To feel relieved that flexible working might be on the agenda again?

I have no doubt that happens in some workplaces, but at my DS's, which is one of the UK's biggest insurance/financial services firms, the senior staff are on very attractive pay bands/scales with very attractive bonuses on top. My son's direct manager is on double my son's pay, so for his firm, it's nothing to do with the senior staff not earning much more than the graduates.

the problem in many workplaces is that senior staff used to be well paid - well paid enough to be able to have a spouse work part time or to afford wraparound or an au pair.
Pay bands have flattened to the point where experienced staff with 20 years on the job are often paid not much more than new graduates, so there’s not that freedom for them to be in an office every day, pay to commute etc.
While they’d happily share their experience, they may be less willing if it involves paying for childcare to cover their commute.

I agree with WFH being vital for people with caring responsibilities. I’m part time hybrid so I can do the school pick up. My office days, I have to leave the office at 2 to guarantee I can definitely make be at school for 3:20. WFH days, I don’t leave the house until 3.

On my WFH days, I can easily stay if a meeting runs over, I need to finish a task or someone comes to me with something at the last minute. We have excellent policies about TOIL or adjusting hours so it’s no problem. Whereas in the office I can’t do any of that, and it has caused problems for colleagues.

I’ve never known anyone take the piss though. Very occasionally a school aged child might be home sick or on a half day while parents WFH.

I was working from.jime during Covid. I hated it because I live alone. I stuck to my contracted hours but there were loads of people who treated it as extended leave. I am afraid that people have spoilt it gor the genuine people. I am baffled how anyone can be working from home and looking afrer a child. Speech therapy need is already on the increase- this will no doubt continue to rise.

Agree with you. I work hybrid but have full wrap around care in place because it's not possible to look after them and work effectively.

That article conflates having work flexibility with permanent ongoing arrangements to work from home. I don't think there are many employers who won't agree to flexibility around nativity plays, caring needs (to a reasonable degree), etc. That is very different to agreeing that employees should permanently be mostly based at home.

There is a happy medium between where we were say 20 years ago with people feeling guilty when home commitments collided with work, and Covid lockdown. There is a huge loss for young people if they are not around other people in the workplace - not that they would agree, most of the ones who work in my team are the most reticent at coming into the office. Yet they are really struggling with learning the social skills required to move into more senior positions. They seem to feel like promotion should be inevitable once they've completed their tick-box set of tasks, when in reality to become more senior they need to be able to influence, read social cues, deal with difficult stakeholders, and be comfortable engaging with a range of different people and situations. You just cannot learn that on a Teams call.

Nail on the head. It’s another way in which our young are being shafted. MyDS is the same, he goes into the office virtually every day but is often disappointed that there’s no one in his team there despite them saying they would be, meaning his training is very slow and often there’s literally no one “free” on Teams for him to ask for advice/help etc. When I was a trainee, if none of my immediate colleagues were around, I’d at least have passing acquaintance with other depts and have an idea who they were, what they did and I’d know who was mostly likely to help me. In my sons office, everyone other than his immediate team are complete strangers - he doesn’t know if they’re trainees or bosses, doesn’t know what team they’re in as it’s all hot desking. Over the months he has asked random workers but they have turned out to be in completely different depts doing very different things so couldn’t help.

It didn’t. Lots of things didn’t work at all or were inefficient. We just put up with it because it was an international crisis. It “worked” for some, but on a bigger scale we still havn’t recovered and havn’t regained the lost productivity/efficiency.

Yes I’ve always know people who do fuck all in the office, and distracted everyone else. Flexible working is great. Managers just need to be more smart in identifying the pisstakers

I know there’s a narrative that the push back to the office is all about control but there are perfectly legitimate reasons for it.

I learned my job from working alongside senior and more experienced colleagues. That was working side by side with them, as ad hoc and unplanned things happened. They were also physically there when I had small questions to ask. It was invaluable.

Our trainees now have none of that. They’ll see the odd senior person once a week, on the off chance their office days marry up together. It’s piss poor in comparison; absolutely shit in fact. They can’t learn in isolation, sitting in their spare room, and no, video calls are not an adequate substitute.

The government can’t expect us to just forget how well wfh worked during Covid.

I agree. There have been people, usually women, in every workplace I’ve known that quietly run the whole business (much more so than the CEO). They’re usually badged as ‘admin’ and paid a bare minimum, where really they should be on a fortune because they are irreplaceable.

The pay just doesn’t cover a traditional commitment to full time in the office. City adjacent housing is too expensive, commuting is too expensive, and too long, childcare too expensive relative to salaries to expect people with children to devote that much of their personal resource for so little. Now if you could keep a spouse, who didn’t have to work - then who cares if you can’t make 6pm nursery pick up, you won’t be struggling to get a meal on the table at 8pm as your hungry kids scream as they are already fed, you won’t have to be ironing for 6am next day at midnight. But that’s what full time office presence means, and it’s a shit life.
maybe it does work better in some jobs. Do they want to pay for it?

I've WFH for the last 20 years. I set my own diary, so could be away 6 nights a week or WFH 5 days a week. It varies. I'm trusted to do this and I can easily turn my laptop on at 5:30am and shut off at 11pm. My dc are adults so no childcare issues, I don't have a pet. But I honestly, hand on heart, am way more productive then if I go into the office for Meeting then hot desk for the afternoon

It should definitely be up to the business to decide
We brought everyone back in after COVID
A few left ,I could have guessed who would leave and I was glad to see the back of them
We all had to work hard to get things back on track otherwise the business would have gone down the pan and nobody would have been working from anywhere
We do offer the flexibility but for WFH it’s very limited

I agree!

I am glad your job is working out for you!

Yes, there is no coordination. My child is at one of the ‘big four’ firms in London. And she goes in most days, hoping to see a manager there. But even if they say they are coming in, they often don’t. Then she feels she has come in for nothing as there is nobody to speak to her about a particular project and she is sitting with people from other teams who can’t help her. It’s very frustrating and I can see it is affecting her morale. She feels quite lost. If there was more coordination, then it would be much better. and despite being Gen Z, she doesn’t love staring at a screen all day.

In my job, I see it as my priority to look after my trainees. I try and meet them in person as much as I can. Our meetings are face-to-face so they can learn and understand all the issues and also the subtleties of communication, teamwork and negotiation etc.

I would agree with this.

I have recently had a career change and am in a corporate job for the first time ever. I am a middle aged and experienced and even I find it hard to know who and how to ask for information. BUT I still find WFH better as when I'm in the office there is such a fragmented team there it can also be hard to get info. So I am sitting next to my boss, but he is on teams mtgs all day, at least when I am WFH if I book a 1 to 1 with him I know I have x time with him. If I was younger, less confident and just less experienced in the workplace I think I would really struggle to integrate and get the hang of things.

I think what would work better is hybrid but everyone one on the same or similar schedules so proper communication could happen in the workplace, being in the office feels like a formality box ticking exercise rather than a useful constructive situation.

I will say though that I am delighted with my current role and its fairly senior and not something I could ever have done it it was full time in the office, I'm disabled and just never dreamt I'd be able to do a full time job again.

My bugbear where I work (very large company) realised during COVID that people can be located all over the country and still collaborate with Teams.
Now post COVID we are being pushed back into the workplace but NONE of my current team are based in my office so guess what, we communicate on Teams.
Pre COVID working in IT your whole project team was one place, but not anymore. Oh and they don't encourage travelling as that costs them money.
Bloody hilarious

I completely agree with you. Our productivity is going down in this country which makes us far less able to compete on the global markets. This is a major problem and particularly at the moment with a burgeoning national debt we need to do something about it.

I’m afraid I would argue it still isn’t that simple. Knowledge transfer is a permanent process; it doesn’t stop after six months. I see long-standing staff who are far less efficient today than they were pre-Covid so everybody is affected.

This!

This really get my hackles up as the conversation around working from home is always very selfish. Generally its 'I' work well from home, 'I' get great performance reviews and work from home. 'I' get so much more done at home.

I genuinely care about my profession and firmly believe that there is so much about office chatter, over hearing phone calls and general discussion that is so incredibly valuable. Not just at the start of your career - although I think we will end up letting down an entire generation, but all the way through. Discussion about new regulation, gossip of an incident that you realise means you need to tighten up something on you own project, its all important stuff and is just completely lost if everyone is operating in their own silos at home.

I'm not against flexibility, or some home working but I do genuinely think that people need to be in the office for a few days each week.

Sadly in my experience the biggest ‘abusers’ of the WFH flexibility are those avoiding childcare costs and looking after children whilst working. Mistakes happen because of poor concentration, and when challenged (however professional the management approach) is followed by tears and cries of high childcare costs, all having consumed significant amounts of management time to try and manage /investigate.
Productivity drops are not made up in the evenings etc.
I think this may damage the reputation of working parents.

As an employer, is it really my responsibility to subsidise a working parent by tolerating substandard word output?

Going forward - the option of offshoring jobs to lower cost countries or greater use of AI agents will definitely reduce the number of jobs available in the UK … and if a job can be done WFH, it really can be done anywhere in the world.

So the unions / government requesting greater workplace flexibility in UK would do well to remember that global organisations really can choose where they employ people and the UK is looking increasingly unattractive.

Who will mentor them if all the senior members of staff are at home?