The working world has become ridiculous

[Rothschild]

Recently a manager at my company attended an online meeting in tears because of a minor issue regarding her child's school. She excused herself from the meeting and took a mental health day.

I can barely get hold of anyone at 3pm in my (large) organisation because everyone is doing school pick up. I don't believe they're getting much work done once they've picked up because they become hard to contact, don't respond to messages and won't attend meetings, despite it being their normal working hours.

It's ridiculous. When our children were small we paid for wrap around childcare or for someone to collect. We were available to work between 3 and 4pm and afterwards.

I'm not talking about anyone who has negotiated flexibility or finishes at 3pm, I'm talking about others who are, frankly, taking the piss.

And if I had taken a mental health day every time I'd had some difficulty in my life I'd have hardly worked.

I'm a manager and agree that some people's view of reasonable behaviour during the working day leaves a lot to be desired. We have a 3-day office, 2-day WFH working pattern. The right degree of flexibility is healthy but some people really do take the mick. For example, if someone on my team has a GP appointment, they let me know and make up the time after their normal working hours. No problem: they take care of their health and the work gets done. However, some of the requests I've had this year have been ridiculous.

• "Need to leave an audit early today so I can walk the dog." The audit has been scheduled a year in advance and the person was a key subject matter expert.
• "Can't come into the office for an extra day because I'll have to pay for an extra day of childcare." Their child is 2 years old and it turned out this person was only putting them in childcare on office days.
• "Can't come into the office at all, ever, because I want to move to the Shetland Islands. I need a remote contract." The office is in London and they manage an office-based team.

If wages and quality of life weren't so shit in this country people would work harder.
People can't afford wrap around care anymore.. No one is valued we are all cogs in a machine. Our culture is dying.. Mental health is poor.. There's a whole host of reasons why motivation to work has declined.

I don’t recognise this at all.

Apart from emergencies everyone who is meant to be working, is working. I could video call anyone right now and they’d answer. My afternoons are packed with meetings that run until 6/6.30pm.

Sickness policy is fair but generous. A small minority abuse it but most take the time they need and have a supported return.

Performance is managed and supported. 60% of our PIPs are passed. Poor performers are helped to improve but exited if they don’t.

@SlightlyHeartbroken how did you manage that? Presumably the health & safety & safeguarding requirements were all the same? How did you handle recruitment and fund it all?

Yeah but Covid was when WFH became widespread and normalised. It is now an expectation in many roles.

This happened in my work. No one ever worked from home before Covid. It wasn’t a thing. Now everyone does. Office attendance is entirely optional. It’s crap, to be honest. New starts getting an absolute raw deal and don’t learn the job properly. I suspect many people are sitting at home doing pretty much nothing.

I like working from home 2 or 3 times a week but full time from home is awful. It’s isolating and boring.

But management like home working as well so it won’t change.

If you're so lacking in basic resilience that you can't do your job, you should lose your job. If you can't do the agreed job because you can't sort out childcare, you shouldn't be working, or you should negotiate a part-time contract. The occasional genuine emergency over childcare (eg childminder falls ill without notice) can be covered by unpaid parental leave entitlement, or by your taking paid holiday, if the employer agrees to that. The employment contract is an agreement that the employee agrees to work (hard) during their contracted hours and the employer agrees to pay them the agreed salary for that hard work during contracted hours. If you don't do what you agreed to do when you entered into the contract, why do you expect your employer to continue to employ and pay you?

I'm amazed the world is still is still rotating with all the mental health problems people cite. When did we become so fragile?
It's just life

Yes I totally recognise this. “I can’t do the meeting in the office because dog” - sorry why is your dog my problem?!

@Rothschild Clearly it's not an issue OP, given that I'm the person who is prepared to work any time between 6 am and midnight, and yet, there is no employer who wants to offer me work.

Actually no I worked the same way before covid for exactly this reason (no wraparound care available where I live). Flexibly. My employer was happy as long as the work was being done. It isn’t ok for people to just stop work after the school run, but that’s an individual employee performance issue, not a flexible working issue. People are entitled to breaks throughout the working day, and if they choose to take a half an hour break to pick the kids up, that should cause no more of an issue that them taking a break at lunch to eat (which a lot of people don’t). I make myself available for meetings 90% of the working day, including if that means I’m grabbing bites of a sandwich between calls because there is no gap between meetings for lunch. So I do not feel guilty for taking a short break when the kids get home (luckily I don’t have to go and collect them).

New graduates are really struggling to find jobs. AI is already starting to replace jobs, and this will only accelerate. All these employees who are taking the piss aren't very forward-thinking.

People say get wrap around childcare. There is none at DS's school. The after school club was closed down and the one child minder who collected from there went out of business during the lockdowns. Moving school isn't an option. I have had no choice but to limit my hours and collect him myself. Yet the government/society wants single mums to work until they drop. It is so difficult to balance work and children, especially where SEND are involved too. Are you sure these people don't have an agreement (and corresponding pay reduction) with work about their hours?

Yes but you'd no doubt say that a genuine problem is the death of a parent for example. But the loss of a dog can be far worse for many people. You don't get to decide what a genuine problem is.

Correct.

People are on the brink. There is no incentive to try, so why bother giving up 40+ years of your life when you can legitimately sit on your arse at home and claim off the state?

The ones still in the game will continue to pay tax regardless.

@AmberRose86 again wfh in a hybrid capacity wasn’t a new thing for myself and many people I know.

AI will take jobs regardless of how forward thinking employees are….

I don't really recognise this but then again with us people are measured against deliverables rather than presenteism. I don't really mind if people finish at 3.30 if they started early and got everything done. Most people work at least some evenings and weekends

Generally giving people a better work/life balance pays out better in the long run. The salaries in the UK are shitty, we work some of the longest hours in Europe, so giving people a bit of slack in other areas probably balances it.

I 100pc agree with you OP.
I know that I will get battered for this but the wfh culture has influenced this massively.
I know people who cancelled cc arrangements as they were wfh.
I have met people at hairdressers and on trains who are WFH.
Has got completely out of hand

Sorry are you pretending that Covid wasn’t a major shift for most in this area?

@NotDarkGothicMama Can I ask how the company dealt with those objections by staff? What was the outcome?

@NotDarkGothicMama so how did you manage those people?

Yanbu.It frustrates me when I can't arrange meetings for any afternoon because full time members of staff have blocked time out in their diaries to do the school run.

That's true, but the lazy and entitled employees are hardly likely to be the last to be made redundant, are they? And they won't be the ones who can move to different jobs in the company, eg management, to improve their job prospects, because the company will be happy to see the back of them.