June 2020
I decided if I was going to spend way more time at home, I would do it with nice cups.
Espresso cups by Kim Wallace Ceramics, mugs by Takeawei.
When in pandemic, buy pottery
Auburn Botanic Gardens
May 2020
This album comes via a quick detour to update Wikipedia so that I understood how school reopenings worked in New South Wales in 2020, specifically:
From 11 May [2020], students returned to school one day a week with a plan for a phased return over several weeks. From 25 May, the phased return was replaced with full-time schooling.
Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales (2020)
I had decided in advance that when school went back — it was remote for seven weeks, and two weeks of Easter holidays — that my spouse and I would then immediately take a week off work. Thus, the week of 25 May, we went somewhere each day in Sydney to explore, of which the most photogenic was Auburn Botanic Gardens in late autumn colours.
Japanese maple
May 2020
Prime example of why I can’t declare photo bankruptcy: autumn in my mother’s garden in May of 2020.
By May, there was very little COVID in most of Australia, which had closed its borders to non-residents in late March and would not re-open them for tourists until February 2022. The weekend of 16/17 May was the first significantly unrestricted weekend, and so we went to visit my family post-haste.
First dawn
October 2021
The 11th was the date when NSW stopped having a 5km travel limit, so I left home before sunrise and drove to The Gap to watch the first far-from-home dawn.
Of course, it was damp and cloudy and dark, no dawn to be seen. There’s more variety in the transforms on the photos than I usually do, because the light was so average.
It was great.
First Sydney lockdown
March & April 2020
I was looking through my phone photo detritus from the time of the original closures (which were not as strict as the July to October 2021 ones, during which I mostly stuck to photographing sunsets rather than sign-of-the-times images).
Early on, this kind of sign was unusual enough that I photographed it especially:
I never figured out if the placement of a hand hygiene sign next to a cheap will preparation sign was deliberate, and if so, intended to be funny, shocking, or just attention-getting:
Speaking of bleak, we played one game of Pandemic but it got awfully real with outbreaks in East Asia and Russia:
Our local Flight Centre was lookng forward to welcoming us back for several months. It closed permanently nearly a year ago now:
I’ve never been to a ANZAC Day dawn ceremony in my life, but I did happen to be awake at dawn, so went and stood in my yard as was the style at the time.
Someone somewhere was audibly playing The Last Post.
Lockdown sunsets
August 2021
Watching the sun set from within my Sydney travel boundary somehow became a symbol of interstate rivalry. May it return to coffee soon.
Previously: Milk Beach.
Milk Beach, last days
July/August 2021
Starting 5pm Friday July 9, we could only travel within 10km of your home for exercise/recreation in Sydney. I’m not generally a fan of bright-siding these restrictions (“my workaholic husband has ditched the corporate rat race, any chance we could stick with widespread house arrest, it’s been just great for his blood pressure?”) but it does inspire a certain amount of scouring one’s vicinity for places to be. The ocean beaches are all slightly more than 10km as the crow flies from me, but some of the harbour beaches such as Milk Beach remained accessible.
I walked with a friend there during daytime and after that decided that a family excursion at sunset was called for:
The other reason to frantically find family excursions, as I told my family gloomily, was in case the rules got stricter, which indeed they did, a 5km radius from August 16. So the evening of August 15 we traipsed out once more to farewell Milk Beach for the time being, not, seemingly, the only ones:
That’s what little girls are made of
March 2020
The end of March was the season of the five reasons. It was also the beginning of the ongoing wet year. Each day we met our exercise (and general outdoor) quota by walking down to the nearest park and cycling: in V’s case riding his new mountain bike over wet turf and in A’s case, carefully paddling and balancing her pushbike as she learned to ride carefully down a hill.
On the way home on one trip, we heard, metres behind us, a small voice saying crossly “I bet that little girl”—A—”is allowed to…!”
I assumed that the question was about seeing friends or grandparents or having competitive sneezing parties, so called back to them to ask what they wanted to know. The father said not to mind but I insisted and he said “she wants to know if that little girl is allowed to eat mushrooms growing on the street”, allowing me to comfortably assert that A is not allowed to eat mushrooms found growing on the street. Neighbourhood norms, cemented.
Mythical creature
A plane! In September 2020!
I exaggerate, of course. They’re rare enough to draw attention, but they’re pretty frequent. Like this plane, they are almost all carrying cargo, not passengers.
Questions to ask of employers transitioning to supporting permanent telecommuting
Some employers are beginning to announce transitions to remote-friendly or all-remote workforces even after office work is judged safe again. This has a lot of potential upsides in reducing commutes, in increasing job opportunities outside of established tech centres, in giving people access to their preferred working styles.
But there’s also a lot of potential downsides where employees personally pay to recreate the parts of the office experience they need and nevertheless find that their career tops out early or that they’re summoned or semi-summoned back to a tech centre just as they’ve started to realise the benefits of remote work.
Thus, just as I’ve written before about questions you should ask when hired into an existing remote position, you should ask a similar set for a company or position transitioning to remote work, to make sure that it is invested for the long term and is clear about any career or financial sacrifices you will be required to make to be remote.
Are there limits on where employees can be located? It’s quite common for remote employees to be required to be based in certain timezones, countries, or states/provinces where the employer already has some kind of established presence.
Is this transition in fact permanent, or is there a review date? Moving away from a city is a very large investment, often in direct costs but definitely in opportunity costs. Best to make such a decision on a strong commitment from an employer to a long time frame.
Will compensation be adjusted downwards for employers who relocate to an area with lower cost of living (or lower market salaries)? There are some remote-first or remote-friendly employers who pay the same salary no matter where employees are located, but also many which pay against local cost of living or local market conditions.
Will all remote compensation be adjusted downwards on the assumption that everyone will leave high cost of living areas? Hopefully not! Because some people have substantial investments in their current area of residence, eg commitments to their partner’s career or to their local family or friends, or to the cultural scene or their hobbies, or to retaining the option to leave their current employer for another that will require them to be office-based.
Will employees who move to an area with less generous minimum benefits have their benefits cut? Eg, will they lose days of vacation or carer’s leave? Will their insurance be revised in line with their new residence’s minumums?
Will there be formal limits on which positions are available remotely?
Even in the software, creative, and research positions that can be done remotely, it’s common for companies to not allow all positions to be remote. Here’s some possibilities for what this might look like:
- you can’t become an executive if you’re remote
- you can’t become a people manager at all if you’re remote
- you can’t do security-sensitive or personnel-sensitive work if you’re remote
- you can’t achieve a certain job level if you’re remote
Best to know!
If the company is indeed open to all positions being remote, how are they going to ensure equality of opportunity?
If there are going to still be offices, it may in theory be possible to become an executive or a high level staff member while remote… but it eventually emerges that no one is actually doing those jobs remotely, that those folks are all office-based.
What does the employers plan for developing remote staff careers look like and how will they audit its success?
Will there be training and resources for workers transitioning to remote, for managers who are remote or managing remote workers, etc?
There are specific skills required to manage and be part of both all-remote teams and mixed-remote-office teams. Will these be taught to employees? Will there be trained support for specific situations that may arise (eg, it may be more difficult to reach remote employees in a suspected emergency)?
Will there be financial support for the costs of remote working?
Remote working passes the office maintenance costs onto employees, eg substantial extra energy costs (particularly in areas with very cold winters or very hot summers), additional space, need for office furnishings, higher Internet bills and larger mobile plans, IT equipment, etc. Will the employer reimburse these costs and to what extent?
Ideally this support isn’t too specific. Eg, “we’ll pay for a co-working space”: co-working spaces usually have open office plans and quite a few involve hotdesking (especially if you’re part-time). They’re thus generally not suitable for people who have a lot of sensitive meetings (ie most managers or HR staff), some people who need physical accommodations, or people who are unable to work well in open plan offices.
Conversely, “we’ll pay to fit out your home office”: establishing a home office requires that people have or can afford to move to a place with an extra room, and usually that there are only one or at most two people in the home who need a home office.
Flexibility is better.
Will business travel be mandatory or strongly encouraged?
Quite a lot of remote teams rely on an mandatory or near-mandatory all-hands in-person get together once or twice a year for team building purposes. This may be an easy trade for some to get the benefits of remote work, but it may not be for others, especially for primary carers.
This question may be especially relevant for people who are going to be one of the few remotes on their team and may be expected to travel to the office regularly; and also for managers, who are occasionally expected to travel out to each of their remote reports periodically.
Will there be allowed to be children/dependants in the house during working hours and are there restrictions on their care arrangements? At least when schools and daycares are open, it’s common for employers to insist that if there are children/dependants living with a remote worker, they must have a carer who isn’t the worker. It’s possible (jurisdiction dependent) for them to insist that the house must not have dependants present in work hours at all.
Questions to ask of employers transitioning to supporting permanent telecommuting by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.