to be tired of the jealousy towards people who WFH?

They are lazy skivers! The ONLY reason people wfh are so desperate to cling onto it is because they get away with so much. Weak managers/employers enable it. Every single person I know who wfh finds time to do the school run/go to the gym/walk the dog/have workmen round to quote or do odd jobs/receive deliveries/go shopping/go to dr appts, hair appts etc. The list goes on.

All the bs like : “I’m so much more productive at home…yada yada.” Bullshit.

it’s an absolute joke and I wish employers would get a backbone and make all the shirkers get back to the office where they belong. Any party proposing that would get my vote.

I dunno. When my husband was able to start WFH more or less 5 days a week it was the worst thing possible for our marriage.

I was a SAHM to young children, I soon got a job that worked around childcare!

So it boils my piss when you see WFH people moan about their child’s EHCP application taking so long.

Weird statement. I work from home and my child's EHCP took well over 40 weeks. I'm not sure my WFH role had anything to do with that. My workload has doubled since WFH after COVID too, so maybe LAs need to be ensuring their staff are productive. It's not the WFH that's the problem, lots of people work over hours and are productive doing it. It's the staff and management doing it that is the issue if the EHCPs are taking a long time, and the lack of staff for an increasing demand.

Those jobs only exist in MNLand, the majority of real people who WFH actually work.

I am paid for my knowledge, a large part of my job is answering questions, consulting on projects and fixing problems. But I'm not particularly "on call" for it, I have a proper workload that I manage around it and my own commitments.

I think you’re being unreasonable to care tbh, if they’re jealous let them crack on and enjoy your job. I changed jobs a couple of years ago partly because I hated working from home so regularly! Not everyone likes the same things, just focus on enjoying what works for you

I'm not jealous of people who wfh, I am a bit envious of all the ft wfh jobs that only seem to entail regularly working a max of 3 hrs a day, but I'd be envious of anyone was paid a decent ft wage for only working 3 hours a day wherever they were based!
I understand the concept of being on call , being paid for your expertise etc but there do seem to be lots of MN who only have a few hours physical work to do. My job is technically hybrid, but in reality, mostly in a workplace (I do like my colleagues and wouldn't want to wfh every day) In the industry I'm in the people who solely wfh tend to be self employed and only work pt, but don't earn very much!

I think this is why in workplaces hybrid is often a good answer. In my previous job I liked being in office a few days a week but everyone else worked from home every day, I realised sitting in an empty office was crap but that things wouldn't change so I made the decision to leave. My current job is hybrid, it's great because if people need to work from home for the whole week there's flexibility, but generally we are all in a few days a week so everyone is catered for.

Lots of people saying they are more focused at home, same amount saying they are less focused / productive. Lots of people saying they like wfh because it’s quiet and better for their mental health, same amount saying they like working in the office because it’s social and better for their mental health.

Surely this all points to the fact that BOTH are equally valid, and that it’s good to have the choice so people can choose what is best for them personally. If you can’t focus at home then don’t take a wfh position. If your employee is not productive at home then they will not progress / will eventually be let go. I’ve been in offices before where people were toxic in the office environment, or where they called in absent a lot because of family or MH pressures. They would have been a better fit wfh. Both arguments can simultaneously be valid; as a society we shouldn’t go back to picking one or the other. We need to evolve.

I work in education (HE lecturer/apprentice coach) and I'm 100% remote

Exactly. Surely the answer to making people want to be teachers, nurses, any jobs that keep society ticking, is to make those jobs pay better with benefits that compensate for being unable to WFH; to address the country’s shitty and expensive rail service – I was just weighing up two jobs and ended up choosing one that paid £10k less because the pay difference would have been swallowed by train travel; to ensure that there are a range of jobs and transport and opportunities in all locations: the “20-minute city”.

I took a remote job with a mediocre salary because it was remote, part time and flexible, allowing me to choose school hours, plus a good pension and shitloads of annual leave; the hybrid jobs I was offered didn’t offer nearly as many benefits nor were the salaries higher enough to compensate. Why should anyone want to go to the office if trains cost a day’s work and are always delayed, or parking costs £££ and hours of traffic jams but there’s no good park and ride or public transport or cycling routes? I’m not going to choose an office job so someone else chooses to be a nurse; I’ll choose to vote for parties that support and fund nurses and teachers.

Work from home is going to become way more prevalent if the government wants to get their way with forcing disabled people back into work - there's gonna be laws forcing employers to allow work from home employees if the job can be done that way.

The government doesn't need to create laws "forcing employers to allow work from home employees". That sounds like a Daily Fail headline, and a rubbish one at that.

The Equality Act (2010) if applied correctly has had provision for the past 15 years to support disabled people in the workplace from Day 1 of their employment, enabling them to request a reasonable adjustment to support their disability, I work for a Government dept that employs many disabled people, and they aren't being "forced" to do anything, either to WFH or come onsite.

DH doesn't like working from home entirely because he's less productive here. He needs to be on site 90% of the time anyway because of the nature of his job, but can WFH to write reports or the like. Unless there's a reason it would work for us for him to do so, he doesn't. Good people will choose what helps them do their job effectively.

And when I was pregnant, we were WFH because we were still coming out of lockdowns. My manager regularly told me to go sleep if I needed it, because I was exhausted and sick for months. Good management is giving your staff the flexibility you need from them.

@ThatNiftyBlueSwan
what about the cost of heating and electricity at home.
Im sure in the office you don’t pay for the water every time you flush the loo, or the toilet paper.
The cost of working from home can be expensive.

That’s just bad management
I take around 100-120 calls a day
Calls are recorded, barking dogs and children not acceptable. You can’t step away from your desk unless you’re on an allocated, timed break or 25 min lunch System is the same as at work but if it goes down at work, mine is often still ok at home
Audio and screen recordings - audio just on calls but screen is recorded for my full shift

My best mate works from home (in finance) and has come on leaps and bounds now the stress of the commute is gone. He gets so much more done and was promoted with a hefty pay increase since doing it. If you can I think fair play, do it. I can’t as I’m in an industry where I need to be there to react to anything that happens. It’s not practical. But if I could? Yeah, I’d do it or I’d do hybrid (house does my head in 🤣). Jealousy has become a big thing in the uk I feel. Everyone thinks everyone else is getting something they aren’t. Unfortunately it’s manifesting as a race to the bottom. WFH people, do your thing. Nobody else’s business really 🤷‍♀️

Haha I hadn’t even read this when I posted my post above.

Teachers work like dogs. But so do many other professions. They aren’t the only ones.

My favourite are the teachers.

I have many teachers in my life. They are all absolutely furious about people working from home.

What a load of old shit 😆 I earn a good salary because of my skill set and experience. There’s absolutely no reason why it should cost me that someone else can’t work from home.

Not all out of the home jobs are office based. This is where the real differences between WFH and not comes in. In my public facing role, I have no spare time in my work day and certainly couldn’t nap for 20 mins! In my previous career as a teacher, I was lucky if I got more than 20 mins for lunch. As a previous poster has cited, I wonder if in the future these types of public service jobs will be paid a premium to make up for the fact there’s no flexibility in the work day etc.

People who can’t work from home - because of the nature of their job , like teachers and nurses- should get paid more than those who wfh . There should be a premium added to salaries to compensate for expenses that those who wfh don’t have , such as commuting.
( I know this is unworkable- but it’s what I wish would happen!)

Well if they were also making a big deal about how productive they are they'd also be kidding themselves on. But it's not comparable because they're generally not making an argument that they don't want to WFH because they're less productive there. And no, I don't think napping during core working hours and getting paid for it is acceptable, but again the point was that she was making a point about being more productive at home when that's clearly not true. She likes being at home because it's comfier and a bit of a skive, let's be honest.

I never really get these arguments. Some people thrive when they WFH, some people prefer working on site. Some people prefer doing a mix of the two.

Some people take the piss at work, whether they're remote, site based or hybrid. It's just in their nature.

My SIL started a WFH job and I remember thinking how much I'd love to do that instead of having to commute each day at the crack of dawn.

The same thought cropped up occasionally over about 6 months until I suddenly thought 'Hold on, if you want a job like that why don't you look for one?' so I did. It wasn't easy, they can be hard to find if you don't specialise in something but I got there in the end and I hope I never have to go back to working on site at all.

SIL decided it wasn't for her, and went back to working in an on site role once her training finished.

My partner is the same - he can't think of anything worse, it'd drive him mad being stuck at home all day. So when he was job searching he just didn't consider WFH or hybrid jobs.

People are so different, we'll never see eye-to-eye over this.

So she takes the odd nap for 20 minutes or whatever.

In the office, there's people deliberately dragging out going to the loo/making a cup of tea for 20 minutes. People chat with colleagues for literally hours on many office days (and no, it's not team building or whatever business leaders say about collaboration when Katy from Payroll is chatting to Louise from HR about her divorce for 2 hours.) Then there's stress-head Steve storming around like a tornado saying, "I HAVE SO MANY EMAILS TO ANSWER!" and going on about how busy he is without actually doing any work.

One of the main reasons I hate being in the office is because they are so noisy and people are always getting up to make drinks or wander over to other departments because 90% of office jobs could easily be done in half the time that people actually spend doing them.