Nigel Farage calls for an end to working from home

I've had to do the same. I'm now retraining in a totally different field to my original area, to be in roles that allow for WFH.

We’ve got a widely agreed government agenda to get everyone working - for disabled people WFH is hugely helpful. Snow days, traffic and so much more are eased by people not travelling for no purpose. It’s a dog whistle to the ignorant to say to restrict it.

Farage is an agitator on many subjects..divide and conquer.
He would survive a nuclear war being a cockroach.

Meanwhile there’s a thread about someone sending a rambly sorry for self voice note 😂 and that being not ok.

Honestly the more this thread goes on the more I am agreeing with Farage. The wfh fanatics have absolutely no recognition of the downsides.

No. It was started by the OP to discuss Farage's comments about working from home. Although it quickly turned into the usual insult-fest from those anxious to prove how much they HATE Farage. And these comments add nothing whatsoever to the subject matter of the OP's post.
HTH

my parents were teachers, and of course they did partly ‘WFH’ (marking and lesson prep) - it’s actually a good example of how it’s entirely normal for parts of many jobs necessitate physical presence in a workplace but other aspects can easily and effectively be done from home.

If you’re so aggy about it then it’s on you to look up. But anyway I made no claims - I said MY OWN mental health is in the pits.

that can be done wfh too, if the company is invested in training, mentoring, there are many in office jobs where you’d hardly get any face to face time, can be ignored etc, in office doesn’t automatically mean training, mentorship etc will be any good.

Yes, the right are always going on about nanny state, except when it suits them, like WFH or assisted dying. Then the state has to decide for us as we aren't capable of deciding when and how we die.

Or you could have multiple hours to have that conversation day in day out 🤷‍♀️

Generally speaking public sector services that have moved away from in person to remote delivery aren't doing it so their staff can WFH. They are doing it because it's cheaper.

Incentivised by successive governments starving local authorities ...

100% this. My dd has had to start up a business of her own to get employment as none outside the home are suitable for her disability needs.

How are you still married to him? The monumental ick I would feel 😫

Generally speaking public sector services that have moved away from in person to remote delivery aren't doing it so their staff can WFH. They are doing it because it's cheaper. Depending on the service, you can often support people more quickly over the phone than in person, so less front line staff are required. Webchat even faster due to AI and the fact that a human operative can be running several chats concurrently. The move to remote as an efficiency iniative predated covid. Covid just showed us that staff can provide the remote service from home, saving on office costs and sonetimes acting as a perk in lieu of higher pay. I agree it's not ideal for vulnerable people though.

There are plenty of threads discussing WFH. This thread started by the OP about Farage.

HTH

You ask if you can have 20 minutes of their time to have that specific conversation, it isnt that difficult..

Yeah. We don't need to consider disabled people in any discussion about us perfect people.

🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

While you are all having a lovely time trying to outdo each other on who hates Farage the most, has anyone actually looked into what employers think about working from home? They are the ones paying the wages after all.
Why are Amazon and Boots trying to bring workers back into the office if all is well? Why has Stuart Rose said working from home has spawned a generation of people who are not doing proper work?
I've no doubt going back to the office is a wrench if you are a home worker, but seeing some of the nonsense on here day-in, day-out about family coming first, my children are my priority, unreasonable flexible working requests etc etc, I think (much as I dislike him) Farage (and Rose) may have a point acrually. There are some I have read who give the impression that their work is something they do when there is nothing else going on in their lives. Working from the office may help put an end to this entitlement.
I am not a Reform supporter and have no time for Farage at all, but it would be nice to see a decent, sensible discussion about policies without name calling, insults and projections that have nothing to do with the matter in hand, such as thinly-veiled insults about older people and references to 'old white men', which just make the posters sound a bit ignorant tbh.
The lack of sensible discourse and knee-jerk reactions along with the inevitable insults at anyone who does not toe the 'Reform are awful' line is EXACTLY the reason the party is gathering such traction in the UK.

Okay...

But as many, many people have said on this thread, that isn't because of WFH staff; who are hugely monitored and just can't be arsing about going to the gym when they're supposed to be working and would be sacked if they were, but because of staffing cuts.

HMRC for instance, an organisation frequently mentioned on this thread have reduced their customer service staff by almost 10% over the last decade because of the transition to digital services.

Similar customer service staffing cuts are in all similar public sector organisations. It's nothing to do with WFH, it's fewer staff because of increasing digital services and the preference of most of the public to use those services and only needing in-person services on the 'phone when there's a problem.

And it doesn't work for people who can't or won't use the digital services but then they have to queue.

Which is a very different issue to us 'dinosaurs' (50's & 60's FFS) dying soon.

The ridiculous thing is that I guarantee all the people who moan about wfh ALSO complain about how busy the roads are/overcrowded public transport is, how long it takes to drive everywhere, how hard it is to find somewhere to park, how annoying it is when commuters park near their house, how long they have to queue to buy something at lunchtime or in the post office...etc...etc...without having the braincells to realise that if everyone WFH suddenly had to start commuting again this would be much worse, and would impact them negatively!

Presumably he's going to apply that rule to himself too...

@Seymour5 - a big part of the issue of declining customer service in the public sector - and I don't disagree with you - is that staff are being shed or leaving and not being replaced. For example, I originally worked in a team of 15 people and we're now down to 8 people - with an increasing workload and we've been told we cannot recruit any more people.

Whereas we used to have an inbox that got cleared every day of customer enquiries, we're now having to leave between 50-60 per day overnight to be dealt with the next day, and the next day and the next day etc. The pressure is immense on my team to get through the enquiries but then there's a knock-on effect of the wider community teams having NO capacity either.

WFH allows many businesses to start up with a lot less cost, literally helps job creation. Also allows spread of people throughout the UK, I live in a rural part of the UK where I was brought up, without wfh I would have to leave, theres lots about how to stop younger people leaving, this is one of the huge things that allows me to live here and not leave, where I would leave to where is an interesting question though, as my current company has no UK offices. Farage, like so many of his policies, is stuck in the past.

The problem is this is not good enough for those who think office based is better.

I suggested just this on this thread but was met with “what’s the point if others aren’t it”.

They want to force the rest of us to work in the office alongside them.