AIBU to expect people working from home to actually work?

[MelbourneWay]

I'm the manager of a small company in an essential sector operating from a number of sites. Most staff can't work from home, but trying to minimise social contact we allowed half the office to work from home. The result is that the staff working from home are doing very little work (we can tell when they log on) and the staff still left in the office are having to work harder than usual to keep up. I appreciate that most people in country are furloughed, but how do I get the staff working from home to actually do the job they are employed to do without appearing to be an evil employer?

Please bear in mind people need to do shopping at times they wouldn't normally and which might take longer than usual and might have children and other dependents/vulnerable family members to look after at this time worth no help. Hedging said that, it's not a holiday and they're should be flexibility all round i.e logging on earlier or later once the kids are in bed to make sure things tick over.

Can you introduce a new process where invoices are photographed by smartphone as they arrive and then emailed from the phone to a shared mailbox which your staff have access to? They could then be managed/allocated out from there.

As a company we are all remote workers and always have been. It works well for most of us and those who struggled to start with have got to grips
With it now.
Home learning does affect it (it is home learning, not home schooling) and a number of us have to split time around family needs. Not perfect but starting to be workable.
In a previous role I had been working from home 3-4 days a week and the other time either in the Office in London or in Wales with a client. I got 3 times as much work done at home Than I did in the office. I was still forced to come in every day to the office in the end (commute by car from Southampton area to London off A41!)
My productivity crashed and when I was able to move on I did ... thankfully to another company that understood remote working.

It isn’t always possible and isn’t always appropriate, but unless there are underlying factors (health, home learning, insufficient technology/resources, the work simply cannot be done remotely) then it is about education, support and management.
YANBU to expect a certain level of work, but you do need to support the staff in changing how they work.

My DH is currently working from home in high stress job. The entire office were sent home for 2 days to check systems worked with them all logged on at the same time. He never actually went back tho. Hes off for the foreseeable future. He mentioned that the first few days; people weren't logging on enough or having lay ins. The company were leaniant as everyone was settling in at home and getting things up and running. Not to mention juggling children. We dont have a designated office in our home; it's been a massive upheaval with him ending up Amazoning a desk, chair and extra monitor and placing it literally at the end of our bed.

Have you spoken to the ones that are not pulling their weight? Perhaps they're on their own with a child/children and are finding it hard to balance everything. They may need extra support from you to work out a new routine. Find out what the circumstances are!

Blimey, sorry for the typos, autospell and a three year old

Swap them over every few days.
Or
Tell the home workers they are furloughed.
Or
Get tough, tell them you will be checking their hours and paying accordingly for hours actually worked as less hours worked, is detrimental to the whole business.

Are you able to accommodate them working flexibly if they also have caring responsibilities? Tbh I’ve struggled quite a bit with adapting to working at home and basically figuring out a system of doing the vast majority of my work electronically when we still use paper a lot. I find it takes much longer to get through my work and that’ll be the case until I get used to it. Combining that with a preschooler at home and missing being outside and playing with her friends, a husband also working from home and mentally adapting to being stuck in the house, it’s pretty hard going.

My employer though has said that they’ll be flexible around when people are working when they’re at home. I mean they’re not going to want people working overnight when it’s important to the job to be available during the day, but I’m able to work at various times, with one day per week in the office.

It’s not unreasonable at all to expect your employees to work, but it’s also not unreasonable that there’s a period of adjustment going on.

Just send them an email of the report that shows how long they have been logged on for. Ask of they want to take the hours not worked as annual leave or have it taken from their pay??

What do most employers do when employees are not doing the job their hired to do?

1. Give warnings, verbal & written.
2. Then fire them.
3. Hire people that need work right now.

Don’t feel guilty. Some people out there can’t work because of the nature of their job. So the ones that have a job & are abusing it have only themselves to blame if they don’t work & get fired.

The silver lining is that you can hire people that will actually work & are grateful for it. Life isn’t fair or easy. This Corona Virus situation will bring people back to reality for sure.

Judging by the endless amounts of posts on here from people claiming to work full time while also managing to be full time parents to their 2/3/4 kids I'm just surprised that you're surprised OP.

"Then fire them". Straight out of the Trump handbook there 🙄. And we all know how good he is at business.

You are totally not BU to expect people WFH to be WFH! If they have kids then that's another matter, but if not, then this isn't a three-six months paid holiday in addition to normal leave!! If they have a laptop and are set up with remote access, (or even if not but can still manage) have a mobile phone, anything else they need to do their job from home then what's the problem? If a boss has a good team, and each member of that team is a mature, responsible adult with any ounce of integrity then no need to check up on them. Of course that may not be the case and you have slouchers who will take this opportunity to do as little as possible and that's unfortunate. I would rather my boss trust that I'm here from 9-5 and let me get on with my job rather than annoyingly checking in with me every hour or so.

Personally speaking, I'm as busy at home as I am in the office. Most of my friends WFH have said the same.

Perhaps they're on their own with a child/children

OP's already said that none of these staff have children

No-one seems to have asked if your photocopiers scan? That's how we'd deal with this at my school. Copiers that scan can often be set to send the scan straight to an email. Failing that, any smartphone would do it. I'm marking handwritten student work sent as phone photos, my eyesight is rubbish and there's been nothing I can't read (except for Mac users sending me .pages and .heic ).

If everything is paper based you could organising it alphabetically so you know Joan has all invoices starting with S etc (if necessary send someone out daily to deliver new invoices to correct colleagues)

Or you could just tell all your WFH staff that due to people taking the piss they have the option to be furloughed or come back into the office.

Personally I would be giving verbal/written warnings to anyone who wasn’t logged in all afternoon (unless they had contacted me at the time with a good reason). Let’s face it, you wouldn’t stand for that behaviour in the office would you?

As ever the compassion and understanding is positively oozing here

I wfh for a number of years before bn called back into the office due to a change of director, now we’re wfh it’s surprising how the attitudes of those who’ve never done it before. They’re struggling, they’re very open about it. As experienced as I am at wfh it’s taken me about 10 days to get Bk into it and get a routine , would approach it with an understanding it’s difficult to get a flow but it averages at x amount of days so expect an upturn in work output, have them complete a daily work log to monitor actual business due to current conditions of course they’ll understand what you’re doing but you’re in your right to do it. Also have them sign into Skype or another biz tool so you can see their activity/online/breaks etc. Or if you can approach work output over hours. So long as it’s done does it impact what hour it’s completed?

The employer is not paying for employees to look after children. If they are not in a position to work from home then really they should go into the office or offer part time hours from home - to take a full salary whilst not actually working is ridiculous.

I may be totally wrong here but isn’t allowing them to take paperwork home a GDPR issue??

The employer is not paying for employees to look after children.

Normally yes. But we’re in abnormal times. There is no childcare available for the children non key workers, for good reason. They have to be at home and they need some degree of care.

What you’re suggesting amounts to discrimination against parents and that is not on.

The employer is not paying for employees to look after children. If they are not in a position to work from home then really they should go into the office or offer part time hours from home - to take a full salary whilst not actually working is ridiculous.

Id love to be back in the office, please give me the numbers of some childminders & schools I can send my dc too?

And they definitely don’t have other caring responsibilities- such as older relatives or sick partners. And youve supported them with tech set up and checked their wifi bandwidth. And they have a suitable place to work for a full day. I’ve no office, desk or office chair and luckily I got a Mac airbook 6 months ago. I have to move about a lot and I’ve no musculoskeletal Issues.

Yes it's really uncomfortable on a dining room chair

Our work has set up a team work schedule on SharePoint. We log every task we do with a start date, expected end date and then put in the completion date when it’s actually done. It can be as simple as ‘call Jane regarding XX’ I put loads on there.

I'm online earlier at home because I'm not driving for an hour to work! I've always started earlier than I'm meant to it's just even earlier now (before 7) and I work until 4. Some days I take an hour for lunch but others it's about 20 mins. I do tend to finish earlier on a Friday. I have lots to do so no skiving for me unfortunately!