Participating in a work from home university study

We are grateful for the opportunity to participate in a study buy a leading university in Australia into work from home and how it is playing out for businesses and employees. The questions are thoughtful, and encouraging insights of our own as we contemplate aspects of what is the new normal that we had not considered before.

When Covid began we immediately moved to a work from home model for all employees who wanted it. As an essential business’s we could keep the office open, and we did with a skeleton team.

Now, almost three years on, the office based team remains small, with only those who want to be here. Everyone else, the majority of our Tower Systems team, works from home in situations they prefer in terms of commute time, time management and local community connections.

We are careful to not encroach on non-work time and have a number of processes in place to ensure this does not happen.

With some colleagues saving three hours a day commute time, the family benefits as well as the individual. It’s terrific.

We have invested more in tech infrastructure to facilitate a good work from home experience. Cloud based applications make it easy for our colleagues to collaborate, which, as a software development business, is important. This investment will continue as new tech support platforms emerge.

At the office things have changed too. We have re-purposed space to create hot desks for those who do want to come in for a few days. Plus, we have created purpose-built broadcast facilities to serve the easier production of the digital content we publish, as well and for the video calls we use for team meetings, POS software demonstrations and more.

The university study is looking at a range of interesting topics related to work from home, from the business and individual perspectives. It’s an interesting study in that it is being undertaken without any commercial connection or agenda. we think this matters because much of the noise about work from home until now has been shrill ‘news’ from landlords and other property connected spokespeople.

We are just one of many businesses participating, and we are sincerely grateful for the opportunity.