to think WFH can completely change one's work life balance?

Not sure and don’t think they’d sit in a cafe all day-that would be expensive. At the moment they try to wfh on different days.

Agreed. I miss my last commute because it was 3 miles each way on foot but I have done the 1 hour each way drive or public transport and hates losing 10 hours a week to something so unpleasant. I also miss the company of other people.

BUT! I can hang washing on the line in the morning safe in the knowledge I can bring it in if a rain shower appears. I can prep dinner or nip to the supermarket during my lunch break. I can run the washing machine or tumble dryer without being nervous about fires. In summer I can do a bit of weeding or cut the grass in my lunch break. If it's just a team meeting or 1-1 I can do it from the garden.

For my employer it means they get more efficient work. I have to bill customers in 15 minute chunks so lack of distraction helps with meeting targets. I can easily do small tasks or respond to a crisis at very anti social hours because it's no big deal to nip upstairs to my office. I can work flexible hours to suit us both without having to consider ability to get to and from an office so can cover other geographies when staffing needs to flex. Win win.

My DD lives in a house share with her friends and they all wfh at least one day- they have to work in their bedrooms or kitchen. Not ideal.

Well done!

I'm pleased it worked for you, but tbh WFH is my idea of hell. I've only done it on a limited basis during the pandemic though.

1. I like to keep home and work compartmentalised. Work's here and home's there and never the twain shall meet.
2. I like to be alongside colleagues for both bouncing ideas off and the social aspect
3. Getting out means I get some fresh air and exercise, no matter how limited it is.
4. Id get distracted by tasks at home
5. When I did it during the pandemic I could only do it from the living room as our WiFi was shit. This meant working off a fold up table and meant my husband who is retired coyinot access the front room or WiFi,though this is better since we moved house.

Mind you I work as a mental health nurse. ATM Im in a job that needs to be f2f. Some roles can be done over the phone or video calls but not the role I'm in.

I actually started WFH one day a week due to health conditions before the pandemic (I did it Weds so that I could break any patterns of migraine symptoms privately and without affecting anyone else).

I had a bit of stigma from colleagues, and I had to actually strongly suggest they take some WFH days themselves when I got the power to do so.

It very soon caught on and I put in a blanket WFH Friday policy. I also cut working hours from 40 to 37.5 with a small pay rise.

The pandemic was just the last stage of us going 8/10 hybrid (fortnightly two days in office together).

The boost in productivity and communication was immense. Dull meetings were ditched, we'd include people who'd previously been out of the loop, and we put on plentiful catering on the days we were in the office with some of the vast saved sums of office spends.

I will never stop advocating for the fact that DONE RIGHT a workplace can absolutely thrive with WFH and sensible hybrid models. And where it is done wrong, there's not a great likelihood that the same organisation would do any other model right anyway.

(Take my current workplace, where I work cross-organisation and cross-nationally. If I spend the expected 2 days in my assigned office, I'm LESS available to colleagues because of commuting, and then spend my available time there on Teams calls. My line manager is sensible and I actually do 2-4 days in different offices as suits my work over a month.)

Your view may be a minority. It should be respected and everyone should have the option to go into an office if they wish.

More importantly than your reasons are people who have a home life that in some way working in an office is an escape from. Or who live in cramped accommodation.

Yes.
I changed jobs just over a year ago.
I went from no wfh and shifts to a very flexible work from home job. In a related sector.

It’s the first time I have worked full time and not been on the edge of a breakdown. I have a lot of demands on my time outside work, and I don’t cope well with being too busy. I have ADHD and am pretty introverted so found being around colleagues all day absolutely exhausting. I used to get very burnt out and have had a couple of incidents of long term sick when something has tipped me over the edge. Now I have the extra resilience available to cope, and the flexibility means I can fit my other commitments into my day. (I do work my full work hours, I don’t mean I’m swanning off to do other things whilst getting paid, but it’s no problem for me to go off in the day for a few hours if need be, I just start earlier/work later)

I feel the opposite. I hate wfh & only do it when absolutely necessary, which can of course be useful. I like delineation between my home and office life but I no longer have school age children.

I changed job in 2025, to a completely new role in a new organisation. The induction period is very thorough, however it is the first time I've done this as a new starter.
I've had weekly (or more) office days but I do feel WFH has huge challenges for new staff but I suppose it is dependent on the type of job you have. Mine is broadly within social care and a lot of learning comes from observation of colleagues, how they handle problems, listening to them discussing cases/situations with others or the manager. All those informal things that happen outside of formal meetings. We've managed it though and I have found what is good for me is learning to hold things and bring up during my 1:1s and feel ok not getting the answer straightaway...usually I'd be asking 'why' in the moment to a colleague.
My job has time in the field which would be the case if I were office based anyway so there's a good mix for me, which I enjoy.

My company is completely cloud based so there is no office to go to, so everyone is home based. I would never work in an office again. I am autistic (diagnosed as an adult) and now so many difficulties I've experienced over the years make sense and explain why working in an office doesn't suit me: noise, smells, people, lack of autonomy etc. From home I have more autonomy, it feels more relaxed (I love my home!), work life balance is great, I go to the gym early every morning - I started doing this as I was finding I was hardly leaving the house at all which was also unsettling for me, I can go for a walk at lunch, when the kids were at school I could take them, pick them up, they could have sick days which weren't disruptive to my daily work schedule. It's the best way of working for me and I'm a productive, flexible employee as a result. My husband, however, hates working from home and loves being in the office.

I worked from home for a call centre originally; i wouldn't recommend this, it was not a good environment compared to when I'd done the job on site.

Now I have a hybrid working arrangement and I am a Trainee Welfare Rights Adviser. The job itself doesn't guarantee home or hybrid working, but the particular office I work in gives us the option. I still have face to face appointments with clients so I need to be in the office for those, other people do home visits or visits in other locations, but appointments over the phone can be done at home or in office.

Completely agree.

i will never work in an office again.

I run several online shops selling vintage. I also do private tutoring at postgrad level.

My work is about writing, so it's well suited to home and having less noise and fewer distraction.

I worked in a public service for many years including two late evenings and alternate saturdays. Everything had to be fitted around that and the shifts dominated my life. Later I became an academic when it was usual to work hybrid with 2/3 days at home. That was back in the 90s and long before the current trend to WAH. I cannot say how much difference it made to my life. There was no requirement to sit in front of a computer on my WAH days. I had a series of tasks to accomplish and a deadline to meet with my boss for presentation or progress report. How I organized the work was entirely up to me. I had never known such autonomy. So if I decided to go out shopping or sleep in later on a WAH day and do the work that evening or at the weekend that was no problem. It also meant I could schedule my shopping to be delivered at home and no more trolling around with heavy bags. It was then I realised how wasteful of time, money and effort commuting was. When I retired from employed work and set up in consultancy I already had an established routine.

The negative of WAH is that there is no effective barrier between working and non working time. Emails and texts can arrive at any hour. However I have always set boundaries in dealing with out of hours requests or those which arrive when I am on vacation. For example over the holiday my customers got a bounce back message saying that I was unavailable until XXX. I may have read the messages but I will not begin dealing with them until Monday next.

Every time I go into the office, which thankfully is now only rarely, I wonder why anyone could be expected to work competently there.

It’s a really large office floor and everyone is sitting at rows of desks. You have someone sitting on either side of you within about 3 feet of you tapping away on the fricking keyboard and making calls. You have to remember to lock your keyboard every time you just get up to go to the loo, because this is a company rule and the work is so confidential. You can hear people talking the other end of the room and it sends me into meltdown. Then people come and stand behind you when they want to talk to you so you don’t even realise that they’re there until they start talking and then you jump out of your skin.

At home it’s quiet and I can just crack on with what I need to do. If I need to speak to someone, I can message them and ask them when they’re free: whilst this could be done at work, it actually doesn’t happen in practice. I can have confidential conversations and I can work exactly as I want, in peace and quiet. I don’t need to book a room for a quiet talk with someone or for an online meeting.

My job has deadlines both internally and externally and I’m accountable. There is no way that I can take the piss and idle the time away, but at least this way I have a life.

When I need to meet clients or go out for a meeting, that’s what I do. The office is irrelevant. There was a drive to start to get people in but there was no coherent reasoning for this and a new manager who was so terribly keen on it has gradually found that it was much more convenient to stay at home when her child was ill, to save time travelling or to come in for just a few days and the push has quietly subsided. Remote working means that people can be recruited from all around the country to do the work.

@MyQuirkyFinchive tackled this through flexible working, I’ve always worked flexi and been strict on recording my time, but I’ve recently switched to working a compressed fortnight which is working much better. Working slightly longer days, which I was doing anyway (thanks to no commute!) and now I get a day off every fortnight which my colleagues respect and understand. It’s been a game changer this year.

100% agree! I currently WFH full time, my contract may end before summer so I'm wondering what mid-level permanent WFH roles are out there for me to start looking at. Tips on where to look (sectors, jobs boards) welcome.

I agree with most of what you’re saying wholeheartedly. With two young children, I could never do the job I do if I had to go to the office five days a week. That said, I do enjoy hybrid because we all go on the same two days of the week and it’s much easier to get things done in person sometimes. I then use my at home time to do the deep thinking work without distractions.

The downside that I’ve experienced, and is something that I really have to be better at managing, is that I seem to fill the extra free time I have by working longer hours. I often find myself working deep into the evenings which I wouldn’t do in the office because I’d have to leave to get home. I also have to remind myself to take a lunch break. I always do this if I’m at the office - I’ll make a point of going for a wander around the shops. But at home, I just sort of don’t!

It’s certainly something for me to work on in 2026!

@Wonderwall23yes I do agree with that. If my workplace was in my town I’d love to go in a little more often to get some of the in office benefits which I do recognise.

But what I love about WFH is that it has opened up a whole new world to me because I can now work In major cities that would not be commutable 5 days a week for me. I’m now based in London which I commute to periodically, I have an excellent nationally renowned employer on my CV, the networking benefits of that, and yet I live in the arse end of nowhere! As someone who has to live where we live for lots of reasons, it’s meant I’ve been able to further my career and not be held back by that.

Can you all please tell me what work you are doing as id love this!

I just think it might be too long into my working life for this particular leopard to change its spots. I was used to working in a certain way for over 20 years and the sudden change in the pandemic and then gradual partial creep back to some weird hybrid scenario just doesn’t work for me and I can’t see the advantages that others are getting. I never had a long commute and would often walk or cycle to work so it was actually a pleasant activity and I no longer have small kids to do school runs for so those aspects aren’t an advantage for me. Honestly I just want it to go back to the way it was and not to have any wfh expectation at all.
I was really just putting my experience as a counter balance to OP and others who are all so positive about it. The disadvantages outweigh any good for me and surely some other people must feel the same way.

I agree OP but I think the WFH is a slight red herring because to me it's the cutting commute that's the advantage and not being at home specifically.

My office is a mile from where I live. I literally wake up and decide whether I fancy home or office each morning and that is the perfect balance for me.

It also made a difference when I was fully office based and went part time to do school pick up. My commute was so short I could still work until 3. Again that's the commute, not being able to WFH. It does irk me a bit that people with school aged children WFH with them after school when they're not at the age to be left independently but that is probably sour grapes as I obviously lose money to be part time!

I work with people who used to do full time in office and now moan about coming in once a week. I can't put my finger on it but if they're that anti it I feel like something's not too healthy about that. I am an introvert but if I didn't have that balance I wouldn't be in a good place mentally. When I first went back into the office after covid my DH said I was like a new person...I hadn't the awareness to realise that myself.