So I run a SME that has a handful of staff, and our work has us doing a fair bit of travel, not only around our home city but also interstate. Mostly we travel to co-locate and directly work with a bunch of different clients.
To do this (and because we’re a small company) we often hire service office spaces when on the road, always using one provider in particular. Usually we just use them to do follow up work after a client meeting or chase up new leads.
But then coronavirus happened. You know the story here: businesses got put on hold literally everywhere. Our little company was effectively grounded – we had to stop travelling for work, instead working from home.
As you’d expect, I reached out to the office provider to pause our contract, postponing payments for a service we could no longer use. I figured because the government put these obligations on landlords about the spaces they rent out that our office provider would do the same thing in good faith. Not so much.
I called the main location we use, the one where I signed up for the service, and the provider told me they wouldn’t postpone payment to use their office spaces because their business was allowed to operate as normal.
Then I heard a cat in the background of the call: “Meow!”
You’re probably thinking, wait a minute, what? I did too.
It took me a second or two to work out that the call had diverted from their office phone to a staff member’s mobile phone. I was talking to someone else working from home… working for a business insisting that I had to keep paying to use their offices… even though their own staff were not.
Riiiight.
I said I wanted to speak to a manager, of course. The policy wasn’t fair.
The first person put me through to their manager. And, yep, you guessed it: also working from home and not in the office that they insisted I should still use.
How could I tell the manager was also working from home? Oh, the baby wailing in the background gave it away. I’ve been using their offices for almost three years, and I can tell you they never have kids in there.
I asked to be put through to a complaints team or sales team member, just someone who could actually see my issue and be willing to help. I figured I might hit a central office this time. Nope. Another person working from home and hypocritically standing by the provider’s policy.
I completely understand that people are doing the right thing in a pandemic and working from home to be safe. But it’s another thing to demand that I pay for me and my staff to do what the provider’s not willing to do. It’s not fair for them to be concerned enough to avoid their offices while expecting us pay and turn up to use them.
