to think some people would be weirdly excited if WFH came to an end?

My boss would be positively giddy if we all had to be in the office 5 days a week!

She HATES that we get to WFH for 2 days.... fucking dinosaur!

Or company has sold off huge amounts of space, we couldn’t all fit back in the office if we wanted to. The team are based all over the county so we all have different ‘base’ offices and wouldn’t end up working together from one place anyway. We’d end up schlepping into an office to spend all day doing teams calls with people who are in different offices, an absolute waste of time, we may as well be at home.

We work for an LA, and the whole thing would crumble if they forced us back into the office, everything runs on overtime, which we do because we’re already home. If we’re commuting in, we’re not coming in early or staying later…it would all catch fire in the space of a month.

It is odd how this has become a culture war. I think it's manufactured by the likes of Farage to further his victimised by the elites agenda and best ignored. Like 15-minute cities, chemtrails and 'left wing milks'.

They may have no say over private companies but what about the Civil Service, MOJ in particular? Do we want courts backing up even more as offenders will need to wait until a probation officer can either travel to their local probation office or their local court and visa versa to do pre-sentence reports? Being able to do them over teams saves so much time and doubles the amount of reports that can be done in a week.

What about prisons? They are often located 40-50 miles away from where people live as there are not enough specialised staff in the local area. If Probation working in the Offender Management Units have to drive over an hour and a half every day even on days they are not seeing inmates and are effectively just driving there to write reports in busy, distracting environments.

Not to mention the office based PO’s who are already struggling under huge pressure workloads and need a WFH one or two days to write reports without the chaos and continuos interruptions. Probation is already struggling to retain staff.

I do wonder about the impact of wfh on recruitment for those jobs which can't be done from home. There isn't as much making them appealing now. I wouldn't have picked an office job as that just didn't appeal, but office work done from home? That would be different.

What's he going to do to support this?

Nothing. He just likes stoking up division. Plus the Venn diagram of "Farage supporters" and "people who wfh" will only have a small intersection. To him I expect they're a useful bogeyman (cf. the kind of people his supporters vilify as being as out of touch/soft/MC/"so-called experts" etc etc.)

I only wfh occasionally and I enjoy being at work. It doesn’t bother me that others wfh

This.

OP is weirdly excited at something someone has said who will never be in a position of power, 'angry man makes no sense' type of thing, getting all frothed up

No business is going to be told how many people it should have in an office, its not possible and wont happen.

Buseiness will decide what they want and how they want it, given many have sold off their office space they havent got a lot of choice anyway.

I totally dont get it either. There seems to be this 'well i have to go in every day' attitude with some. They are very short sighted.

I have to go in every day. I WANT everyone to WFH.
Quieter roads, more parking, cheaper petrol with less queues. What's not to like?

Pure jealousy!! Lots of people resent others having this privilege while they don't for whatever reason.

Entirely reasonable though. I wfh almost full time and would be incredibly envious if I didn't.

One of the many good reasons to keep Farage out of power.
I work largely from home, with some office days, usually once per week. However I can plan when that is to suit me.
Farage's idea that people aren't more productive from home is not grounded in reality. I start work 5 minutes after dropping the kids at before school club instead of having to commute for 50 mins. I dont have constant interruptions or the team behind chatting loudly while I am trying to focus on a task.
I have a professional career and far more integrity than the WFH naysayers think.

Further, my authority has downsized its estate and our team of 20+ simply doesnt fit on the 12 desks allocated to us!
I am also a single parent and a 1 income household. Being able to work from home keeps me in a career and gives me a work life balance and my children some emotional stability.

We literally saw school mum with laptop in her hands on school run. What kind of quality you can get from it?

But if you don’t work with this person or in the same organisation why on earth would you care?

There's certainly validity to having some minimum level of office attendance. I do WFH full time for a small business that has no need for anyone to be physically present, but I couldn't do this job without the decades at the start of my career, learning my craft in the office environment. So if I was part of a large enough organisation to need a policy on this I would have a maximum of 1 day per week WFH for all early-career staff, and a maximum of 4 days per week WFH for senior staff, with everyone else in between agreed on a case-by-case basis with everyone with more experience having it as part of the job description that working alongside junior staff in the office, helping them to learn more from you, is part of everyone's responsibilities.

Yet another reason to be wary of Farage, after he dismantles the NHS and sells the lot to US big pharma and insurance companies.

It’s envy.

Or resentment thinking everyone at home isn’t really working when they’re slogging away somewhere. Truth is, I get far more done when I’m at home.

This is why Trump and Farage don't like it though - they want us all to be trad wives dependant on them for money.

Yeah it's a jealousy thing. So many people think WFH means the worker is sitting there twiddling their thumbs and going shopping. I flaming wish. I replied to that poster earlier who said she thinks WFH should end because it doesn't suit her personally, and I said how I've never worked so hard. I start at 7am and don't finish a minute before 5.15pm. One hour lunch. I get so much done. No one is there to distract me or make me change the toner cartridge, etc.

WFH managers now think nothing of putting in calls for 6pm. Mine did it on Monday. I had a gym class a little later and had to cancel it. This never happened in the office. There's a sense of "you're at home, therefore you can attend a meeting at 6pm".

I also know people who were very jealous of WFH people, as they themselves had manual jobs. The usual crap about "sitting around doing nothing all day". Then some of these people ended up in desk-based roles, and oh look, suddenly they're massive supporters of WFH.

Farage is deluded over this. What's he going to do to support this? Things like affordable travel, extended wraparound care at every school, affordable property rents for offices, measures to counteract the increased pollution? Fuck all. Or maybe its just a ploy to get more women staying at home (since for a lot of women who can manage childcare around flexible working, going into the office full time would likely mean leaving).

One thing though, please could people stop working from home while looking after their toddler full time? This can't be good for thr toddler or work and it's examples like this that are going to be used to ruin it for the rest of us

Also the push against WFH in the civil service goes directly against the governments push against disability benefits.

my DD went from part time topped up by benefits to FT with no benefits due to WFH as it worked with her condition. To stay in the civil service she’d have had to go back to very part time and be topped up again.

thankfully she found a new fully wfh job.

DH is one of those who doesn't like people working from home - it isn't good for them.
He used to do it occasionally even in days before COVID was an absolute nightmare getting in the way and needing silence. Would suddenly announce that morning when I would be surprised to see him sitting at the dining room table papers and stuff everywhere when I got back from taking the DCs to school. He must have known his plans the previous evening (I could have gone out for the day or swap my part time work days). I don't think I could have coped with his "important" job being done at home for the last six years.

I wonder if you actually need to be better at your job if many people work from home.
So you can't just have managers who spend their days in pointless meetings. Meetings have to be useful and getting promoted to a level of incompetence becomes harder as you are judged by your output rather than the fact that you left the office last all week.

I am freelance, working from home, and if i am not working (like right now), I am not being paid. So obviously the motivation to be productive is there but I also benefit from what any WFH employee can do - take a break if you need to, work later or earlier if you need to, let the plumber in without taking a day off, and no commuting.
There is no way Farage will be able to stop this, and it's being talked about so much in a way that I am not sure promotes Reform's real agenda.

My Fil will be ecstatic, he’s completely unhinged about it, he knows literally nothing about wfh, but is obsessed about people wfh being slackers, I’m included in these rants as is his neighbour despite knowing nothing about either of our work.

It's a great use of public money. It's going to make rich people richer. What better use could there be!

WFH keeps women in the workforce who want or need to be in it.

I say this as even though men can take time off work to raise kids or part time work, let’s be real, it is primarily women who do this!!!

Because of WFH I was able to do a full shift then pick my baby up from nursery at 16.10pm for four years, rather than him being in there till 6pm!

I was able to be just down the road if he was sick and needed me to pick him up within minutes not hours.

I was able to exercise on my lunch break in comfy clothes when time is limited as a working mum.

Now he’s at school, I am able to pick him up him up at half 3 and make up any lost time later.

Without this I would be working part time or SAHM, be out of my career and not earning enough as a household.

I'm a retired gardener who by the nature of my work couldn't have worked from home.

To me WFH seems like an absolute no brainer. Less commuting, more family friendly, no big spend on office space, a better work life balance.

Farage and his ilk are trying to keep the office market going for the financial benefit of their pals and to stoke culture wars.

The culture wars bit is working as you can see here pensioners are getting it in the neck.

If I was younger and WFH I'd do two things

• ignore anyone who says WFH is a bad thing
• vote to keep that wanker Farage as far away from power as I could.