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

It is worth separating out childcare objections based on age. People sound silly whining about older primary kids, whereas a toddler is much more likely to be a distraction.

I'd hold off on buying a new rail card if I were you.

It does strike me that a job that can be done 100% at home with limited human interaction, and multitasking with childcare, is a job that is ripe to be replaced by AI.

It's not really that black and white. I'm a fiction editor. While I acknowledge that at some point in the future that job might be replaceable with AI, it's very much not the case at the moment.

Agree that no one should ever be juggling childcare and work, though, or not if the children are small enough to need active care anyway. People wfh need to make childcare arrangements the same as if they were office-based, unless their kids are older and able to entertain themselves and it's just a case of not leaving them home alone.

Genuinely, why do people link remote and AI? If a job can be done by AI then that's going to happen regardless of where it's performed now. If there is a difference, which I doubt, remote workers are less expensive because they don't require premises, so the saving from switching to AI will be greatest for in person workers.

Also, if you want to talk about the welfare of young people then that includes all of them. Not just the ones who want to and can do a job in a workplace. You're saying they feel isolated working from home. This is another unevidenced claim, but even if it were true, the ones who are only able to access work because they're allowed to do it remotely would be more isolated by a default of going into the workplace. Because they wouldn't have the jobs at all! Try and think about the existence of all the people who were screwed over by in person work being a norm.

And lastly, if you want working in person to be the assumed norm, good luck persuading either the public or employers themselves to pay for it.

One of my DC works fully remotely. There is no office to go to as all the work is completed online. It has saved the small business many, many thousands of pounds by having no office. Businesses would simply move abroad if everyone was forced to pay for unnecessary office accommodation.

I don’t think it is an all or nothing, but I do think going in to work should be the default.

If some people need to come in a little late or leave a little early due to childcare, or need to stay home one day a week, I think that is reasonable.

But, if you are simultaneously doing childcare and working on a regular basis, you aren’t doing either well.

When I see the threads about Teams ‘etiquette’ on here, they are a total embarrassment from supposedly adult professionals.

But young people do feel isolated WFH, or coming into a nearly empty office. There are more mental health issues; being on screens all day both for work and leisure isn’t healthy.

It does strike me that a job that can be done 100% at home with limited human interaction, and multitasking with childcare, is a job that is ripe to be replaced by AI.

It's just distraction politics, like the "boat people". Farage couldn't run a bath, never mind a country, so he has to play distraction politics. It's just about getting into power so he can acquire more wealth for him and his cronies.

How can they talk about London being hollowed out and not talk about the price of accommodation?!

Not just the right wants to end WFH
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3ep20drr0o

I’ll start going to the office every day when Nigel does.

😆

It’s called the race to the bottom. The same people saying doctors shouldn’t strike for better pay because their own pay is shit, and teachers shouldn’t protest about their pensions because they don’t have a pension themselves. The same sort of people who think unions are ruining this country (unless they have a fall out with the boss and look to join one then). Small minded, hard of thinking people.

I worked from home for 20+ years. I now work in an office (my choosing, w work for myself) and I can categorically state I could not give a shiny shit where anyone else works.

Ding ding JACKPOT!

Either you let businesses do what is best for them - free enterprise, low nanny state etc etc

or you don’t and dictate minute details like where employees sit to do their work

can’t have it both ways

but yes some people resent the super geeks earning huge amounts of money whilst never having to put shoes on whilst they are stuck in wet traffic jams earning nothing of course they do

That's a fallacy that you've convinced yourself of.

Customer service/call centre workers WFH are strictly and intensely monitored and have to account for every single minute they are not available for calls.

There's no system available where they get to bunk off at any time, let alone 9am or 3pm

What you are experiencing is possibly, some workers shifts work around those times so there are fewer operatives.

Or more likely.. everyone is calling at 9am as that's when they open and a lot of people like you, think WFH people are bunking off to collect their kids at 3pm so jam the 'phone lines at 3pm.

Just think for a second, do you really think any company anywhere is paying for people to WFH and letting them off around school drop off and pick up times and paying them to work when they are not?

Really? do you really think that is happening? do you really think any low-paying company is paying people to be working when they're not?

Thing is, people generally understand that there are loads of jobs they don't encounter. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion about customer service, but that isn't a reason to presume that all jobs done in a particular place (in this case home) are customer service. Virtually everyone gets that there are a variety of different roles done in a hospital, for example, and that what's true for a surgeon may not be so of a receptionist. And that there are jobs that don't involve being available on demand to members of the public.

As for whether annoyance is correct, this really depends on whether they'd be willing to pay more for the service they want. And also accepting any wider consequences, ie if people just choose something else. If you (general) want to talk about customer service or helpline jobs not being remote, that involves more than waving a magic wand and expecting the early 2010s job market to come wafting back to us.

Like many others my employer sold off some buildings which they owned not leased. Imagine they went for a lot of money as in town centre with underground parking overlooking a park - being converted into flats which will be snapped up.
We’re now hybrid working and there’s not enough desks left in the remaining office to accommodate this.
i can’t see how a government can dictate how a private company operates but imagine Reform will push for office attendence in the public sector.
It’s really up to each business how they operate - if my company didn’t offer hybrid working they’d struggle to recruit. Some employees work in the office full time (through choice), some are on home working contracts and most of us hybrid work.

There is poor management, and I agree that's often what people are complaining about. Equally, I'm reluctant to blame individual managers for what is sometimes a consequence of wider structural factors.

Our labour force has shrunk, getting people to work in person is often expensive and people don't necessarily want to pay what it costs to get the service they want. Organisations have tight budgets and are squeezing harder, people with in demand skills can enforce remote working as a condition of taking the job and it can be a way of not having to pay people more to cover the costs of commuting. These are not really things that can be good managed away.

For "Joe Public", most times they come across WFH employees will be when they call some kind of customer service, hence the negativity when the experience is crap. Perhaps customer service roles, helplines etc shouldn't be WFH jobs?

I know that lots of WFH jobs do "work" well, I've done it myself and I've had staff who've done it, but we have not been "helpline" or "support" line workers, we've been doing professional work that involves minimal interaction with other people, i.e. specific tasks that take anywhere between 3 hours and 2 weeks which only need 1 or 2 phone calls or emails to ask/answer queries on the task. That kind of work can, indeed, be done anywhere, anytime, so lends itself to WFH/remote working.

Call centres/support work is completely different as callers expect a sensible answer to their query anytime within normal working hours and are rightly annoyed when no one answers the call at 9am or 3pm or when they speak to someone about something important and the call is marred by dogs barking, children crying, door-bell ringing etc that distracts the call handler.

I’ve WFH for decades. These days I go into an office infrequently to work with colleagues who go in a couple of days a week. It’s accepted that we are less productive on office days.

I think a lot of the criticism of WFH is the crap customer service that people are suffering these days. I don't think there's a problem with WFH if done properly, i.e. managed and monitored properly by the employer, but it does seem a lot of staff WFH are taking the piss and/or management aren't managing properly.

It's often justified as being about shit customer service. As though remote work means you must be doing something that involves being available on the phone to random members of the public.

There's a real bizarre fear or hatred of flexibility around work at all. Employers might hate employees having anything other than reverential compliance to rigid working practices but why other ordinary workers? You see it on here all the time, even on a forum for mums, where people complain about other mums being able to do the school run.

I work in a hybrid role - wfh usually 2 days per week and get so much more done at home! When I'm out and about working in the community, the traffic is awful everywhere, so there are clearly lots of people who do not work from home. When I go into the office, sometimes I can't even get a desk and if I do I find it really hard to focus with all the noise going on around me.
I cannot stand NF and his smug face! He would not have the first clue about my job role, or the work of many other workers. I don't understand how he has the audacity to come out with these ridiculous sweeping statements!