Do you think that now a lot of jobs are working from home, it’s a good thing or bad ?

[LovelyYellowLabrador]

I know it’s like most thjngs has it’s pros and cons
but Us humans are fundamentally social animals
so can’t help wondering what the long term impact of this will be ….

just wondering about your thoughts on the subject

for every one of those people who take the mick, there is another person who actually puts more hours in, is more flexible / available, and far more productive

I doubt that. Most likely you get X% of people who work as effectively as they would in the workplace plus [100 - X%] of pisstakers.

I would be interested to hear from DVLA and the passport office about why levels of service remain so poor, more than two years after the first lockdown. What’s their pisstaker percentage?

If what you say about each shirker being offset by somebody MORE productive at home is true, service levels should have been the same as before the DVLA and passport office worked from home. They are not. Where are the ‘more productive at home’ type of people in those large organisations? Maybe they don’t exist, or are very rare. Which would explain why employers want staff back in the office, mightn’t it?

Sorry, I'm not picking on you because lots of posters have agreed with your points, just quoting because you were first.
But, to play devil's advocate, do you, (and the posters who agreed with you) not feel a bit as though you've pulled the ladder up after you? You agree that YOU are sufficiently experienced to not need mentoring from colleagues at this stage in your working life, and YOU are confident enough to build good relationships solely through virtual interaction, etc.

But at the same time isn't that acknowledging that when you were younger you did need mentoring, and assistance in getting to know people, understand working norms and interactions, observe good practice etc? And that you did benefit from older and more experienced staff members showing/demonstrating you those tools? If you, and other posters who benefitted from in person mentors, relationship building via water cooler chat and "anyone around fancy coming with me to meet x/visit site y?" but now don't want to be the mentor/more experienced person for new/younger starters isn't that a bit "I'm all right, Jack?"

I'm commenting from a bit of a unique position in being the experienced person trying to train new starters almost entirely virtually in 1 job from March 2020-mid 2021, and seeing how hard they found everything, particularly those for who it was their first "proper" job, and then being the new starter myself in a different job, and again doing everything completely virtually and never meeting my colleagues in real life, from mid 2021 onwards. Even with a good 12 years experience in professional work environments, having confidence to chat to people virtually etc., I found it all so much harder online, and although I would say I have a good working relationship with my new colleagues its nowhere near as good, either socially or professionally, as in any of my previous, face to face jobs.

Do you have statistics to back up why you think people are less productive at home? I would hope so. Otherwise it’s a bit unsubstantiated isn’t it.

In the nicest possible way... It's me I care about. My mental health and work life balance is so much better WFH. I've been in the office today and it's killed me. Granted I am disabled, but still.

Yes, in your opinion or the opinion of whoever is doing the job.

If the opinion holder is personally invested in saving £200 per month on train fares (like a PP) or saving money on child care of petrol (other PPs) they are unlikely to be forming a disinterested opinion on their own situation, are they?

The opinion more likely to be based on fact and evidence is that of the employer. You know, the business who pays the salaries and monitors the performance of the business.

Lol what a bootlicking post. Employees are all lying piss takers and employers are capable of no wrong.

@Iamthewombat yes, people do see wfh jobs as a "soft option" and I think that's where the resentment lies. When you're both out of the house all day you can't put a wash on/unload the dishwasher/peg out the washing/pick the kids up/walk the dog/run the Dyson around etc etc
I'm intrigued by the "mouse jiggler"! Please tell me how this works.

It’s a fact that service levels at the DVLA and the Passport Office are terrible and much worse than pre-pandemic. Just Google.

It is also a fact that many employers have asked staff who worked from home during the pandemic out of necessity to return to the office, and many are resisting. Did you read the Jacob Rees Mogg story? Or the stories about the civil service? You can Google those too. There are many other examples.

My own experience is of two junior team members pretending to work from home whilst they were caring for children. That is why I dismissed them. You’re not going to try telling me that the only two WFH pisstakers in Britain worked in my team, are you?

It doesn’t mean that everyone WFH is taking the piss. It means that some are, and I’m suggesting that the impassioned WFH advocates’ motives might not be selfless. Almost every pro-WFH post on here mentions saving money on travel and having more free time. Bolstered by sanctimonious ‘and I’m saving the planet’ declarations.

It’s interesting what brings out the utter fury on Mumsnet. Top of the list are:

No, you might not be more productive at home despite what you think, and your employer will get better value from you if you spend some time in the office.

No, house prices may not rise inexorably.

No, you are not paying too much tax.

No, your nursery costs should not be paid from general taxation, nurseries are not too expensive and nursery owners are not making massive profits.

I know plenty of civil servants who wfh, JRM is being ridiculous.

Correlation and causation aren’t the same thing either - prove service levels at the DVLA are bad because people WFH.

Plenty of pisstkers in the office, in retail, in literally every field. I don’t know why you think it’s more prevalent among wfh folks.

I have to agree with a pp comment about pulling the ladder up after you. I have two dd, in their twenties trying to get careers going. WFH has been very hard, both want to get back to their offices and miss being around people. They want to learn from colleagues, be seen, socialise, all the things that many people at the start of adult life should be able to expect. Colleagues a little older, with partners and children and comfortable at home are very reluctant to come in and continue the tradition of helping along the younger generation.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/15/mercury-rising-searches-mouse-jigglers-shirk-home/

There you go.

I work some days from home and some from the office. I go into the office because I need to be available to colleagues. I can see very clearly that problems are solved much more quickly when you are in the same room as your colleagues. It’s the other stuff as well, which is dismissed by the ‘WFH and never go into the office again ‘ cheerleaders: helping newer team members find their feet, having a drink with colleagues, finding out news, seeing which way the wind is blowing, mentoring the younger members of staff. That stuff is important to the business, not just the individuals, and I want the business I work for to be a success.

Your opinion of Jacob Rees Mogg is as irrelevant to this debate as your biased opinion on whether your own job can be ‘done from anywhere’. You asked for evidence that employers wanted staff back in the office. That’s a piece of evidence.

Why do employers, including the DVLA and the passport office, want staff back in the office? It’s a tough one all right. By cunningly applying Occam’s Razor to the problem I have divined that it’s because the employers think that the jobs will be done more effectively if the staff are in the office. Ergo having everyone WFH the whole time must be, in their view, less conducive to working effectively.

That’s quite simple logic. You can contribute an alternative theory if you like.

It depends completely on the type of business you work for. I lead a team which is split over a number of sites, and work with colleagues across the country. As a result, that side of the office you describe just doesn’t exist on a regular basis and so we can work flexibly from any location - it’s not a one size fits all.

No, i asked for evidence that WFH were more likely to be piss takers.

Thats not logic - you have to test out a hypothesis and prove it one way or the other. Until that point, it’s simply an opinion.

It has also become clear that the managers are struggling to manage people when they don’t see them
Some managers are just terrible, even when they can see workers. I know some of those managers.
I currently work in a place we cant work from home. I would love to change to a wfh/hybrid.
I'd happily commute a fair distance one or two days a week. I'm obviously looking in the wrong places.
I looked at sky for a job and they wanted I think 6 weeks or more in the office, then you can ask to wfh. I dont want to waste 6 weeks to then be told oh no you need to stay office based. I'm also not getting younger.
I guess I'll keep looking.

Works for us. Great work-life balance family.
Can now fit work in around more important things in life.

Dp socialises with her team and we have an invite to her colleagues wedding.
I work for the money so not arsed about social engagements or being friends.

What @SirChenjins said.
I was talking to a friend recently, who works with colleagues from different countries round the world. Since being able to wfh, she is very happy to log on, on the occasional evening to talk to a colleague in America, or get up really early occasionally to talk to a colleague from one of their Eastern offices because she can also take those hours back during the day to suit herself. Prior to everyone getting linked up on Teams / Zoom / Google Meet / whatever they use, they only communicated with colleagues in different time zones by e-mail. No only was it slow (you'd have to wait for the next day all the time to get an answer to each bit) but it was nowhere near as productive as being able to have a meeting, where you can see the person's face / hear any intonation. If she couldn't wfh though, she wouldn't go into the office late in the evening, or before dawn cracked to continue these really productive meetings - it only works because she can do it from her dining room.
Of course there are different jobs.
Of course there are people with hugely different attitudes towards their work, but there are also ways of measuring output for most jobs, and it is down to the manager's to manage those that don't do what they are supposed to be doing.

No, i asked for evidence that WFH were more likely to be piss takers

You asked for it, and you got it. I’ll explain it again and it might sink in. I named two organisations, DVLA and the passport office, whose service levels have plunged since their staff began to work from home. Both organisations are trying to get their staff back into the office. Why do you think that is?

What is the most likely reason for (1) the drop in service since the staff of those organisations began to work from home and (2) those organisations’ desire to get people back at their desks? What does the evidence point to?

I invited you to put forward an alternative theory to explain the combination of (1) and (2). Please do. I think that your passionate desire to work from home forever and your outrage at having to meet your own travel costs to work have clouded your ability to think logically.

Trains strikes-not an issue I’ll just log in at home. Got two loads of washing out the other day and dried. Put first load out before I started, next load in am out on the line during my morning break. When I dismiss I don’t need to trudge to the station, wait in a train that ScotRail will probably fuck up and then tramp home from station. £8.80 a day in travel expenses saved…what’s not to like?

Where I work, WFH didn’t massively affect productivity due to people slacking off. Some people did but most people were pretty productive at getting through their own emails and writing up their own things.

But at the same time as most people were doing their own individual work okay, all the collective work and the kind of work that couldn’t be ticked off on a to-do list suffered. Collaboration wasn’t as good, new people found it harder to get the sort of informal learning that you pick up outside training webinars, organisational culture got fractured and weird, people got more passive and less interested in being part of plans and decisions, rather than just “I have completed my task, now I will sit here and wait to be assigned another task.”

So now we are hybrid which works much better. Although some people are still grumpy about it, and sometimes we get stuck in this endless loop of “there is no business reason to want us back to the office!” where all the business reasons provided get dismissed because the people saying it don’t see the value in any of that stuff and therefore refuse to see it as a business reason at all.

I don't feel like I am pulling up the ladder. Firstly, I am in my new role because it was a WFH / field based role in the first place. This meant I could personally move up the ladder. If it was an office based role I could not get to London. I managed a promotion within 18 months because I could do it from home.

Secondly, I hire from across the UK. I have team members in Scotland rather than London based.

Thirdly, we have only 15% females in my team. I have designed a programme to target females, especially those who may wish to get back into work. I have a mentoring programme planned. I don't believe it would be successful if my pool was London based people. I need to cast my net wide which means flexible working.

We offer office, hybrid or WFH. Even the younger people choose hybrid or WFH.

I like that the jobs I see now say hybrid working and come in when you want

The pandemic was woeful but it’s one good thing for the sector which used to be highly driven by presenteeism and women leaving after having dc

And people can manage remote workers perfectly well. How do you think global teams work ? I manged US people for 10 years and built up wonderful long-term relationships based on seeing them twice a year. It's not a remote issue but a unskilled manager issue.

I've worked for global companies for years. We have known for years that while good people can work effectively remotely, getting them in a room together shifts everything up a gear. That's why pre-pandemic, for certain critical activities like initiating big change projects, we'd spend 100ks getting people to spend a week in the same location.

My own team formed in lockdown and initially worked without ever having met, amd we did good work and achieved a lot. However now we are hybrid and the difference in communication, energy and collaboration on the days we are in the office is huge.

IME people do work remotely and don't take the piss, but they are not as good at working out what to work on. So their perception that they are just as productive remotely, and the business's perception that they aren't as effective, are probably both true.

For jobs where the what is fixed and obvious it won't be an issue, but for more self directed work (in my case tech) where teams are self organising to solve problems and deliver solutions rather than pre defined outputs, it is.

Hybrid works for us - it gives us time to spark ideas, agree the next targets and hear what other teams are up to, and time to get our heads down without too many distractions and crack on with what we've worked out.

I wonder how many men think oh goody, I can do the washing and housework in my break...