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

@AmusedShark ,

I did in the pandemic, and it wasn’t great, but I am also middle class and middle aged, and had a study to work from.

Of course, the ability to work from home is a boon, and all work is a negotiation between willing employer and willing employee.

But I still see a lot of drawbacks from accepting a lot of working from home on a population level, both social and economic.

i think a lot of people remember their first jobs fondly, both for being learning and social environments (with a lot of overlap between the two).

It's jealousy, pure & simple!! Why should they all be able to wfh when I can't? Get a new career then if wfh is your sole wish in your working life.

Exactly! I don’t know why this is hard for people to comprehend. DH always complains about his commute and then complains that people working from home have it easy. I pointed out that if they all went into the office his commute would take twice as long.

Likewise, he’s forever complaining about buses “taking up space”. Again I pointed out that if all 50 or so people on the bus were in individual cars instead, it would take up a lot more space. I honestly don’t know how his head works.

It is weird that on the one hand you have the "women used to be much happier being housewives" narrative. Also the (post divorce) "SAHMs have it so much easier than people having to get up and go out.to work all day" narrative.
But then the same people will argue "WFH is just so bad for people's.mental health. It's actually out of concern for their well-being we need to stop it..imagine how awful being stuck at home all day with no adult contact is for those poor young people."

For what it's worth I think people are different and benefit from different things. Some people might enjoy WFH (or being a SAHM to a small baby). Others need the hustle and bustle of an office and would be climbing the walls. But the faux concern is somewhat hypocritical. Especially from a party that also thinks women should be giving up their careers to pop out lots of babies in their 20s.

What a fucking post.

A lot of the resentment towards remote working is from blokes who object to women being supported in making their lives more family friendly.

These are often men with “facilitating” wives who do all the childcare and chores and have enjoyed decades of being able to take large amounts of working hours to go to the pub or dick about on the golf course safe in the knowledge that their SAH wives would manage everything on the home front. Ot just making a point of presenteeism so they can be seen to have their bums on an office chair past 6pm.

WFH irritates them because it reminds them that women are often far more productive than they are out of necessity because they usually don’t have “facilitating” husbands who can do all the domestic work. So they bitch about people “stealing time from their employers” for having the temerity to take five minutes to put a load of washing on when they have no compunction about stealing several hours in the pub “networking”.

Its based on insecurity about the fact that their historical dominance at work is eroding and it’s absolutely pathetic. I’m not surprised Farage champions this self martyred bullshit.

They find a job with a set-up that gives them what they need and want? In exactly the same way people who wfh have. Why is it so difficult to grasp?

Trying to impose working from the office on people who don't want to, who have a better life balance by wfh, have flexibility around other responsibilities isn't anything to with concern for them though. There's literally no reason for it except to push them into something someone else says they should do. The driver for that is jealousy - either of their arrangements, or the fact they have a degree of autonomy.

You've yet to prove that the first one even pointed in the direction the report claimed it did! And this news report also doesn't contain the actual data, or even as much information about it as the first one did, so in fact we can't critique or endorse the methodology.

Some of the writing is rather tortured though, which is never a good sign. It says 'almost one fifth of people who choose to work from home say a lack of socialising is the main reason for their job dissatisfaction'. So... the other 80+% don't have a problem then?

The clearest stat is that 60% of remote workers were proud of their jobs, 66% of office and 70% of hybrid. Which would seem to suggest your belief that in person should be the default isn't backed up, ey? They don't say the people are all doing the same jobs, office work clearly covering a wide variety of roles some of which have to be in person. Moving the remote ones back to the office doesn't necessarily mean they're going to become as satisfied as the others.

Are you just googling for sources saying remote working is bad? It looks like that. If you do the same for surveys showing remote working is good you'll get plenty to back that up. The key is to actually think, open your mind. Generalisations on this subject are stupid.

So you don't work from home and never have?

But think you know all about it, when it could be brilliant and when it could be awful?

But you think people are just assuming people against it are jealous and that's wrong? but you just made numerous assumptions about WFH and why it could be brilliant or awful? And in fact, made assumptions about the entire human race and what they need.

How odd.

https://www.agcc.co.uk/news-article/people-working-from-home-least-satisfied-in-their-jobs-new-survey-shows

Another survey of 5,000 young workers.

You can question and critique the methodology of all surveys, but they all point in the same direction and it also makes sense.

How do you advance career wise, learn from your superiors, get noticed if you're young and ambitious is my question. Surely you're at risk of just being a drone. This concerns me. I have three DC's. Eldest own business likes to mentor the young ones and steer. So mostly office based. Second son, works from home wife hybrid worker, they juggle school runs etc. youngest works two days in office, three days at university. He's still learning and likes the discipline of the workplace.

Personally in my field remote working wouldn't have worked. My skills and personality would have withered.

Have a look at the sample. They spoke to 1044 office workers aged 18-44, 500 of whom were 18-24 and a minimum of 500 in office jobs. There's nothing to say they bothered polling those who were fully remote, which is by definition going to contain the 18-24s who are least able to work in person and the ones most advantaged by greater availability of wfh.

This matters, because those young people get spoken over a lot. Too many people, and you're very much one of them, don't bother acknowledging all the young people who won't be in the office in the first place.

The results are also being selectively reported. They don't link to the data, but 48% is less than half. Does that mean the other 52% think remote working makes it easier to build relationships with colleagues, or that it's immaterial? A third feel demotivated- it doesn't say whether that's due to remote working but let's assume it is. That leaves two thirds who don't. Yet we don't see that spelled out.

iosh.com/about/media-centre/home-working-damaging-young-workers

So many people seem to think it is jealousy!

I can’t think of anything worse than my home also being my office. It is nice to have separation.

I genuinely think that work is a social activity and the human race needs that physical mixing of people for happiness.

WFH is brilliant if you started your career in an office environment and had all the benefits. And then you got married, had children and live in a nice house, ideally with a home office.

It is awful if you have just started and work from either your childhood bedroom or a tiny flat.

Going into the office to then sit on Teams meetings has to be the worst. Absolutely pointless.

Anyone who “objects” to WFH are, IME, those whose jobs cannot accommodate it!
There are a lot of low-paid customer/patient-facing workers who are clearly treated appallingly by their managers (who are “on their backs” the whole time, micro-managing them) and these people are the ones who seem to resent the idea of a relatively stress-free work experience: in short, they’re jealous!
It would be impossible to make it illegal for companies to allow WFH anyway: in my Company, they tried to make everyone come back into the office after lockdown, and tons of people threatened to leave! Faced with the reality of losing hundreds of years of experience, the company backed down (it is a huge international business), and also, they realised that they can’t justify making workers collaborate across Countries and Continents if they are also saying that you need to be in the same room with your co-workers, while trying to reduce travelling at the same time!
So IMO, it’s complete ignorance and jealousy that is prompting the narrative that WFH is bad!

You can gain all the positives probably with only one day a week in an office. Preferably the one with the fewest meetings or calls.

Teams and Zoom for all its failings is a great improvement for most meetings as you can be multi-tasking and doing some work whilst the bits of the meeting you have little or no input into take place.

It's bizarre. Some people really think WFH means not doing your job at all and the employers don't monitor, check, or sack people for you know, not doing what they're paid for.

Tell them it can go as far as stroke counters or mouse clicks monitoring and they'd not believe it.

Yep, you have to log what you're doing every single second of the day. Apart from fuck that, it's mad that so many people don't know how micromanaged that area is.

If you're interacting with a human it's human interaction.

Why do you think someone needs to be in an office to be involved in or interested in their work? That's a very odd assumption.

And I don't think there is a dominant demographic WFH and certainly not one where everyone lives in nice houses with family. I live in a rented flat with no family and WFH.

Totally this.

I find working in the office phenomenally unproductive. There’s a pointless one hour each way commute which takes out two hours of the day. There’s then an obligatory 15 minutes hunting for a desk, getting set up before you can attempt any work.

There’s huge amounts of pointless gossip and chatter about Netflix and tea runs. All of which is supposed to be about “social cohesion” but which is just a huge time vacuum. Fighting over meeting rooms etc.

There are legitimate reasons for wanting people to work together but productivity isn’t one of them.

I worked in academia from the late 1980s and the tradition was hybrid working. Academics are required to do deep reseach, prepare grant applications and tasks which would be impossible in a busy office with the noise constant of phones going off. Not all academics have their own offices. When I began work I was delighted to find that I was routinely allowed to WFH 2/3 days a week. There was no real requirement to sit at a dest 9-5 so long as the work got done. So in theory the work could be done evenings and weekends. The prof I worked for walked her dogs twice a day on her WFH days. The system was that you attended campus for meetings, seeing students, holding tutorials using the ibrary and admin business. Most research was done at home and it was upto you to schedule the work for when it was required.

When you have completed a masters and a doctorate you are already accustomed to working this way and to the self-discipline of organizing your workload. Nowadays I am long retured but still do private tutoring of postgrads. Learning how to organize and manage tasks is part of what I teach them at the onset.

Same in Staffs (not an employee but know many).

I was under the impression it was referring to council and government employees.

Worcestershire have had Reform council for a while now… still no return to the office full time mandate - our HQ is condemned though which means there’s no space!