People have significant others and children at home. Even people that work remote full time will be taking a productivity hit during the COVID-19 disruptions. I fear companies are going to look at the decreased productivity and conclude that remote work isn’t viable for them.

They should first discount the major productivity loss that's caused by people nervously refreshing news about COVID-19 all day long. That's not the fault of remote work, and will hopefully go away with the virus.

Still, many don't have the space to work distration-free with children at home when schools are closed. Open-plan offices can be noise, young children at home tend to be noisier.

My manager(people manager) has the same opinion. But in reality he is afraid that people might question what's does he do anyway if every one works from home. Companies are going to find out people managers job are really not as important.

In my companies it's the managers telling people to work from home when possible and parents asking to come in at least every other day to have some hours of distraction-free work.

Genuinely, I think this will backfire and it will be proof that remote working isn't for everyone..

I don't think it's going to show anything worthwhile as the whole pandemic thing is a huge confounding factor and the adoption has been hugely ad hoc. In particular people are going to suddenly find themselves working from home in completely unsuitable conditions and the whole social distancing thing means normal remote ideas like coworking spaces and coffee shops aren't really an option.

As someone who has been remotely working mostly from my home for two years today I'm joined by my wife and a three year old and a five year old. My work desk is in the living room as our house is teensy and trying to do anything of substance with two kids is very hard! On top of the added stress caused by the global situation being a distraction in itself.

My wife should be remote working but a last minute change meant it's now up in the air whether her office will actually allow VPN access. This is after they issued her with a brand new laptop, monitor and so on. So now she's spending the day at home tidying up our storage.

Remote work in this context is nothing more than trying to keep the wheels turning and people expecting the benefits that come with doing it more deliberately are definitely going to be disappointed.

I agree. I work remotely quite often, around a week every month - but I do feel like productivity has been reduced just because people around me also have reduced productivity, are less available on IM, etc.. I also miss going into the office and being there physically, even though I don't really sit at my desk, it's nice to have the space there.

I think so too, since the introduction will be anything but organized. People asking if they can just move their workstation to home...

But currently MS Teams is working fine in central Europe (Ger). There also isn't any incident report in the Office 365 portal.

There are some interesting browser based soft-vpn solutions that could work for a large amount of users. They could connect to their individual workstation instead of some terminal server that never was meant to support more than 20 concurrent users.

Given how busy the beach is this morning (UK), I'm presuming that everyone is taking full advantage of working from home.

It will be interesting to see how productivity is affected overall though.

Which makes me wonder, what is the general measure of productivity?

Meetings attended? Emails answered? Hours worked / Time in seat? Story points?

I don't know.

If it's valueable it will be the new normal, independent of it "being for anyone".

Will it? Won't it just prove that people might be able to "get by" at reduced productivity if they're suddenly forced to work remotely without being a "work remote" kind of person, or are properly equipped for it?

conferring immunity to future infections