I cannot be alone in detecting the enormous drop in productivity when dealing with large commercial organisations.
My office does a great deal of telephoning in pursuit of issues raised with us by constituents, and I do quite a bit myself for my own purposes. It’s always been a bit of a bugbear, but the agony of very long waits on the telephone has multiplied exponentially.
You are warned when you reach the first hurdle: the recorded message telling you that because of Covid19 there will be extended delays in answering.
It is not uncommon to wait in a queue for half an hour only for the line to go dead and you have to just give up or start all over again.
Last week I did a short interview on Times Radio. I followed a yet another professor (they must cloning them) who had produced the results of his latest study showing how, on the contrary, there had been a massive increase in productivity consequent on so many people working from home.
How did he discover this?
As far as I could make out he asked the sampled home-workers, who told him gladly that they were more productive.
Is he a professor of gullibility or what?
Asking individuals to measure their own productivity is hardly an objective assessment.
As a consumer of the services of banks, building societies, insurance companies, law firms, government departments, I can safely say they are kidding themselves if they think they are more productive.