to be really, really annoyed with my boss.

[bogwobbit]

Situation is that about a year ago I changed to a different role in my company. Beforehand I was out of the office most of the time visiting clients / customers (call them what you will) and was mostly responsible for organising my own workload. When I needed to do paperwork, I generally worked in the office or if I had a report to write or something that needed a degree of concentration I would work at home. This suited me because: 1) I find it difficult to concentrate properly in a noisy open-plan office and 2) because it makes it easier to fit work in with family responsibilities, e.g. when dd doesn't go to breakfast club I could work at home, starting once I had seen her off to school and working later.
Now I am in a totally office-based job and I am finding it really difficult, both to concentrate due to noise levels - there are some particularly noisy people on my floor - and also to fit in work around childcare with a 2 hour commute every day.
I don't expect to be able to work at home all the time, far from it, but when I asked my boss if I could do it once a week I was told in no uncertain terms that this was not acceptable with various, frankly ridiculous excuses made to justify. He did say that he would be prepared to consider 'ad-hoc requests' in specific circumstances. So today, I asked him if I could work at home on a particular, complex case that will require a lot of thought and consideration and concentration for one day. It would also mean that I could see my dd to school and start at 9, fininshing in time to collect her from her childminder.
Basically he has refused to even consider it and after a heated discussion has admitted that the only reason is that he is the head of his 'unit' and he likes his staff to be in the office and available at all times.
I'm outraged and mightly pissed off but he isn't budging. His latest 'solution' to me not being able to concentrate enough to deal with this case is that he take it off my hands and work on it himself. Frankly, I find this quite insulting.
Am I being unreasonable and over-reacting? And, what do I do now?

I think you should be provided with a place to work which is quiet and free from unnecessary interruptions. I think you're quite right to want that and he should provide you with it if you find it hard to work in the office environment.

I think the business of occasional days at home is to do with sick children or train strikes etc, isn't it?

Sorry imperial, but I think you are unrealistic. Many of us work in open plan offices. They are far from ideal and rarely quiet, but its just a fact of life.

That's where ear phones come in handy.

I can see where you care coming from, but I tend to agree with other posters - it sounds as if the childcare and commute issue are the real reasons for wanting to work from home. I can also see from your boss's POV - if everyone in the office worked from home when they wanted to 'focus' he wouldn't have staff on site when he needed them.

If the noise in the office is a problem, then I'd ask him to look at ways of managing that - but much it's great to work from home when you have a long commute and are juggling childcare, it's not a right, sadly.

I'm coming down on the boss' side - if he lets you work from home then he has to let everyone else do that too. However you look at it, some mug still has to be answering the phones, signing for deliveries, showing the clients into the boardroom, and some poor sod is ALWAYS going to be the one stuck in the office on a Friday afternoon all alone whilst simultaneously trying to find files for you, looking up a phone number from your desk rollodex or setting your out of office because you forgot to do it, because everyone else had "some urgent concentrating to do"....

And it sounds a lot like you use the time at home not for concentrating but for juggling childcare - not exactly the most peaceful environment???!

I'm very lucky to work from home on Mondays and it does help me to focus, but I appreciate that I won't be able to do this forever (probably).

I asked for this as part of my flexible working when I came back from maternity leave. It was probably granted because other people had tried it before me and it fits in okay with the job. However I know the boss is wary of lots of people trying to do the same thing and he does prefer to have staff in the office.

I think it's okay to ask - particularly as part of a flexible working plan - but if the answer is no then you have to accept it. If you're in an office-based role now it may be beneficial for the other staff to have you in every day, it's just the nature of the job. I know that it's harder to discuss trivial things when I'm at home, or harder to go over print-outs and things like that.

You'll just have to figure out a way to concentrate. I appreciate it's not always easy. Sometimes I have to transcribe interviews and that's tough in a noisy environment. Ask if you can have headphones on while you work on particular things maybe, or see if there's an office you can use just for short periods, maybe a small meeting room if you have them.

northerngirl41 - I do agree with you but had to laugh at "looking up a phone number from your desk rollodex" - do you work in the 1980s? :o

Actually, I think we can't really say YABU or YANBU unless we know what job you do.

My job, e.g., really could not be done in an open-plan office. I'm an academic and my job regularly involves things like marking a 40-page MA dissertation, following the argument closely and intensely in order to give that person a fair mark. If I were interrupted every 10 minutes there's no way I'd be able to concentrate sufficiently to do the job well. For this reason, most people have their own (very small!!) offices where they can shut the door, or it is understood that they can take one day a week at home for 'quiet work'. Otherwise, you simply couldn't work at a sufficiently high level to do the job.

I imagine there are other jobs like this, too: I mean, you wouldn't expect a surgeon to work in an open-plan room with other people giggling and phones ringing in the background - or a composer writing a score - or a barrister carefully putting together a case. Some jobs just need deep concentration.

But if you work on a trading floor like a PP, or in sales or similar, I'd say that's less likely to be the case and YABU.

SHRIIIEEEKPoolingBearBlood - Not I, but the colleague who "worked from home" Mondays/Fridays was always bossing me about to go fetch phone numbers from hers!! (She had shoulderpads too - eek!)

Why is it that flexible working requests almost always want Friday/Monday off? If they asked for Tues/Weds/Thurs you'd be slightly less skeptical about them using it to extend their weekend... The amount of work which gets done, I'm not so convinced about.

I think mostly YABU because if this is about the commute and childcare, you need to get yourself better organised. As you are in a different role to the one you had previously, I don't see how what you did then was relevant, especially if you had a different manager.

YANBU to think that your manager is being difficult. As you have a child under the age of 16 you are entitled by law to make a formal request for flexible working and have it seriously considered, with proper business reasons given if it is refused. In your position, I would take this route, submitting it directly to your manager and CCing HR. To send it directly to HR would make it worse I think.

What decade is everyone else working in? I used to work from home from time to time in my old job - public sector so not exactly cutting edge technology - and I could divert the phone to my mobile and log in to the office network from home. As far as anyone ringing or e-mailing me was concerned, they couldn't tell I wasn't in the office. I didn't have the kind of job where people were constantly talking to me face to face, so it really made no practical difference from anyone else's perspective.

Yabu.

I don't think I'm being precious or that I have a sense of entitlement, although possibly I didn't come over as well as I could have in my original post -partly because I was still raging when I wrote it .
I think that the issue with concentrating in the office and the work/life, family/friendly issue are two separate, albeit connected issues. I can assure you that much as my commute and childcare issues piss me off , I don't believe that I have a right to have my working conditions changed accordingly. After all, having children, living quite far from work etc were all my lifestyle choices. I can see though that on reading my post, I didn't quite put that over.
What I do object is the fact that when I first started my work, and without going into too much work it is a professional role where the decisions I make may affect large number of people's employment, I and colleagues doing the same job all had our own offices whereas the administrative staff always shared an open-plan office. A couple of years ago the decision was made, against our wishes and purely to save money, to make us all work open-plan. This caused a great deal of anger but our wishes were ignored. Colleagues had always worked at home on an occasional basis but once this happened there was a mass exodus such that on many days there are hardly any people of my grade in the office. They are either out 'in the field' or working at home. Various technological adaptations have been made to facilitate this including remote access computer and the ability to have work calls transfered to home or mobile numbers. Funnily enough, although I was never happy wiht the open plan I was always the one who was trying to put a positive slant on it.
My real objections are that: most of my compatriots (or whatever the right word is) are allowed to work at home. Although I have moved to a primarily office-based job there is no reason why parts of this couldn't be done at home. I think it's unfair that my line manager is able to arbitarily decide, for his own reasons, that this is unacceptable when it is widespread among others.

Oh and the reason I changed to this job was that I was advised that it would be a good move as I was keen to get promotion. Funny thing is that due all the cuts / changes there are absolutely no opportunities for this either now or for the foreseeable future.

OK, that's not quite how it came across in your OP. It sounds as if this is one of these "manager's discretion" type things which usually results in staff across departments working in completely different ways, with some benefitting from common sense approaches and others being actively managed by overzealous, rather controlling bosses (can you sense my bitterness? ). Have you been to see HR about this issue? Sorry, you may have already said and I may have missed it.

Its for this reason that as the CEO at my place (small - 27 staff) I oversee all flexible working requests in order to be fair and equal to all. I ask the manager to assess whether their department can accommodate but I have final say.

I work for a huge organisation, which is why we so many things tend to be "at your managers discretion" - which, given the many layers of management, causes many headaches! I agree - if you can standardise practices to ensure that all requests are handled in the same way than it's definitely preferable to the rather haphazard approach which often arises.

Although I have moved to a primarily office-based job there is no reason why parts of this couldn't be done at home.

There is a reason: your boss doesn't want it done at home, he wants it done in the office.

YABU.

So if her boss wanted it done on the roof she would be unreasonable to suggest the work would get done better indoors? Since when is what your boss wants the final word on reasonableness?

YANBU - it's the 21st Century FGS - working from home is supposed to be encouraged - lower carbon emissions , better work/life balance etc If you have the technology and are trustworthy I fail to see what the problem is.

Your boss sounds like a dinosaur and a control freak - talk to HR, but carefully and ask if it would be acceptable in principle to the employer.

I forgot to say, going behind your boss's back in asking colleagues whether they would mind you working from home, is terrible form.

I would not be happy if one of my staff undermined me in this way. If I wanted to consider other people's feelings when granting permission to someone to work from home, I'd canvas that opinion myself.

Do you honestly think your colleagues would say, 'actually I'd be really pissed off if you were allowed to work from home, bogwobbit'? Of course they wouldn't. They would say it's fine with them. That's until it began, and then it would become your boss's problem when they went to him complaining about the unfairness.

The reason why YABU is that you are in a new position. While its in the same company, you are in a new position where none of your colleagues are doing flexible/work-from-home time.

If you were still at your old position and were denied flexibility then you have a case. Now, your standing is less firm.