Harold Wood Branch Manager shares his experience of working from home

3rd April 2020

Thank you to Daniel Bourne, manager of our Harold Wood branch for sharing his experience of working from home. We know these are unconventional times for all of us and we're all adapting to different routines. We hope reading this insight shows you that we're all in this together even if we're apart!

Working from home

There have been certain benefits working from home, being home on time to help with dinner is one, however, working from home with a 2 & 3 year old who are not at nursery & school is a whole new challenge that many of us are facing. It seems the kids are beginning to get used to the new dynamic of us working from home and knowing that they unfortunately, can't always have our undivided attention.

Work routines have been put in place so that my wife and I both get time to fully focus on work. For instance, when the kids are up at 6am I take on the role as parent whilst my wife works and then we switch over at 9:30 and again at 13:00, 14:30 and so on.

Fortunately, most work is paperless and cloud based, with the main tool required to be a good estate agent is still a telephone.

I have certainly appreciated the extra time I get to spend with my family, although, my work family is greatly missed. My colleagues and I stay in touch with each other, tell jokes in the morning to lighten peoples moods and even had an afterwork conference call on a Friday, with all of us having a beer/gin as if we were out welcoming the end to a busy week.

I feel the future will bring many changes to how we work, whether it is working from home one day a week (where you can surprisingly can get a lot of work done without being pulled constantly from pillar to post). I certainly think conference calls will be used more often although that real face to face human interaction is deeply missed. Who knows, a traditional hand shake could easily become a thing of the past.