To hate the Daily Mail and its anti WFH vendetta

Excellent post.

This made me chuckle- thank you.

Both DH and I are both back in the office 3 days a week which I think works really well for both of us and the family. I do still think my WFH tend to be my most productive days though as I'm online from 8 and work until 6 whereas when I'm in the office I need to allow for commute times.

I actually really like being back in the office although I know some don't. DH's company have told all employees if they're not in 3 days a week then this will be counted as unauthorised leave and they could face a disciplinary (mine aren't being quite so hardline).

Yep, I WFH throughout the pandemic keeping a public service from basically collapsing. It now suits me to mostly stay at home and my organisation wouldn’t now have desks for us all anyway.

I don't think most employers are worried whether Mrs Jones of 23 acacia avenue is frothing about homeworkers as she reads the daily mail.

The pull back to the office in my experience is coming partly due to seeing the benefits of hybrid rather than fully remote and partly due to piss takers and chancers who take advantage of the trust being placed in them. Or those who just whinge and cause endless difficulty each time they are asked to leave the house. (I am lucky to have a team of professionals but have seen it happen in other bits of our organisation and heard the chatter at management level)

It's really frustrating because I want hybrid working to work, it's great for so many people, not just parents but those with disabilities or caring responsibilities or time consuming hobbies etc. But we need to act like grown ups when given trust.

There was an astonishing thread on here a while back of people boasting about all the stuff they do when they are meant to be working from home

Some banks, Britain based, appear to be clamping down on WFH:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12477649/Bank-workers-given-bonus-ultimatum-working-home.html

Well said, Pink.

I am glad that we’re getting away from the “suck up to the boss in the pub on a Friday night” culture. It was pretty marginalising. And I say that as someone who benefited from it in the 1990s!

I do find it very odd why some people get so worked up and upset by people working from home. I can't work from home but I'm pleased for those who can and who enjoy it. it's such a race to the bottom and bitter country at the moment it's depressing. I'll be honest hadn't given it much headspace really but amazing if it makes such a positive difference to parents and people with disabilities as well as those who just enjoy it for the benefits- bloody brilliant!

Why not boost the cafés etc near your house instead? That would boost commercial property prices outside central London.

Suggesting that people should divert money they can use for mortgage overpayments to prop up central London property owners is telling them to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. Frequently "Paul" is someone like the Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor in the street or building name means it's his) who has more money than the late Queen did. Why should working people pay money to support super-rich people like that?

With house prices so high that younguns can't get on the ladder, it would be painful in the medium term but beneficial in the long run to have a downward correction of house prices.

Gosh you have got one looooong day ahead of you are going to police every thread you feel is pointless today

It's very ableist. Well, if people are just talking about themselves and what they like it's ok. But beyond that, the total failure to acknowledge the increase in opportunities for disabled people is utterly depressing. The number of posters trotting out the ooh it's terrible for the young workers, clearly assuming that being young means having the same traits as they did, says it all.

Crikey this sounds like my mum, are you the sister I never knew I had?!

Financially transparent 😂😂😂 we're in Wales, it's all smoke and mirrors here.

I don't live in London and what is happening with property prices seems to not be linked to what is happening in my local area. I think you need to provide a much better argument about why I should care about saving central London commercial property landlords in order for me to commute to my office 5 days a week in a small town in the Midlands.

tbh I'd have been pleased when I was working at a local authority if one of my colleagues was working from home all the time - more chance of me getting a desk. (I did know at least one senior professional who worked from abroad for part of the year but it worked fine - it was work that could be done remotely, he had time with his family, and he was always available when we needed him.)

If only I could have worked from home in my 12 hour shifts, that were nights, so that I could be home for my children. Unfortunately my manager, and my patients wouldn’t have been happy!

I always just wonder how these folk think the government managed to introduce furlough, rapid testing centres etc during lockdown - reader all the civil servants who delivered this worked from home as their offices were closed too...

Also public sector workforce always had more flexibility than a lot of private employers - it was one of the ways that the civil service could recruit when it couldn't compete on salaries (yes pension benefits can be better but a good pension doesn't feed your kids). Now there's much more flexibility in the wider workforce civil service have to continue to be at least as flexible in order to recruit & retain staff

I don't think you're alone. One of my clients has recently lost very two talented young members of staff who have both accepted jobs in office-based city centre companies versus their previous WFH roles.

It's amazing how easily these newspapers manipulate their readers isn't it. My FIL is a PhD educated, analytical, critical thinking person, but believes everything he reads in the Telegraph. So yes, he's mentioned WFH despite my DH having WFH full time for 7 years, along with how young people today (he means us, mid thirties with kids) are eating too much UPF and are too lazy to make a meal from scratch. This is the man who finds beans on toast challenging to make, and actually eats more UPF than he realises as he loves sausages etc! And my dad is enraged that young people today "don't prioritise saving for a house deposit" whilst also being told by their estate agent that the small property they rent out will achieve double their initial rent estimate.
Somehow these clever people don't join the dots that not all these things can be true at the same time.

We couldn't afford to buy a house (2 bed) on two professional salaries in the 2000's and a more generous loan to salary ratio of 4.5x. And it has only got worse since then, plenty of people in negative equity now or having homes repossessed even though interest rates are still much lower than they were in the late 80's. And I wasn't wasting my money on avocado toast and lattes.

Perhaps this may explain why the generations after you feel they have a worse deal than your generation and are not really in the mood to listen to you constantly going on about how much tougher you had it.

As a millennial I find it utterly laughable that you think the boomer generation gets "all the blame" for our current situation. Bashing millennials has been a full-time occupation for many older people over at least the last decade as far as I can see and now there is the backlash and you don't like it. Well tough, suck it up.

I’m with you. WFH has worked wonders for my mental health. I’m a happier, more productive, more mentally balanced person.

Being in the office full time was hell. I go once a week now and that’s been great to touch base and fulfil the ‘social’ element.

They've had two kind of sold for two years options by developers agreed on them. So they're off the market. I'm sorry but who would agree to an open ended arrangement like that. The developers haven't paid anything yet, the council still responsible for deteriorating buildings . Just put them up for auction, sale and get rid.

Maybe applications have gone up since Covid?

It’s all about keeping the investment groups who own Pret A Manger & the office blocks going.

So we’ve got to go into the office but not use cars and you’ve got to buy lunch out every day then cook from scratch when you get home after your two hour commute on two buses & picked your kids up from childcare.

Sounds fun.

They don’t realise life exists outside of London and we don’t have good public transport. HS2 annoys me too. Why would anyone want to commute from Manchester to London everyday?

Life’s moving on & people need to accept it.

Agree. Also councils can’t just randomly sell off buildings, it takes ages to do anything like that due to the need for them to be financially transparent.

Council tax probably went up 10% because everything councils are paying for went up 10% last year —thanks for Liz Truss— due to inflation.