To think if you moved out to the countryside during Covid, you can't demand remote working?

WFH is a pisstake where most people abuse it and have ruined it for everyone else. This gig was never going to last forever. Just search the threads on MN where people are saying how little they do at home.

are you new to MN? Do you know how this forum works? Why is anyone bothered by anything? Probably the same reason why you bother to comment on their threads.

There needs to be a concrete business reason to insist people come into work. Of course many jobs can't be done at all/as effectively from home. We are one of those families who moved out of London during the pandemic, not very far, about 20 miles along M40.
My commute is 40-60 mins, I'm a healthcare professional so have to do it and it would be unreasonable of me to refuse.
My DH job is desk based, it makes absolutely no difference to his employer whether that desk is in our home or their office, and for them to insist he comes in is unreasonable.

Is London weighting really still a thing outside the public sector? I got paid it 15+ years ago when I worked for a fairly old fashioned company. It was £3,600 PA, £2,160 after tax. Barely touched the sides of my commuting costs (around £7k PA) even then.

I have a 'London' job now but WFH full time. I negotiated the salary on the basis that they needed me more than I needed them (niche skillset). 'London weighting' wasn't part of the discussion.

I personally feel it's entirely and utterly unreasonable to demand office attendance for jobs that do not require it.

Allowing full work from home doesn't only help parents, it helps people with health conditions get and keep jobs they otherwise would not. Im sure there's other groups, carers etc.

Employers need to get over themselves and get with the times, and allow home working (unless, of course, the job cannot be sufficiently done remotely). If you come in an office just to sit at a computer, you can do it from home.

They'll have no choice soon anyway, what with the Labour government and it's get disabled people into work push. Employers will be legally obliged to allow fully remote home working to enable this. Thankfully, I'm sure that will be extending to other people it will benefit too.

Can't wait to grab my popcorn for that drama.

Because I wfh it is far easier for me to be flexible about working time. This is something which benefits my employer. At certain crunch times in the month I can be online at 6am and have the time critical parts of my job done before the 9am starters are in.

It doesn't matter that those time critical tasks were performed by me in my dressing gown.

Also, because I wfh, I am able to join meetings with my US based colleagues late in the evening.

Oh how simply dreadful to have new people living in your village. 🙄

I wasn't talking about having kids with you when working, I pointed out that someone could be paying for several hours more childcare due to covering the commute.

I'm fully aware people had to do it before Covid, I was one of them paying for expensive childcare for a job I had to be in the office for, which is why I back WFH so strongly as I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to do my job like that when DDs were younger.

And hence I could only do the job part time when it had to be office based. One of my red lines when I went full time in 2019 in my current job was that I could have two days at home, and over my dead body would my employer change that. Fortunately my boss has a similar sensible approach to me to life balance.

We should be backing each other here against the interests of plutocrat commercial property investors who would have us all working like lab rats if they could, not tearing one another down.

No it's not a good thing for the people in the less populated areas. It's turned into a nightmare.

Good.

The company I work for has had to start offering hybrid roles in certain departments since COVID as it was very clear applicants were expecting this. It isn't offered in certain departments (including mine), particularly in operations - in which, to be fair, some of the jobs couldn't actually be done remotely. I pay at least £80 a week travel costs and up to £400 a month for wrap around care. Do I like that? No. Do I enjoy my job? Yes.

For those members of the company that WFH, I find generally that they aren't as up to speed with the rapidly changing situations at work, nor do they necessarily appreciate some of the current pressures. That said, I do understand how helpful flexibility can be. For sectors such as mine though, where hybrid working wasn't previously a thing, it all still feels a bit disjointed now. Maybe it'll settle, but I do feel that face to face interaction is important - both for productivity and mental health reasons. I appreciate that others feel differently though, and that's fine.

Yeah it’s absolute entitlement gone wild

But surely employers are equally allowed to turn it down or request a modified version

By law, the company has to provide a valid business reason to reject an application for flexible working. A person can challenge them and take them to tribunal if it isn't a genuine reason.

I personally find the push to force people back into the office disgusting. Years have passed. People who have given literally decades of their lives to our company and now, for personal reasons can't go to the office are facing the sack. It's clearly a brutal and arbitrary way of reducing headcount.

What really needs to happen is these kinds of companies need to relocate to a place where they can employ people at a wage that will allow them to buy a home.

This has been an issue in my brother's sector, where it seems very doable for many to work from home. It's in health, and they have actually always been encouraged to work for differernt medical sites.

But many during covid got the idea that they should therefore be able to work from whole other parts of the country, where commuting isn't really even possible without overnight accommodations being part of the picture. And people were pissy about it, even though in the contract it states that in emergency situations they can actually be called in to work from the site indefinitely - as in, they don't go home until the emergency is over.

But there are also other issues. One of the reasons they encouraged people working from differernt sites is so their staff would be familiar with them, and also get to know the on-site staff, and also in part to be seen to be working by other parts of the organisation. Plus they spend quite a bit of regular time on differernt kinds of training and upgrading, and mentoring too.

Which isn't always that visible to less perceptive employees, who only seem to see it in terms of how much they get done at home.

I need to say that we have a very sympathetic senior manager who allows us to have a Team meeting twice a year where we meet somewhere central(ish) travel expenses paid, we do some work stuff & then we take flexi-leave for the rest of the day, have lunch together & generally have a get together. Last time we had a bit of a 'do' for a colleague who was going on maternity leave - we had cup cakes, a 'guess who's the baby' quiz & a good gossip after we'd done the work stuff.

I totally agree with you.

There are many jobs-mine included. I manage 16 staff in a stressful & responsible job. It's not always easy to have a private, confidential discussion over Teams when in an open office where people can hear my side of the conversation & their part of it if they're in an office which sometimes is in an office open to the public.

My staff are spread over 3 counties & are over 250 miles apart in a part of the country that isn't well serviced by public transport. It's not practical for us to meet face to face if they have something confidential or sensitive that they need to discuss. I will often suggest that I we both go home early & we have the discussion from home in order to have these conversations. I don't know how we will manage should we be forced into the office 100% of the time.

I also have staff who care for people, have neuro-divergent conditions & other disabilities who were employed under a WFH contract. post covid (there was previously no option to WFH). However, their contracts specify that the Dept can change it given 3 month's notice. WFH is not set in stone & I fear losing some valuable members of my team who work hard & make a valuable contribution to our work (not to mention the money that the tax payer has spent on their training) should the Govt decide to remove the opportunity for them to WFH.

Me too! All my time is logged in six minute units (and it’s checked and scrutinised) so work know it is valid. In the office - I do only about an extra half an hour each day. Wfh days - usually get an extra two hours in. And I get value in which is a bonus for me. So it’s a win for myself and my employer. Most of my colleagues do similar.

I love wfh. But then my employers had already introduced this and set up proper systems for it a couple of years before Covid. My friends at other firms have mainly all been told to return 4-5 days a week so I’ve never been happier to work at my place.

I dick about way more in the office. And it’s not as if dicking about in the office is a new concept. There are two hugely successful TV comedies which are entirely about people dicking around in an office - and there’s a reason they struck a chord!

Also I am sort of in this category and thought maybe I will move closer to work. However the house prices near my work are too high. The difference is more than I could make In the years I have left to retirement. People are only trying to survive. Yes in an ideal world everyone would be a big happy work family maybe with on site childcare. In reality people can’t afford to live near work often. The whole system is broken. Houses cost too much, commuting costs too much, too difficult, roads are gridlocked, nowhere to park, childcare too much. Employers expect more and more. Wages are stagnant. Everyone is working flat out and trying to juggle home and work life. So what if some people think you should not wfh. If you can why not. Every year wfh with children is a year closer to more flexibility!

Please re-read my message. I’m saying just because you happen to have seen x number of people who seemed to be on work calls while walking their dog, doesn’t mean you can extrapolate that WFH is less efficient than office working as a whole.

You're conflating different issues I think. Working from home is one thing, working with a child on your lab completely another. Obviously you should be giving full attention to your job in your contracted hours. But walking the dog or doing the laundry on a lunch break is fine imo. I do think the pandemic showed some jobs can be done very effectively at least partly from home and I for one would have a much worse work-life balance if I had to be in the office 5 days a week (1hr commute into london), and would only accept a job like that if I really had to. I would ask before applying if a hybrid approach would be considered, and negotiate the specifics after a job offer. And finally people request all sorts of flexible working patterns for all sorts of reasons, and I do think businesses should try to accommodate these as long as performance isn't negatively impacted.

Edited to add I don't think businesses should move the goalposts if you're already in a certain job!

Personally I clear FAR more work when WFH than in the office.

But I'm talking about an office where I have many friends/colleagues who I've worked with (some of them for 40+) years. Also I've trained many others over the years.

I can tell my DH to piss off & leave me alone if he disturbs my work I can't do that when a colleague bounces up to my desk for a chat.

Going to the loo at home takes 2 minutes, whereas at work it's at least 10/15 minutes as it's a big building, I have to wait for a lift (I have mobility problems & can't manage the stairs) & then I inevitably bump into someone who wants a chat. At home DH brings me cups of tea to my desk - at work I have to make my way to a tea point, again, meeting someone who wants a chat.

Then there are those who realise I'm in the office & pop up to just asking for 5 minutes about to ask my specialist advice about a difficult case that they have.

Given that the Taxpayer pays me about £30ph I swear all these 'chats' waiting for the lift etc probably take about 45 minutes out of a day I could be at home doing something more constructive.

I think yabu OP.

There are two main bases of objections to remote jobs, jealousy and concerns about real estate.

My employer has offloaded most of our office space. If everyone went in it we’d be shoulder to shoulder like a nightclub. But MIL still has a DM-related dig about me not being office based everytime I see her.

It’s the wfh bingo.

I’m under no illusion if my employer could find someone cheaper in India than me then they would, but they can’t. The UK is a fairly low wage economy anyway. But that would be the case whether I was in the office or not.