Why are (some) people so against WFH?

[thistimenextyearwellbemillionaires]

I see so many threads on here about why people shouldn't be able to WFH and I don't really understand why people would be against it

For most people it seems make sense with their home life & financially as saving on commuting costs. When my children were young I was 5 days in the office and had to rush back from town to collect them and it was so stressful, it must be great for people not to have to do that now.

I know some people might take the piss a bit, but this happened when people were in the office full time too, there would always be someone always in late, leaving early etc.

I am lucky that my company is hybrid and no plans to change that. I've been offered another role recently which was a big pay rise but 5 days in the office and have decided to stay where I am. Where I work, whether you're in the office or at home you're expected to produce the same work and results and if you don't you'd be out so they're no slouch in terms of expectations of their employees.

Interested to know people's honest opinions.

My DH mainly WFH but goes in the office 1or 2 days a week, he loves it and finds he’s more productive. I work in education so I have to be in. I feel sorry for young people going into their first jobs though. I don’t think you can beat that office camaraderie for building social skills. The fact that doesn’t really exist anymore saddens me.

I work in a sector and role where WFH isn’t possible. I’d hate to WFH anyway. The pandemic proved for me that I’m not suited to it. I love getting up and out into the day and the social element of working with people in person.

I have no issue with WFH on principle, though. It seems a sensible option for a lot of businesses and workers.

I do feel sorry for some youngsters, though. My niece is 25 and went straight into a fully remote role straight from university. It seems so limiting in terms of social interaction, developing people skills etc. I would have found it soul destroying at that age.

If managers are managing staff by presenteeism then they will struggle with their staff wfh. If they manage by the quality and quantity of what their staff produce then wfh won't make any difference.

If induction and on boarding are planned and thought through, then it can be done well wfh (as happens with one of our partners that provides a helpline service for vulnerable clients, and has staff based all over the UK). That includes making time for less formal chat and interaction, a 'buddy' system etc (which also provides more experienced staff with a stepping stone towards management).

Beyond that, wfh home is about the needs of the job - some need you to be personally present of course - and personal preference. There's no right or wrong. Some colleagues are in most days, others only go in when needed.

It has allowed us to recruit from a much wider pool.of candidates than just those able to travel to central.London 5 days a week.

Luckily, there are also young people who now have many more opportunities open to them due to remote working. If you're in education, some of the DC you're working with now will fall into this category when their time comes. There are positives!

I have no doubt that WFH is bad for my employer ( public sector). Our job is about making connections, working in partnership. So much of that relationship building, and finding out about what is going on from just having in person informal conversations has been lost. I started my current job in the WFH era and I am so far behind where I was in a similar job before WFH became a thing. More than that, I have lost any connection with my job, its just something I do, not something I have any real passion for. Because the job has become utterly abstract. I have no real personal relations with anyone, and no real connection to the job.
There is no requirement to go into the office and hardly anyone does. so there is no point in going in, even though I would like to.

My employer has made noises about people going back but never enforced it so no-one does.

I would like hybrid working, or people to be able to leave a bit earlier to collect kids but in a role like mine, there is absolutely no doubt that WFH full time, as my colleagues do, has an adverse effect on our performance and delivery and commitment. I now do what is required but all the creative thinking, new thinking, identifying and developing new projects,that I used to do, has been lost as I am just not as informed or in the loop as I was when I could develop relationships, learn informally what others were involved in and identify new areas of work .

Social work isn’t a job you can do solely from home though anyway. (I’ve worked for SS, before you jump on me.)

Who cares if they do ? As long as they are doing their work properly and getting results for him what does it matter to him what they do for 5 mins ? Instead of controlling their every movement concentrate on their actual work and put things in place to measure it

My entire company is WFH. In fact, virtually the whole industry is WFH.

That’s how I know that any objection to WFH is bollocks. We are trained fully online, we socialise fully online, all meeting are over zoom. There’s nothing that cannot be done remotely. Some days I have 5-6hrs of meetings. They are (mostly) productive discussions that are just colleagues working together on a document via screenshare. Some days, I have few meetings, and work independently. The company and industry are very profitable.

Most objections people have to WFH are personal gripes, or things which could be easily solved. Like the poster who said they had one 30 minute meeting with their manager a week, which wasn’t enough, so WFH is bad. That doesn’t mean WFH is bad. You just need to spend more time talking to your manager.

I don’t understand people’s connection to being sat at their computer in a stuffy room
with 30 other people also sat at their computers.

WFH also allows companies to recruit the best talent, regardless of geographical location. I wonder if that’s why some people don’t like it? Maybe they realise if they were up against the whole country/the whole world rather than just people living within 1hr radius of their workplace, they wouldn’t have got the job?

I don't care where people work generally speaking, but our local council offices haven't reopened since covid and every seems to be WFH. It's made it so everyone is struggling to contact anyone now and we can no longer go in face to face and wait to be seen by someone, it's a nightmare and it's not working.

The only other gripe I have with it is when people moan about neighbours doing renovations during the day time or making other general noise in their homes because it's disrupting their work. Seen so many threads on here complaining of neighbours mowing the lawn or being interrupted by people knocking the door for various reasons. It comes across as being entitled and as though their needs are more important than anyone elses and that because they WFH the whole world needs to pander to what they need to do. Oh and actually I see threads about children and partners being too noisy too, not sure I'd want a partner WFH due to impact it'd have on me and my child but to each their own.

They seldom do it as well as you have, though, and the posters that was replying to were making the usual wild generalisations.

Absolutely. By contrast I now work in a non-practice role fully remotely and my team is one of the most collaborative I’ve ever worked with. Less experienced staff are nurtured and developed, and while social stuff is more planned than might have been the case there is still a good social life for those who want it. There’s a culture of checking in with each other, using technology to keep connected. It’s so job, sector and personality dependent whether WFH works or not.

There are definitely elements of that, yes.

But I think also some people don't really have an understanding that this is how some sectors work. A common refrain on here is that you need to be in person to build relationships with colleagues. That's obviously underpinned by an assumption that the people you'd be building relationships with must live within commuting distance of each other. But lots of roles just have a wider geographical scope.

Envy but also just a lack of awareness of anything or anyone else. So many people cannot see things from a different perspective.

Social work isn’t a job you can do solely from home though anyway. (I’ve worked for SS, before you jump on me.)

No, but there’s increasing pressure to have social workers be home based outside of home visits, meetings etc with many meetings still being online. Trying to explain the importance of a social work team needing dedicated office space and physically being in the office is a constant in local authorities who are looking for savings.

I love WFH on the whole but can see arguments against it like isolation and lack of in person interaction.

I can also see many more arguments personally against being in the office. I do think in person has benefits, but in my mind no system is going to be perfect. You’ll have pisstakers and shirkers wherever you go and people acting like one or the other is superior but it really depends on each company, team and individual.

What I don’t get and find really annoying is this idea that WFH was some sort of ‘treat’ that was a ‘good run of it’ with a real nasty edge, like it had been some sort of insult to employers and people should just doff their caps and be happy to return to the office (where WFH is being transitioned) - it’s wild how many people will actively advocate for those in power to make others lives worse just because they don’t like the possibly it made someone else’s working life easier. Such envy and resentment, when we ought to all be pulling together to advocate for better working conditions and pay!

I don’t know. Is the honest answer.

I work from home full time and have done so before Covid. I work on projects and my job performance is gauged on whether I’m meeting my deadlines and the quality of work I produce.

There are other people in the business I work in that have made snide comments like “I can’t see patients from home , must be nice etc…” but I chalk it up to the fact that I didn’t choose their careers and they didn’t choose mine.

At the end of the day other peoples opinions don’t change my working arrangements. So let them be bitter and petty and misinformed.

@5431go - so would you husband feel the same if he was in the office and his colleagues were away from their desk having a non work related chat about something? Honestly who cares - as long as they get their work done and to a high standard. And if they're not then that should be addressed by him.

Could not agree with your last paragraph more

I started my current job in the WFH era and I am so far behind where I was in a similar job before WFH became a thing. More than that, I have lost any connection with my job, its just something I do, not something I have any real passion for. Because the job has become utterly abstract. I have no real personal relations with anyone, and no real connection to the job.

This is entirely your personal experience though, not an indictment of WFH. My
company is fully WFH. I am very passionate about it (cancer research). I have lots of close personal relationships in my team and the wider company. We spend many hours collaborating together, so it’s hard not to form
bonds. We’re all pretty connected to the job and the “mission”.

Just because your company is bad at implementing WFH, doesn’t mean WFH is bad.

You have to be quite a self-driven person to thrive working from home, so I wonder if that’s why some people don’t like it. They like
having those office dynamics - a manager looking over at you to see if you’re typing, or an intern to lord over, etc.

I used to like going into the office. Mind you I was an office manager so I'm kind of biased! Basically my type of role is being made obsolete. Office managers, receptionist, secretarial jobs are all going down the swanny. I ended up leaving as my job would have been non existent or I'd have to do a different one from home.
I would miss the office culture, the banter, even stupid stuff like catering for meetings, fixing the boiler. I guess I'm a bit of a saddo.
WFH is fantastic. But some people don't have a big/private enough home to work from. If you lived in one room with your partner and kids there's no way two of you could do so easily. So I guess it might disadvantage people in a bad housing situation.

A lot of the negativity (on MN at least) about wfh comes about because some posters are wilfully dim and refuse to understand that not everyone's jobs are the same.

eg: I've lost count of the number of threads on which people are confidently stating 'wfh = universal bad thing' because they once had a crap experience trying to get through to their water board, without ever acknowledging that not everyone who wfh is in a customer service role and required to be glued to a headset 8 hours a day.

As with many issues on MN, there is an increasing dearth of critical thinking and an inability to see beyond the end of one's own nose.

I head a team of 42 people at work, spread across the length and breadth of UK (Dingwall to Somerset, Kent to Cumbria, Barmouth to Rendlesham). We have hybrid worked since 2016, before that we were based in two offices. Our training work is delivered on client sites, and so it has worked to have staff distributed and working from most convenient place, often home and for some the offices. Our work is in training, so attracts a group of delivery staff who like being around people and are perhaps 'wired' differently to my tech working brother in law who has only ever worked from home. We are a genuinely nice organisation to work for, huge reputation in the industry for quality, with people seeing us as 'the best' employer to work for in the industry as well. Recruitment is not an issue, nor generally retention.

That said, I find much higher rates of staff turnover in the remote / homeworking staff. I find many more issues of staff 'disconnected' from our constant in-house support and training, not following protocol and not developing as much in the team who never come to the offices.

Our remote staff have had more HR issues over the years and my view is that things are allowed to 'fester' somewhat or go unnoticed by a manager. You can hide behind a screen emotionally and physically...(so much so that we recruited someone who after a month of being at the business called HR staff member on teams one morning, stood up to show more than head and shoulders and announced she was due in two weeks.)

In the team who visit the office regularly (say 3-4 times a month) I notice higher overall happiness and lower turnover. The feedback, even from our reclusive FD, is that being in the office is great to connect to the organisation and colleagues. Staff enjoy our offices - they are comfy, free (quality) refreshments and time and space to chat with colleagues without disturbing others.

For the delivery folk there is huge feedback around meeting colleagues being really good from a quality of work perspective, so much so that we are in middle of introducing a more regular opportunity to connect with managers and colleagues outside the offices on a regional basis, and an annual few days away of training. The delivery team love collaborating, planning together and having update in all sorts of ways, from email, Teams and in-person.

On balance, I dislike permanent home working, and am a huge fan of hybrid and office working for our team.

All that said, my brother in law and some of my neighbours all work from home, and all work in technology. I wonder if a lot of the variation is around the personality and type of person who has to home, office or hybrid work?

i am on a hybrid contract with 60% of my time in an office. There are benefits to both sides of working.

what I do have an issue with is people who are on hybrid contract who then throw their toys out of the pram when they are asked to go into the office.

they seem to forget that they have a contract and their job requires it of them just like they require other things

I don't have any problem with it-only for organisations where they are taking calls for customer services/people need help promptly. It's too easy for some to skive.

We all know how absolutely insane it sends us taking hours to get through to a human being and the stress this causes. Especially for the elderly.

Very much so, and I think that's particularly true of the posters who claim remote working is bad for young workers.

What they actually mean is they wouldn't have liked it/current graduate staff in their sector don't. MN contains a disproportionate number of people who've done well professionally and therefore benefitted or at least weren't disadvantaged by a system where in person work was the default. Some of them are very bad at thinking about all the people who did badly out of those systems.

I think a big factor is jealousy