To wonder how we ever did 5 days a week in an office?

There isn't a single broken arm that can be fixed, or a home that can be built, or a single item that can be manufactured, by people working at home.

You are free to indulge in home working as you please, but as you do so, bear in mind that someone's hands built everything around you.

Covid has resulted in a very selfish older generation who care only about themselves. Wake up!

👏👏👏 hear hear

And I say that as part of the older generation. The first year after Covid we had four grads start with us, one reported into me and I made the effort to be full time office based for the first few weeks of them joining to get them settled. The other three ended up unofficially looking to me as their manager as each of their managers couldn’t be bothered coming in. One didn’t even meet his in person for 6 weeks.

Worked out well for me as I got a pretty decent bonus that year, with it noted that a lot of that was due to how I had basically taken on 3 additional line reports that I didn’t ask for

Following feedback from the grads themselves to the country head, the other 3 managers found themselves not being very popular with the management team and there is now a structure in place where graduates and their line managers need to be in the office together for at least the first 4 weeks of them joining plus a formal development plan to give them as good a start to their career as possible

I agree with pp’s that it’s selfish of the experienced members of the team not to offer the same as what they benefited from when they were just starting out

Speak for yourself - I go into the office most days - I’ve had quite enough of WFH thank you….

I’m ‘older’ and I agree. I spent a lot of time in shared and / or less than optimal housing during my early career and cannot imagine what I would have done or how I’d have coped had the pandemic happened back then.

Luckily when it did happen (I haven’t gone back FT even now) I already had my own workroom at home.

Particularly so when people take it on themselves to insist that they can speak for a whole generation in this respect. That they're usually not even part of.

Ask young architects who aren’t satisfying requirements to qualify after 6 years of education whether it’s working for them. How do sales people learn their trade? It’s from listening in to ace sales people. How do structural engineers solve issues -by collaborating with colleagues around a problem.

Remote learning doesn’t give the full picture. It’s a shit way to learn to be honest. But if it suits you to sit in your trackies and log on to a teams call between walking the dog and putting a washing on then just forget how much your peers helped you gain that privilege. You owe the next generation your knowledge. Pretty poor to not acknowledge that.

FFS! We have a whole generation of architects, engineers, bioscientists, designers, sales people, PR hopefuls, HR wannabees, unable to learn from more senior people who can’t get their arses into the office to share their knowledge and experience.

People who say that WFH works for them are often only thinking of their own experience. They’re pulling up the ladder that got them to where they are now. ‘I get more done at home” often means ‘I tick off my task list’ with no recognition that their seniority carries a responsibility to grown and develop the less experienced members of the team.

Our economy is built on learning and collaboration. Covid has resulted in a very selfish older generation who care only about themselves. Wake up!

I love wfh and would massively struggle back in an office. I accept though it works because I’m older. Have family that still need organising and taxi driving if not actual childcare. We live very rural with limited public transport so I need to help them get places. And professionally I am senior. I can work effectively autonomously. A younger less senior person couldn’t do my job remotely. They need mentoring and supervision and professional development. I also don’t need water cooler chat. A younger person might. I see the benefits but downsides too. I don’t need to help mentor anyone as I have no team. I work with a few all well established people all in different roles.

Exactly this.

My employer switched to wanting me back in the office most days, and I although I could almost certainly have argued it on disability grounds I just chose to move to a new job which enables me to be almost fully remote

But, she's right though! Those people could do that if they wanted! She has never, not once, said that ALL jobs can be done from home. Just that if you can't work from home and that makes you unhappy, then you have the option to change jobs.
Same as if my employer decided to shut the office and make us all work from home, then I would leave and find a different job where I would be in an office.

You do have a choice! Assert it. Your employer doesn't own you.

Switch jobs!!! There are loads of options out there. I will never go back.

You don't work in communist Russia. You could choose to do another job!

Just some of the comments the OP made. These were in response to those saying their job could not be done from home.

More that work has moved away from where people live, i.e. the closure of regional branches and concentration into London, SE and a few other large cities.

She really didn’t say that though. People are saying they have no choice but to go into work as they work in shops, factories or some other such place where the work can’t be done at home.

if someone is desperately unhappy in their job for whatever reason, there are other options. No, it doesn’t get handed to you on a plate, but the choices are there.
i worked in a shop, hated the hours, weekend work, bank holidays, Christmas etc, so I applied for every single office job going, got turned down for sooooo many and finally got one - it was through a temp agency and from there I worked bloody hard and now I’m in a stable full time office job where I can wfh.

Except the OP pretty much told everyone who worked out of home to retrain, and/or get a different job/ career so they too could WFH. With very much the undertone that those who didn't were, quite frankly, a bit stupid.

And also, a lot of people didn't manage. They got pushed out, or just decided it wasn't worth it.

To answer the OP’s original question of ‘how did we all used to manage 5 days per week in the office’ well god knows. With hindsight it was brutal (and we had to look ‘corporate’, too) and I’m so grateful things have changed.

You're not the first person to do this in the thread, but what's completely absent here is any acknowledgment of young people who aren't like the ones you know and are talking about.

What you've done here is taken an example of a person who clearly likes, benefits from and isn't excluded by in person office work. But people like your son and his colleagues aren't the default. They're a self selecting group that can't possibly be representative of young people as a whole. By definition, it won't include those who couldn't have taken those jobs because they weren't able to live in close proximity to that job market, or because their caring responsibilities, disability, health problems or neurodivergence prevented it.

It's not true that remote working is bad for young people and grads per se, because its just plain fact that some of them now have more opportunities because of it. It's bad for some of them.

I don't know why people keep saying this - OP's original post is clearly talking about office-workers. 🙄

It's not some amazing "gotcha!" to remind her that some people don't work in offices.

Not everyone works in a city centre, or in an office that is far away from affordable housing.

What baffles me with so many working from home and hybrid, is why the motorways are still so busy in the mornings! The M6 where I live is still rammed every day.

@OptimismvsRealism so you'd like all the nurses, doctors and paramedics to WFH? The nursery staff, mechanics and retail staff. In fact a huge part of the infrastructure of the country can just change jobs and WFH can they?!

You are ridiculous.