A year ago, our President advised his fallow South Heficans that we would all have to stay at home for a bit.

There are a lot of songs with the word ‘home’ in them. There’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound (Homeward bound I wish I was Homeward bound, Home where my thought’s escapin’, Home where my music’s playin’, Home where my love lies waitin’, Silently for me). There’s John Denver’s Take me home. There is Going Home, to the tune of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.

I’m sure you can think of plenty more. So, anticipating the high-up and utterly clueless would do all they could to make the situation worse than just getting flu, I had pre-equipped the staff with laptops, and our resident genius, aka SuperTech, had rigged things up so that they could work on the office computer and the central drive from the comfort of their own home, et cetera. And so they went home. We decided that each day we would all log on to WhatsApp at 09:30 and discuss who was doing what and schedule site visits and meetings and see how it went. It went and has gone remarkably well. We run a paperless office (we don’t do any manual filing) and so all can get hold of all documents and standards that we need. SuperTech keeps it all running and we have backup to the backups that we keep for backup. The staff no longer have to drive to work. We do get together from time to time to discuss design work but only once a week.

So, having sailed into a new ocean, so to speak, I thought I would share some rules for working from home. Well, actually not. How you arrange yourself at home is your affair. What I mean is how we work on projects while working from home. As I said, we all log on at 09:30 via WhatsApp. It is vital that we all have a good WiFi signal. At 09:30, we agree who will do what and by when and then we follow up each day. Compared with working in the office, this is more management than before but when output is results based and not appearance based, people become aware that they must deliver what they said they would. This may seem obvious but, in fact, office workers very often sit at the desk and tweet or WhatsApp or Pinterest and don’t get the job done but cover themselves because they think, “Well, I’m here, the boss can see I’m here, so, if the report is not finished, I can just say it’s taking longer than I thought.” This no longer happens because quite the reverse – if they get the designs or the reports finished apple snap (that is, quickly) they can sit and watch TV the rest of the day.

On another topic – meetings. When I think how much time I have wasted in meetings where there are the client, the architect, the project manager, the civil engineer, the structural engineer, the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer, the safety consultant, the office dog and the car guard . . . thinking of this I am embarrassed that human beings can do that to one another. Meetings online are very great and very efficient.

There’s another great result of working from home: not nearly as much printing paper is taken home by the staff and our printer cartridge life has multiplied by four.

Is there a downside? Well, if you don’t leave home as much as you did before, it could get on your nerves. Conversely, you could get lonely. Neither of these affect me, since I have lived on my own for a very long time. And when I walk to work, out the house and down to the office, the dogs follow me to work.

A final note: to work from home, you have to be honest with each other. I’ll leave you with that. Enjoy.