to be tired of the jealousy towards people who WFH?

If people in my place were out doing shopping or sleeping when meant to be working they’d be pulled in for a chat. Not sure why any company would be happy to pay people to do their shopping or sleep. Surely the staffing numbers need reviewing if there isn’t enough work to do. I am not jealous of home workers as I could work 4 days from home if I choose, but I don’t as I prefer to go to the office. Emptying a washer between meetings is one thing, but I wouldn’t be going shopping when paid to be in work. Mad companies happy to pay money for this.

All the banks and fund industry, pensions industry want staff in offices, (bums on seats,) in order to protect the value of real estate and infrastructure, that they have invested in.

I feel a bit sorry for people who work from home. Both my sons have hybrid working, one in a civil service job. When they are in the office it is stressful hot desking and when they are at home they need to allocate a room as office, so in effect they are buying extra rooms in their flats for their employers. I have recently retired but I loved my office and most of the team I managed, chatty coffee breaks, secret Santa, all that stuff. It seems to me to be so isolating at home in front of a screen. There is nothing to beat personal contact, especially with customers and suppliers. So no jealousy here I wouldn’t have swapped my drive to work early in the morning giving me time to think ahead of the day for a tumble out of bed and into the spare room.

There can be. You can't just take an existing culture and set of processes and send people home. You have to structure your business in a different way and create opportunities.

And yes, facilitating all that is a job. Managing a remote-first business is much much harder than managing an office. This is why employers are wanting people back in - nothing to do with keeping Pret in business. It's hard work managing a remote workforce - a job in and of itself.

But it pays for itself in my business through hard commercial metrics like productivity and soft but still commercial metrics like staff retention.

I work from home almost exclusively. Everyone in my business is remote-first. Very few choose to go into the office.

I know for a fact that our business model is more productive than equivalent office-based businesses, because one recently reached out to merge with us and on every metric - financials, customer satisfaction, number of projects, number of clients - they were weaker than ours. A similar picture has been presented by businesses wishing to acquire us and add us to their portfolio: our profits are stronger, our output more prolific.

This isn't to say that I believe working from home is better than office-based businesses. It's absolutely horses for courses and there'll be businesses out there more efficient than mine.

But if working from home isn't working for your business, it's because your managers and processes are rubbish, not because working from home is.

Our hours are fully flexible. We don't just accept that people will nip out and do things. We encourage it. No one should miss their kids' nativity, or the opportunity to form a local network at the school gate at pick up time. No one should spend their whole weekend doing life admin when some of it is much easier to pick up during the week.

We've only ever had one employee take the piss. It was immediately obvious and dealt with through performance management.

I have no idea why people are so down on the concept, other than jealousy. And yes, some jobs can never be performed from home. I have sympathy with people in those roles and I'd urge employers to support work/life balance in other ways.

But everyone else... We weren't put on this earth to be slaves or miserable. Work should be productive and good for us. Work is healthy. So let's really lean in to healthy ways of working.

I imagine with wfh there’s a lot of silo thinking and very little contact with other parts of the organisation outside your own team.

Wasn't there a load of research a while ago that found people get just as much done in a shorter, compressed work day or on 4 days a week as they do on the standard full time hours? The shorter time frames made them more productive. I actually think people faff around more when they are working in office.

Only snoozing, wake up when the phone rings 😜

I don’t think WFH is here to stay, except in a minority of cases.

So much of work can be done better in an office environment.

A lot of the best ideas and work starts with random conversations in the coffee room or as you pass someone’s desk.

And mentoring young staff is also awful on Teams or equivalent. You just can’t give the same kind of support as you can face-to-face. And spontaneous Friday night bonding sessions are out too, so useful for real team building.

Some will find studies that suggest productivity is as good WFH, but we need a good 10-15 years of it to see the long term effects on staff who are now young.

I think some flexibility and WFH is good, as it allows people into the workforce who would struggle otherwise, but the general rule should be most of the time in the office, except for a few roles.

But are they available if they're running errands and sleeping? It seems to be taking the piss.

I'm working for myself so it's whatever to me, but as an employer? I wouldn't love it.

@Katypp going to the loo takes maximum of 5-15 minutes all day. Kettles boiling and making a drink maybe another 5 minutes. Passing chat with colleagues maybe 15 minutes over the day. Making a total of 35 minutes unofficial “rest” time in a day. Scheduled breaks obviously not included in the calculations, because WFH people have those too. If people are doing school runs, walking dogs, doing chores, going shopping, and having naps, getting kids an after school snack, helping them when they hurt themselves, taking in parcels, making life admin calls etc etc, can they really do all that in 35 minutes?

So true.

We have lost so many TA’s and school admin staff to wfh roles which pay the same ( or more) and give more flexibility over school drop off, flexi days, compressed hours, no commute, no fuel or WRAC fees etc.

I'm a social worker and WFH, I obviously have to go out to complete visits but arrange my own diary.
I don't know a single other SW who doesn't work hybrid/primarily wfh.
Social Work is hard to recruit to for very different reasons.

Oh come on, you're not seriously comparing going to the toilet or chatting to someone while you wait for the kettle to boil with doing the school run, looking after small children, taking long naps, going out to run errands and the many other much more time consuming activities people who WFH have talked about doing on here?? Having something to drink and going to the toilet during the working day are basic rights and essential, doing an exercise class or walking the dog during your paid working hours are not but the fact that so many people who WFH don't seem to see the difference is part of the problem.

I m a full time employee, and do about 2 to 3 hours actual work a day, and remain available for the rest of the day. It has crossed my mind they should make me part time, but they want me at the other end of a phone at any given work hour, it's their choice to keep me as a full time employee. (I ld leave if I was paid any less.). I ve worked in offices where staff talk complete crap all day long, pointless meetings, procrastination, make a month's work out of a few days worth of work, some people are very skilled at being a busy fool.

At the end of quarter I can be available until midnight for perhaps the final 3 days and/or over the weekend if its a particularly big deal. The priority is getting the deal done and bringing in the revenue. Employers must be mature too, flexibility goes both ways.

I have had roles where managers wanted to time manage me, I left. 😆😆.

I m in a regulated profession and upskill through professional courses pretty regularly. No need or patience for micromanagement.

It’s not the being in the office that’s the issue for many wfh-ers, it’s the sitting in traffic for hours at a time along with thousands of others polluting eveywhere, such a waste of time and so boring. Also dangerous on the overcrowded motorways shared with trucks, people angry everywhere. I don’t blame people for not wanting to do it.

100 this.

A friend works in an office. 8.30 is start time, but the unofficial start time is 9 (after the catch ups etc)

Once a week they have a meeting which involves everyone coming up with a positivity story.

Is this a good use of time??
Then there are the distractions of sharing an open plan office (bodily noises / noisy eaters etc)

@TheignT your passport office experience is a classic WFH hassle.

I know someone who works in a management role in a University. She has worked from home since covid and has told me that she takes naps, watches movies, does housework, gardening and exercise classes during the working day. Her perspective is it's "fine" because she can easily get her work done in a couple of hours despite being contracted to work FT and that many of her colleagues do the same. She is now being made redundant, along with several colleagues, and those who are keeping their jobs are being told they need to be in the office more. I wouldn't wish redundancy on anyone, but it can't be a shock that if your FT job is so easy you can do it in a couple of hours a day eventually someone might figure out it can be subsumed into someone else's role or scrapped altogether. Also not surprising that so many Universities are struggling financially if there are whole teams of people being paid to do very little work.

The worst part of my job are the days I work at home.

I much prefer being with people.

I thrive off the professional contact, ideas shared etc.

Being at home, alone all day is awful.

The pressure of the ‘teams’ green light means guilt for going to the toilet!

I've never understood the argument that if a job can be done from home then it can be done from somewhere with poorer worker rights like India.

Surely, if the job can be done in an office in the UK, it can also be done in an office in India?

I also find it noteworthy that the biggest critics of homeworking are those who have jobs that cannot be done from home and people who either don't work (mainly through retirement, especially early retirement) or do elite jobs that are not reflective of the experience most home and office works have. In my business for example the people keenest on people being in the office happen to be the people who have their own private, air-conditioned office to work in. But 80% of staff don't have this luxury, we're stuck in a noisy open-plan office which half the people think is too hot and the other half too cold.

I’ve rang in office ones where the chatter in the background is distracting and they don’t know the answer, not being able to answer isn’t a wfh exclusive, for every wfh call centre jobs I’ve had fwiw, I’ve had to prove I had a private office and people have had to prove they have childcare etc. as for asking the manager, works the same way for people in the office as out in lots of call centres, you ask on the chat or put them on hold and ring, no need to be in the office for that.
You get terrible wfh call centres, you get terrible in office ones.

Do you spend every minute working in the office? Never go to the loo, never take a break, never talk to a colleague, never wander off to another department? Never chat while the kettle boils, never get talking to a colleague in the toilets?
Wfh is just the same only the downtime is spent differently.