • Photo: Jordan Galloway

      Jordan Galloway answered on 1 Dec 2021:


      Yes, since lockdown I have primarily worked from home. Occasionally we have had to travel to client sites or the office (whilst being COVID safe). It has been a challenge but very rewarding as well.

    • Photo: Andy Putnam

      Andy Putnam answered on 2 Dec 2021:


      Yes at the start, after about 4 weeks we started back out on sites again. I did a lot of working from home where i could, but my job needed me to get out to sites.

    • Photo: Stephen Whatling

      Stephen Whatling answered on 2 Dec 2021:


      I was working from home for much of the lockdowns but we provide 24 hour support to keep data centres up and running and all these people kept working and visiting sites across the country to make this happen. They were all key workers.

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