How are the rail strikes affecting you?
Simple question: how are this week's rail strikes affecting you and your business or charity? Any other thoughts about the strikes, send them across.
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7 responses from the Newspage communityCopy all
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We've had to tell our team to work from home for the week. We pay nearly £7,000 a month for our office, and it's sat empty this week. With a lot of staff off for Christmas from next week, and more train strikes scheduled for the first week back in January, it means we probably won't all be together as a team again until mid-January, which will cost us money.
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This morning I fought my way into work with grit and determination on a frozen bicycle with frozen brakes, only to see a lady commuting through London on a penny farthing. She somehow seemed to make it look easy despite the heavy traffic and icy roads. I feel like there is a life lesson in there somewhere but I'm too cold to work it out right now.
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I am getting fed up with these train strikes. I have lost money on hotels, and had to attend an event online. I have used money on petrol when a train would have been better. I don't know the ins and outs but truthfully I don't care. Just get it sorted and sorted fast.
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Our company has always been vulnerable to rail strikes because we have offices in some of the UK's biggest cities. In the past, this has made it hard for our employees to get to work and to travel to meet clients. Fortunately, for us, the world has evolved since then. The work-from-home culture and flexibility to hold virtual meetings really helps office-based businesses like ours to better prepare for any type of rail strike disruption.
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Very few of us are untouched by the disruption caused by these strikes as we are all to some degree reliant on transport. Our food supplies to local shops get disrupted, as does our post as a result of rail strikes and heavy snow. So a double-whammy of snow and rail strikes doesn't pass unnoticed. Snow closed schools locally yesterday and the M25 was brought to a standstill.
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In a world of online meetings and working from home the railways could find themselves in real trouble; they are already seen as expensive for the most popular routes unless you can navigate the overly complex ticketing system (how is it cheaper for me to fly to Scotland than go by train?), if they are now seeing as totally unreliable, they could find themselves with workers making demands that the reduced passenger numbers simply can't meet. This is bad for all of us, as getting people out of their cars and onto trains is a great way to reduce the nation's carbon footprints and meet the ambitious green agenda goals that we're putting on ourselves.
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I run a small human translation agency and even though we are 100% remote we do meet occasionally with some of our team members in the UK and we set up face-to-face meetings from once in a while with clients.
Even though it has impacted us very little and have missed some meetings because of this more recently I still try to maintain a positive attitude as we are still human beings after all.
Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Some people have decided to strike for their rights and we lost or delayed some meetings but on my end people who I've had to meet also understood why I was late so at least even though meetings can be rescheduled I've got a positive out of it since I didn't lose my opportunity to do business with those companies for something that's out of my control.
Even though it has impacted us very little and have missed some meetings because of this more recently I still try to maintain a positive attitude as we are still human beings after all.
Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Some people have decided to strike for their rights and we lost or delayed some meetings but on my end people who I've had to meet also understood why I was late so at least even though meetings can be rescheduled I've got a positive out of it since I didn't lose my opportunity to do business with those companies for something that's out of my control.