Are the days of WFH over?

[MerryMarigold]

Dh been working from home since Covid. Been 1 FtF meeting a week/ fortnight for past year.

Work have said everyone needs to be in work in central London for 3 days per week after Easter.

Not too bad for us, we live in the same place we lived before. Still a 1.5hr commute each way (plus associated costs). Not so good for others who live in the middle of nowhere.

Is this a trend or just his global company?

I’m a permanent remote employee as are many others. I have been for 15 years so I don’t see that changing. Local staff are encouraged, but not required to come to the office a couple of times a week at this point. There are lots of carrots to get people to come in.

dh’s company doesn’t have office space anymore. They just rent a conference room for the occasional meeting.

Global company, hybrid one day a week in the office since January and can't see that changing again any time soon. They've sold a lot of the office space off so we couldn't all be in. If they do insist on significantly more days there are a couple of fully remote companies I would look to move to.

I worked at home regularly before Covid, so it wasn't a difficult change. And I do think if I wasn't doing my job properly I might have been 'managed out' at some point in the past three years.

There’s more of an expectation that people are visible at our work in recent times - public sector. That’s mainly because so many staff are incurably lazy. They’re drifting off sick now that they have to account for their time.

I have to say, although in theory I would champion the rights of people to work wherever suits them, in practice having to deal with people who are forever wandering off to see to the dog or catch a delivery driver are driving me nuts. Also is it so hard to give your hair a quick brush before a call ffs.

Not where I work. Office space is about 20% of what it used to be. A handful of peo

Dh’s company doesn’t have office space anymore. They just rent a conference room for the occasional meeting.

This is going to dictate it in a lot of cases cases. Premises big enough for staff to regularly work in are expensive. In some cases they'll be an unaffordable or at least unjustifiable expense.

My office 700 plus are all staying WFH

They have confirmed productivity and job satisfaction rates are have gone up

Test your workforce. A recent meeting with food and drink resulted in 100% attendance at DH office. People are honestly taking the piss. Pre-arranged face to faces and people call in at the last moment because they have various life events going on. Recent unforgivable classic was a new starter was left for 1/2 hr in reception. No-one on reception, no-one in HR, line manager hadn't bothered to turn up. DH happened to arrive and let her in, poor thing needed the loo, made her a coffee, got his own team to set her IT up, and run some welcome videos. He was livid.

My view is that yes WFH is good for some people - namely introverts, parents and people
who are well established in thier career.

how is a complete WFH culture going to help school/uni leavers? They need to be trained and gain experience. A lot of this isn’t possible purely through elearning and teams calls. Some learning and skills come through exposure to other parts of the company, other team members, you learn a lot through osmosis. Will also be harder to get promotions without your face being seen. And when you are younger work is a big part of your social life - drinks after work etc.

Pressed send too soon, a handful of people choose to go in more frequently but are only expected to attend twice a month. And IMO there’s nothing wrong with a bit of mindless household stuff whilst WFH.
dinner prep during a catch up with a team member, laundry whilst thinking something through, petting animals is beneficial for wellbeing too. Lots of work doesn’t need to be desk work.

I have been WFH since 2013 and I still am - had several jobs in that time. It's still working for me.

I'm fully remote but I'm an exception to the rule for reasons I won't go into. Most of my company is back in the office at least one day a week, some 2-3 days (depending on manager preferences). I miss certain things about the office but it does make life easier and I'm able to be more flexible about doing extra hours during busy times and slacking off a bit when it's quiet. They do net far more from me than my contracted hours though and I certainly don't spend the day slacking off. I also don't have to worry about childcare for the odd day here and there e.g. teacher training days (child is 8 going on 25 and other than occasional feeding is happy to potter around while I work with little to no actual parenting needed).

I'm early 40s with a child so it suits me but as someone said above, I feel like I'd have missed out on so much if I'd had this setup in my early 20s when I worked in the City.

It seems to be stabilizing in the US with about 30% of the workforce working hybrid and 13% fully remote.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3862069-nearly-30-percent-of-work-remains-remote-as-workers-dig-in/

The job market is not as hot as last year, giving employers more leverage to demand people come in. We're really seeing this in the tech sector, which has had a lot of high profile layoffs.

The policy at my workplace is that you can work remotely one day a week unless there are special circumstances. I have a very easy 20 minute commute so it doesn't bother me to go in. DS, who moved home after uni, works from home an average of four days a week, which saves him an hour trip into the city.

But if you asked enough office workers what they do in the office aside from work they would probably say: chat to colleagues, eat biscuits, browse the internet, make repeated cups of tea, chat to different colleagues etc.

A lot of desk based jobs will have some downtime in between busy spells. In my experience my downtime in the office is often spent listening to colleagues bitch about each other or moan about the boss/employer. My downtime at home is spent putting laundry on or emptying the dishwasher. Either way the same amount of work gets done.

I don't even think it's always good for introverts. DS2 was a young apprentice when his company moved to fully wfh during lockdown. He was "happy" in that shutting himself in his room and never speaking to anyone is his comfort zone, but he was never going to seek the help and support he needed when he wasn't even seeing the people. It was a disaster for him, even though he'd tell you he prefers wfh.

This

Our work policy is hybrid, with 2 days in the office encouraged. I like this and can't see it changing as it suits the managers too, many of whom were hired during lockdown and don't live within a commutable distance.

Your post made me see red. I'm an employer. I'd sack you if you were doing "dinner prep" during a team catch up.

I also think it's extremely selfish of those who are established in their career to abnegate responsibility for training and mentoring of trainees and junior staff. Trainees are telling me they want to be in the office - they want in person meetings and mentoring, they want to pick up what's going on in an open plan office.

They need to ask questions. It's far easier for them to see I'm at the desk and not on the phone or engaged so they can come over and ask.

Our company has slowly been asking that some work from the office , some people ent back no issues but most still work from home most of the week . I have to admit it hasn’t affected my team at all so I’m quite happy to let them work from home

Definitely not the case for everyone, but WFH was bad news for me. I definitely enjoyed it a lot, and still do sometimes, but over time I became lazy, lacking in motivation, bored, fatter, mildly depressed. I still argued that it was great and wanted to do it forever. Then I took a new job which is 80% office and it's honestly so much better, I recognise that I was lying to myself. I get more work done in the office and being able to chat about work with colleagues is more useful than zoom or email. I feel healthier and more alert for getting up and out rather than festering at home for days on end.
I will cavate this with the fact that my office is a 10 minutes bike ride away. I may feel differently if it was a long and expensive commute.

I don't think it's going anywhere tbh. It's what the people want. My industry are absolutely desperate for experienced staff and in general will do what it takes to get them.

This happens every thread, and you aren't even the first one to do it on this one, but when people talk about young people like this what they actually mean is particular types of young people. You can be young and disabled, a carer, unable to live near job opportunities, neurodiverse. The drinks after work culture has always excluded some young people even as it benefitted others.

There are young people who are in a much better position than they would've been a few years back thanks to more remote roles, and the reason for this is there's no one size fits all.

OH has to go in 2 days a week now, previously wfm all the time. Even before covid only 1 day a week.

Why , if it’s ok to ask ? I just would multitasking make you see red ? I can see your point in some settings regarding junior staff but the multitasking , why does it upset you ?

Yep, it's a double standard. We all know full well people can and do use being in the office to take the piss, but that isn't used as a reason why everyone ought to go remote.

I personally work about 50/50 home/office (I absolutely hated full-time home working, to the point I started looking for new jobs when there was a period where it looked like we might remain fully remote). Everyone in the team I manage chooses for themselves whether to come in aside from either when we have in-person team meetings (once a month) or face-to-face meetings with people outside the team (about weekly for some people in the team, almost never for others). I have noticed a slow partial drift back, though, including from some people who were initially absolutely adamant they'd never be setting foot in the office again.

I find it really hard to even remember and imagine why we were once all in the office five days a week, though - it feels so clearly unnecessary for our roles. I don't think we'll go back to that, and I'd really resist it if we did, not so much on my behalf (though I wouldn't love it) but for some of the members of the team who have found it really transformative. For one in particular, who has recently been diagnosed as autistic, it's clear that the ability to WFH has massively improved her life and as her manager I'd need a very, very good reason to take that away.

There was a lot of grumbling about a move towards hot-desking recently, which I did feel was a bit ridiculous: I'm really happy for people to choose to work at home if it works best for them but I don't think they can expect to have a desk reserved exclusively for them to use once every few weeks!

My view is that yes WFH is good for some people - namely introverts, parents and people who are well established in their career.

I agree with this, apart from being introvert. I have wfh for years, I am not introverted, am a lone parent and am well established in my career.
Also, apart from a few people in the office in Hong Kong we are all remote workers which I think helps with that feeling of knowing everyone else is in the office and your a bit of a sideline working from home.

When it comes to being a parent, I don't think it's just flexible working which is helpful, but (for me at least) being a parent teaches you many skills, mainly time management, how to prioritise, and multi-tasking.

When my son was in childcare and I knew my working day had to finish by 5.45 I found myself better able to focus on my work. If I had had the whole evening ahead of me I would likely fanny about a lot more.