To wonder why some companies/managers have such a problem with flexi working?

[MotherOfDragons90]

My team, and the department it sits within are super flexible. Working from home is encouraged, we use Skype a lot for meetings, core hours are 10-2 but people’s hours vary immensely depending on workload/personal life etc. I think this is great, as it means I can finish a project late into the evening without having to worry about getting OT approved, or leave early on a Friday if I’ve got a weekend away booked or something.

DHs company used to be similar but they’ve recently revoked pretty much all forms of flexi working. He now has set hours of 8-4, and even that he only got because he’s been there a long time, new starters must do 9-5. No working from home except in unusual circumstances.

I get that in certain industries it isn’t possible, but I’m talking office type environments. It’s made things very awkward for my DH and I because he commute together and in the past have tried to align our flexi working and wfh days to save travel costs (AND the planet!). Traffic is hell at 4pm too!

AIBU to think this is absolutely bonkers and not conducive to a positive working environment at all? Please could I ask what your jobs policies are towards flexi working and any good reasons for banning all together?

unfortunately some people just believe that working is about presenteesism, not productivity.

My first job on leaving school, in a laboratory, was flexitime: core hours 10-3, place was open from about 7.30-6pm. You could bank hours and take up to 1 full day off each month - which I always did. Most days I worked about 7.30-3, and went early to take advantage of the afternoon.
However if there was a rush job, sometimes some of the tests could take 3-4 hours or more - you couldn't just leave in the middle, so some days I had to be there till 8pm just to finish it. Everyone worked really hard, nobody took advantage, and we all worked well as a team and help out each other if things needed doing to save someone having to stay late, the moral was high and team work was the key, we'd do a lot socially eg skittles evenings, and often we'd all be out including the manager eg we'd all be late in every now and then if we went for team breakfast at a local cafe before all starting at 10.

Current job does require a physical presence - and often till the post goes on a Friday afternoon (4.30ish), but I can and do work flexibly from home if doing just computer work. I think flexible is great, but can understand won't work in certain types of business, likewise working from home won't necessarily work in a physical type situation eg manufacturing, but in this day and age with computers etc no reason anything computer based cannot be done wherever.

lisalocketlostherpocket without being too outing, usually a contract bid for an opportunity that’s just come up. The nature of the business means that this often happens with very tight deadlines

However, I don’t think urgent work is unusual in any company is it?

However, I don’t think urgent work is unusual in any company is it?
It isn’t but you put a system in place to manage it based on the resources you have.
E.g. I work 3 days a week by coworker works 5 and we have a service (Data warehouse) which has to be available 9-5 5 days a week.
If my coworker is on leave and something happens on my day off that needs urgent attention I will work from home to fix it. If you know people’s working hours you can plan accordingly.

Because some people take liberties.
I’m always surprised at the huge number of working age people wandering around town centres with shopping bags at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon. Would put money on half of them supposedly “working from home”.

Really? I would assume they have a day off, work part-time, are freelance, don't work at all - all ahead of 'they must be piss-taking workers-from-home'.

And agree that fundamentally the world of work is one that was designed by men, for men, at a time when women didn't work, and women have been shoehorned into this world, it's been tinkered with to allow for those pesky female biology issues, but basically the only way women will get on is if they behave like men and make like they have no other responsibilities in their lives at all.

The whole thing needs tearing down and rebuilding. It's ridiculous that 100 years after (some) women got the vote, women are still shoehorned into this way of working.

of course it's because people take the piss!
Have you read how many threads from women who want to work from home so they don't have to pay for childcare? Men are taking the piss just as much to be fair, but they post less on here.

I don't know why people keep banging on about times when women didn't work. if you were among the very wealthy maybe, but the rest of the world both parents had to work to survive.

Some people are unable to work from home, so cannot imagine others doing it. Others have been too proud about staying in their pjs all day, watching tv and doing nothing - if they are even home.

It's a shame, but for many companies I know, people confusing working from home with duvet days are the reason - when it would be possible to be at home.

Depends on the job. When your work can all be produced from a laptop then work from home is suitable. A lot of engineering and financial audit jobs for example are home based with only occasional site visits needed.

If you have any other kind of job where work from home isn’t suitable then it takes a bit of managerial skill to arrange flexible working - and as most UK companies hire managers based on experience rather than qualifications / reputation / feedback / results that can be in short supply.

i used to work at a large US multinational, that was very flexible about hours.

initially WFH was allowed for specific circumstances (deliveries, appointments etc), but this gradually became more and more flexible, to the point where people routinely worked 1 or 2 days from home per week.

the head office did a study of email traffic, and found that on friday afternoons, email traffic dropped by 60%. which would indicate it's not just a handful taking the piss.

after that, they clamped down hard, and they're back to emergencies only.

i would imagine a lot of companies have experienced similar, hence the lack of flexibility.

Our company has a policy of allowing up to three days' telecommuting, I do a job that 95 per cent of the time is working on easily measurable work ... yet our unit is only allowed to do one day of telecommuting max. I do about half of my weekly work on my day working from home as it's a job that requires unbroken concentration a lot of the time.

Makes no sense to me.

Just because some people take the piss doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. That's like say because there are some benefit scroungers (far fewer than the DM would have us believe, I reckon) that benefits shouldn't exist.

The legislation is there. Comapnaies are choosing to ignore it.

If there is an issue with Friday afternoons, then simply say Friday's can't be taken as a WFH day. Stopping the whole thing is using a hammer to crack a nut. (And how much of that slow down is a knock on effect? If your clients and suppliers are slowing down on a Friday afternoon then your email traffic will slow down too! Obviously!)

I Will work around annual leave to cover it. We all get annual leave, and it’s up to the employee to manage their workload in advance where possible and their manager to meet urgent tasks. What I will not do, is pick up their work around their flexible working on a regular basis. Other members of the team also have their own work to do, and as they’re not doing the same role can’t easily pick up others work. But even so, expecting the rest of the team or your manager to pick up hours of your job because you have flexible working is totally unreasonable.

That’s not fair on me as the manager, and I certainly have no one to pick up my work so I can do flexitime.

If flexitime doesn’t work then it has to be rejected. If people come to me with requests that don’t include any solution as to how their work is covered apart from “someone else will do it” then it’s rejected

Just because some people take the piss doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.

I disagree. There are many departments where productivity lowers when the boss isn't around. It's pathetic, you would imagine adults behave like grown-up, but in many places people take it easy when there's no management. There's no way any of them could work from home!

Also, when people start taking the piss, it's very hard to ban one but allow the others. It is much easier to just ban it.

I think it's a shame, I do work from home, and I work better there. I am on MN when I am in the office, not when I am at home but I completely understand why in many cases it's just not allowed.

Where I am, taking TOIL works the same was annual leave. So if you want a Friday off you still have to request it and put it in your diary etc. You can’t just not turn up. Managers can and do say no if it doesn’t suit the business.

Where I used to work it was quite rare for people to WFH for security reasons. However, there were a couple of women who had managed to get an agreement to allow them to do this.

I was on the same team as one of them. There is no doubt at all she did the hours expected and her work was of a high standard. However, it did sometimes feel that she got a slightly easier ride than other team members for a number of reasons:

1. As she was working one her own out of the office then when work was allocated she tended to be given the more straightforward jobs which could be tackled with the minimal of discussion and chasing up of loose ends.
2. If an emergency cropped up it would always be people in the office who would be expected to tackle it.

Where I am now they are pretty flexible about time, we have core hours but can start/finish early or late. Also with prior arrangement we can WFH but mostly we do this for one-offs rather than a regular thing. We are a small group so it is helpful for people to be in the office when possible.

A lot of stupid managers focus on ‘low productivity’ on Fridays while ignoring that their staff may send emails and make calls from 6am-9am or 5pm-7pm during the rest of their week because they work during their commutes. Often the extra hours worked between Monday-Thurs is greater than the entire working day of Friday.

you can picture the complaints for discrimination if you ban 1 person to have flexi time and working from home, whilst you allow others.

It's honestly easier to put a blanket rule. Again, it's a shame, but not all employees behave like responsible adults.

Often the extra hours worked between Monday-Thurs is greater than the entire working day of Friday.

so what, if you are supposed to work on Friday, then you still should.

As I said, some roles such as reception just aren't possible for work at home roles.

But a receptionist's post is often perfect for a different type of flexible working. I remember the shock horror of my middle aged male partners when I authorised a job share reception post - it enabled one mother to get in early and be home for school pick up and another to sort stuff out in the morning and her husband collected their daughter from nursery on his way home. They were a brilliant team and often swapped around for the other when family commitments necessitated it.

Job share is completely differnet to flexible working though. A job share is two part timers, what people are advocating here is being full time but with flexible hours which can't work for a receptionist.

@PamelaX - and people do. But if your company culture requires early starts and late finishes then it also has to be flexible enough to allow staff to offset it as per their schedule.

so Pamela are you saying that employers should simply disregard the legislation around flexible working? Decide that there are too many piss-takers out there so this legislation needn't apply to them?

Haven't RTFT but ughhhh this is something that annoys me so much!! In my first job for a big well known company, they were quite big on flexible working. I had a desk and I had to be in 3 days a week minimum to keep it so I would generally keep to that rule, however they generally didn't care if I worked from home or came in early/left early. Managers were always very flexible.
I left that company for a more senior/better paid role in another big, global company, doing a very similar role. In the interview I made sure to ask about flexible working as I know I work well like that, and the type of work I do requires all day conference calls, and needing to do a lot of reading and writing (not great in big open plan offices). All fine. Then when I actually started work they were fucking militant about it, because we had this idiot Director who didn't trust anyone. She was an absolute nightmare, and basically only if you were in her 'in-crowd' could you work from home without being questioned about it. It was ridiculous. I had to hot-desk every day, and some days I would drive an hour and not have anywhere to sit. You had to get 'permission' to work from home, which basically I just never did because I had agreed with my line manager that I wouldn't work like that, and then other people (not my line manager) would phone me up and question why I wasn't in the office. Drove me mad!! I left about about 6 months, was absolute joke.
I know work for a much smaller, not well known company. The whole office generally works 9-5.30, but my team are very flexible and I often work from home or start early/leave early. It makes me actually want to do my job as they treat you like adults!
Oh, and all these companies I had mobile phones/laptops/remote working solutions. Why bother paying for them if you're not going to actually use them!

TL;DR I think it's paranoia in more senior people that don't actually work when they're at home.

WeepingWillowWeepingWino
since when does the legislation not take into account the need of the business?

@Passthecherrycoke

@KatherineJaneaway it doesn’t work like that though does it? I have one member of staff who has flexible working- compressed hours, so they work 9 hours 4 days a week then 9-1pm Fridays. What happens when an urgent piece of work comes in for her at 2pm on a Friday?

What would you do if they were on holiday or off sick? Same issue.

If no one else can do that task, then you need to train someone up to be a stand in in case of absence. Having all your eggs in one basket i.e. only one person being able to do a task, is not good practice.