We find a lot of work done remotely is less productive
A couple of examples
If working from home and you have to scan a hard copy to other members of the office, 2nd, 3rd parties etc. the home scanner is usually not equipped to handle multiple pages. Thus you stand there and feed in one page at a time until the document is finished. This is very time consuming if perhaps you are a lawyer that needs multiple pages of documents sent tp all parties affected. Then you get comments, additions etc which require a repeat of the process. Very few homes are equipped with modern copiers. Have you ever tried to do a complicated will remotely???. Or perhaps a decision from town council on a zone variance. Impossible. Even a simple agenda with zoom, or skype is hard when you don't have the personal face to face contact. Did you know how many people use lip reading to assist the hearing of some people when they do not speak clearly?? You may not know if you do partial lip reading yourself or not
Another example is some body gets an idea to ask for bids on such and such. Requests are sent out to bidders, who spend hrs working out the material, labour, overhead, profit margin etc. only to find out the people requesting a bid, do not have the majority of decision makers on board with the need for such a part or what ever inventory JIT may be deemed sufficient. Thus at least two people have wasted time on a project that goes no where, where as if the people would have a meeting with such and such a request on the meeting agenda a decision is made in minutes as in yes or no
Just a couple examples of working from home as many think this is the new future. I am not saying working from some place other than a central office won't become more popular but it does have some draw backs in some applications.
Of coarse many people can trade from home very easily
Scanning docs? Not much of that going on anymore. Create it electronically and email. For legal docs, lawyers will just about always insist on originals relying on snail mail or fed ex, etc.
Bids that go no where? Not at all limited to working from home.
Have you ever had to feed a scanner 10 pages of documents one page at a time multiple times, as additions etc are made thus repeating the process many times especially to multiple parties who all have additions, different wording, thoughts added thus requiring a whole day or more on one document and then it may not be done to every bodies satisfaction
The regulators of municipal towns have a field day making changes as each has his personal turf
We don't take bidding seriously until a second request comes which saves a lot of time. They want our production thus we don't worry about loss of business. Took some time to figure that one out
Everybody on the other end works from home thus agreement is not always a done deal
We always insist on a hard copy from sales of grain as the e-mails do not always come. Usually one sale or load of grain is missing in the e-mail.
Statements are horrendous and full of mistakes but that hasn't changed from pre corona, except it is frustrating when people from home do not return phone calls in a day or two, as they seem to loose the phone call in the message box. The kids get on and erase the calls, often by mistake
No kids in an office messing with phone calls . At least that is the excuse, with home phone calls
Like I said, manually scanning docs is pretty rare in most places. Docs are electronically created (Word, EXCEL, PDF, etc.) and emailed. If multiple revisions from multiple parties are required/expected, the docs will be on a shared drive.