To hate the Daily Mail and its anti WFH vendetta

This is exactly it. Alan sugar is pushing back to the office because he has huge investments in office real estate. They're crapping themselves about what they'll do if thousands of square feet lie empty 4 days a week and organisations choose to let them go.

I hate the Daily Mail full stop!

But yes, this anti-WFH stuff is ridiculous. Especially as some of their columnists live partly or wholly abroad; I can't easily see Richard Littlejohn getting regularly to the office from Florida, or Isabel Oakeshott from Dubai,

They're more worried about their urban property portfolios losing money.

WFH is killing the newspaper industry.

Even if this is true, along with killing the sandwich shop industry - this doesn’t mean we should scrap hybrid working!

reason was- there was no broadband 100 years ago.. or even 10

As if the DM ‘’journalists’ are in the office 😂

I hate the Daily Heil for many reasons.

I did not know they had an anti wfh agenda but I will add that to the list.

WFH is killing the newspaper industry.

I would respectfully suggest it is crap newspapers that are killing the newspaper industry. I am of an age to remember when reading one actually left you better informed than before.

We should be able to debate the WFH situation without people accusing others of skiving (it certainly does happen a lot) or insisting it works brilliantly for all. I have done both. I found during Covid the junior staff were sadly the ones who couldnt be trusted and the more senior people who were often more customer facing much better. I WFH now and did both in a big corporate for many many years.

You only have to see some of the threads on MN to know doing 'other things' for an unacceptable part of the day is rife and now the companies are fighting back. If it worked why wouldnt they allow it to stand? People never being available for an urgent client call at 1530 and if pushed on it the predictiable 'dentist appointment' was rolled out. Often due to lack of time the call went ahead without them. Yes, you could start a investigation about your suspicions but the corporate world is very often fast moving and the moment was gone. Companies are telling people to come back into the office because - yes - they dont trust them. A % of people have spoilt it for the rest. Its not a small %.

There is someone on MN who is obsessed with management sorting out the people who are doing other things whilst meant to be wfh but putting evidence together on individuals when they have a ton of other things to do is not fair on them and extremely time consuming. It wasnt a management task before. So companies have made a decision to get people back into the workplace.

I managed a couple of people who I knew were not working the way they were expected to. No calls before 0930 or early meetings at all, not being available for calls between 1530 and 1630 but of course taking their lunch hour. If they were told they would be expected on the call they sometimes came clean and said as a one off they needed to collect child from school or child was ill etc. Usual expected excuses.

There were various reorgainsations within the corporate before I could actually pull all the evidence together on a couple of people (and why shouldnt big corporates have re organisations!) so although I passed on my suspicions to the next Manager it often doesnt get addressed. I only had a team of 5.

I never had this issue when people were in the office.

WFH is killing the newspaper industry. Fewer commuters mean fewer people buying newspapers or reading free ones like Metro (owned by the Daily Mail group). The papers are struggling to make money through online advertising, so they are pushing people back to the office.

It's not just the Daily Mail (or as I refer to it, the Paper that Supported the Blackshirts). Or even just those on the right of politics, the London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan wants people back in offices.

Not sure if he still contributes but that vile Richard LittleDick used to post his ‘everything that is wrong with the UK’ rants from his gated community in Florida whilst his audience lapped him him up, I am going back years now though.

As is well known, the hacks who write this bile for the Daily Mail mostly work from home too - nothing else to add

Yes, the Times is covering this too.

People (employers, newspapers, the Government) need to decide what they want!

…but no-one on MN reads the Daily Mail? 🤔

I get it. I’m well past retirement age but members of my family WFH. One contractor goes in to the office more now than before Covid. Unfortunately the minority who misused/abused the privilege have made some companies less willing to support WFH as much.

Hybrid working has got to be the norm for tech based work, unless a physical presence, as in medicine, care, retail etc is needed, as long as output doesn’t suffer I can see the benefits to all.

My DH has been able to WFh since covid. He loves golf. He’s a consultant which means that his workload varies wildly. His company are flexible with him to play golf when workload is low, and in exchange he happily pulls very very long days when a project is due.

Before WFH he would just have been sat in the office with nothing to do during one of the down times. Which is such a waste of time.

Well the DM likes WFH today as the government have announced the growth of WFH means more people on disabilty benefits can now be expected to work.

This. Hard copies of the paper are much more profitable than internet clicks, and commuters buy papers. Homeworking is killing the daily newspaper industry.

This is it. A lot of businesses which have been run on patriarchal lines find WFH irritating because it allows working women to circumvent all the presenteeism and bullshit and actually structure their lives in a way which suits them.

I spend years working in the City having to pay a childminder to pick my kid up after school when I was able to work perfectly well from home because my bosses, egged on by male staff, thought that the bankers and brokers we work with would be offended at the idea of people working flexibly. Because we all have to ape this ridiculous culture of arses on seats just for the sake of it. Mainly because, let's be honest, "facilitated" men (men with stay at home wives running around after them), think that the natural order of things is the bloke going into the City to bring home the bacon with the man running around after the kids. They think that's the natural order of things.

Post COVID that whole fiction has broken down and not a moment too soon. We all now can see that actually most people work perfectly effectively from home: in many cases more effectively without the distractions of being in an office.

The Telegraph is even worse than the Mail on this front: constantly banging on about the supposed snowflakery of people WFH. That ship has sailed though. The people who believe in this sort of shit are too old to matter for much longer. People of Millennial age and younger would find it bizarre that you coerce people to sit at a computer at a desk in EC1 when you can do it perfectly adequately in another postcode while also making sure your children are taken care of.

This is very true too I think

I think the DM genuinely just hates people. Pretty much all people from what I can gather, except for the extremely wealthy.

So you just believe what others tell you without checking it for yourself? Great critical thinking skills there.

Serious recommendation: check claims for yourself before commenting on them.

I have never played golf in my life and not likely to start because I have hayfever.

A lot of my older colleagues reevaluated their lives during lockdown, calculated that they could afford to retire early, and did so. They are probably the ones on the golf course.

I've been in support calls with Microsoft engineers at 10pm because they work at Redmond time. I'm able to do that because I'm already set up to work from home with access to our servers etc and I don't have to commute afterwards at a time when the buses and trains are stopping for the night. When the call is over, I can jump in the shower and be in bed before midnight in order to be well-rested before getting up at 8:30am for my 9am meeting where I can report to my boss what happened in the support call. Yes, I take TOIL for those late stints, as is my right, but that TOIL doesn't look like me needing to sleep in the following morning because I didn't get home until gone 1am.

My job is nominally 9-5 and this late working is on a goodwill basis despite it being necessary to get support from US-based vendors. WFH is a major reason why my employer gets that goodwill late working from me. If they stopped that, I'd stop the late support calls with vendors.

I ask whether you would work at 10pm in a supposedly 9-5 job? If not, then kindly stop calling WFH staff "lazy".

Charlie Mullins is a twat, so not really.