AIBU to think if your boss wants you in the office, they should help pay to get you there?

If employees have been meeting their targets and performing well for a number of years, what justification is there for changing working patterns?

Spot on!

I love WFH 2.5 days a week - it saves me money on childcare/commuting costs, gives me more time with my family, allows me to cook more nutrious meals (I meal prep/batch cook during lunchbreaks) and ultimately I earn more because I didn't need to drop as many hours as I would have done if full-time in the office to be able to do balance work and family life. These benefits are good for health, wellbeing and the economy.

I also fully appreciate that WFH can be very damaging to productivity. I've experienced that first hand - being in a role with not a lot to do and no real impetus for management to up my workload because that also means they'd need to do more work. I am a manager myself now, and as you say the role of managing hybrid or fully remote workers requires specific skills and also specific data. It is such a delicate balancing act trying to address potential "shirking" when targets and performance metrics just don't give you the info you need to be able to say very clearly "you are doing less on the days you work from home and that is a problem".

I would fully support much more monitoring of remote working. Its a price I would pay happily to continue to benefit from the extra 7 hours a week I have at home (commuting/lunch break time).

I am concerned that companies are instead pushing for a return to office; its an easier way to address the problem people, at the expense of those of us who can WFH effectively. And I do believe it will disproportionately affect parents, carers and those with health conditions.

And before anyone pipes up that not all jobs can WFH so its a "perk" office workers should be grateful they had temporarily - I fully support all job roles in all sectors providing as much flexibility as is reasonable to enable people to have a fulfilling career and be economically active while maximising their opportunity to live a good and balanced life. The point is office work CAN be done at home, at least some of the time, so WFH is reasonable flexibility; if your job can't be done at home, it's not reasonable to WFH, but other flex may be avaliable.

As to OPs point - no, companies should not be paying for commutes. However, there may be a wider picture whereby companies have watered down other T&Cs and/or not offered inflation-matching payrises and/or offered new employment contracts on the basis of remote/hybrid working. Those companies need to remedy those issues and not just tell employees to suck it up.

A lot of recent studies have shown a huge drop in productivity from people that wfh. So companies are getting less from their employees whilst paying them the same. It was unlikely to continue indefinitely.

Meeting individual employee targets doesn't paint the full picture of how it affects the organisation as a whole. For example, my organisation has discovered that junior staff get less support if people wfh as senior staff focus on their own targest and don't provide the same level of training and mentoring as would happen in the office.

That would be a question for the employer. They must have their own reasons because lots of companies require employees to go in to the office for a certain number of days

Oh for goodness sake. No wonder this country is going to shit.

Have you ever managed staff?

@movingtotheslowlane sadly no, we are keeping him for the duration! He’s here to learn skills for getting back into the workplace after time out ( I don’t know why he was out if work, we don’t get told) so we have to suck it up. The organisation really does try to offer opportunity for people and if people come in on this scheme they could be offered roles in places where their are vacancies if they want to apply, obviously with some experience of the workplace they can speak from that experience, and stand a chance ahead of other candidates potentially .

He won’t get a good reference from me though unless things turn around. I feel he has been spectacularly tone deaf about how you go about getting to know the team, the role and how we can best support him. in week 2 wanted to work from home shows no motivation or commitment really.
Meanwhile tomorrow I’ve got to respond to an admin person who thinks that in spite of being paid in a full time role, they can leave at 2:30 every day because they have to pick their child up from school, again no asking for flexible hours or anything, just started doing it in sept!

Well it depends on the situation and the company set up but in my personal opinion in the majority of jobs (definitely not all) wfh only works in combination with days together in the office. Employees may think they can work effectively at home but they miss the bigger picture

They may meet their own targets but it may be preventing the company as a whole or other people developing in the right direction.

Junior colleagues need more senior ones in the office with them to learn and develop appropriately.

working together in person enables extra conversations and discussions to take place that result in new ideas and innovations

it creates a better sense of unity and enables people to spot people who are struggling better

The point I’m making is that commuting in sometimes very expensive; if the government are wanting people to work in offices to stimulate the economy: they really should consider tax breaks on commuting costs.

Possibly not: some jobs require certain skills that not everyone has.

That’s a senior management issue and a lack of structured training issue.

2/3 of the staff at the company I work for are located in a different continent, yet somehow we manage to train and work with them effectively…

Yes it may be a senior management issue and they are addressing it by getting people back into the office.

And you can introduce as much structured training as you want but it has to be in addition to learning on the job. Learning on the job is the best way to learn and covers way more than just the content. It all teaches how to be an employee, development of software skills. For example, you learn a lot more also being able to watch people before and after the meeting /presentation that just being able to watch the meeting itself.

And there’s also lots of people abroad desperate to come to the uk for jobs.

It really depends on what the employment contract says doesn't it? If employment is based on WFH, the employees are right.

BTW, all 'back to the office' initiatives are consultations by stealth. They are looking to shed workers and this is a way to do it without having to say 'redundancy process'.

Or they genuinely believe it will result in an increase in standards and company growth

Well that's great for you. The senior management at my company have found that remote structured training is not sufficiently effective, hence it wants people in the office some of the time.

Yes, instead of senior management improving their management skills, they are passing the buck to junior staff who are less able to absorb the costs of commuting.

I live in prime SE commuter belt territory. It costs c£50 per day to go in by rail which is the only viable option. That’s a huge cost out of net income.

And yet millions of people have studied for degrees via the Open University. Perhaps your company needs to switch training providers….

no, as management they decide what is best for the company and all employees and they have decided that is to be in the office for several days a week . If you haven’t got to senior management (yet) then don’t assume you know everything because you probably don’t see the whole picture.

and before you say being in the office is not what is best for all employees, the company struggling will result in job losses and I imagine that is not in the employees best interest.

You cannot learn how to fully work through structured/ external training alone. That is a proportion of it but the vast majority is on the job.

You are aware that giving people standard structured training is not the same as giving the individual on the job training that is specific to their role and the company's way of doing things? And that people improve by working with ohters, seeing how others do the job and getting feedback?

You don't just sent a junior engineer on a C# course and then expect them to write perfect code, for example. Nor do you just expect them to use AI to write their code and understand if it's acceptable.

Although some work standards are so sloppy these days, maybe it is because training a new employee is now simply sending them on a training course and then expecting them to work the rest out.

In many cases, RTO mandates are about getting people to leave so they don't have to pay redundancy. They hope people will go and they won't replace them, and there's even more juicy profit for their multi-millionaire shareholders.

So people who are desperate for jobs won't be any better off.

I'm sure that is the case. Employers are really lazy - that's why there are so few entry level jobs, they shove a job requirement of at least 2 years experience on something we (Gen X) would have done as a Saturday job - or import from overseas.