I don’t want to go back to the office(s) unless absolutely necessary.

[Carpedimum]

Before the pandemic I worked at home as often as possible, but my workplace hadn’t fully embraced wfh culture and I was told that I needed “to be seen” in the office at least a couple of days a week. I also travelled to two other sites regularly, one 60+ miles away and the other 200 miles away. I went to my home office 2-3 times a week, but I dislike it and much prefer wfh. I dislike the commute, the bus from the remote car-park into the office, the distractions of the big open-plan and I can’t work nearly as efficiently there as I do at home. Obviously, the pandemic has been wonderful for me, in that I have worked full-time throughout, all from home since mid-March.
I welcome the vaccines etc. and the prospect of a return to normal life, except I am dreading needing to go out to work again. I have proven over a long period of time that I can do my job very effectively at home, AIBU to hope that I’ll be able to continue that with only very occasional trips for meetings in the future? I realise that the economy is a complex web of supply & demand, and part of that is the commute etc. I just can’t face the idea of going back to “needing to be seen”.

I'm autistic and have faced so many issues working in an office in the last few decades. So like others, I love working from home and absolutely hate the thought of returning.

But even I can see its not sustainable or ideal in the long run. Even I'm slowly realising I'm missing the random corridor meetings and chats which used to keep you connected outside of your own team. I'm out of the loop without even knowing it on things you would have heard people nattering about in the kitchen.

And yes as a pp said, the "we can have a chat half on zoom and half in the office" idea misses the fact that people in the office will have a chance to chat informally before, during and after the meeting. Its inevitable that those at home will lose out, it can't be helped.

I just can’t face the idea of going back to “needing to be seen”.

Irrelevant. If your employer wants you in the office, for whatever reason, that’s their prerogative (regards current Covid, obviously as long as it’s safe). It’s not a choice on your part.

Yes blended office/zoom meetings won’t work. We’ve been doing them for years with people from other offices and there are always problems with it, and people not in the meeting room miss out on chats and don’t get to be involved as much. We only used them for more formal meetings with a clear agenda and even then it wasn’t brilliant. I think most companies are starting to realise that actually it works better with people in offices and the novelty of wfh completely is wearing off. It’s fine temporarily for a well established team to do, but as soon as you need to work with other teams or you have new starters or need informal cross team meetings it doesn’t work.

@Yesyoudoknowme

This is intriguing me - I am CS and before covid WFH 2 days a week - under protest despite being able to do our jobs just as well. I can't wait to see how they try to persuade us that we have to be back in the office in the future. TBH the Government could save millions of pounds on rent for CS depts by people WFH, our office could go down to a couple of meeting rooms which could be anywhere within the city I work in.

Again, they don't need to persuade you. They might decide they should, for morale, but they don't need to.

@HappyThursdays

I agree wfh appears to encourage silos. I think you also lose the ability to brainstorm things on the hoof. I usually have meetings with a company who does work for us with say 2 or 3 people in the room - in a big meeting, it might be up to 10. What I notice now with Zoom and teams is those meetings now have 20 people on, last big one we did had 50. It's not necessary but people invite other people and before you know it, you've got an auditorium.

Ultimately it's not up to you unless you're in the v rare position of being so important to the company that they will let you do what you want. The company will make the rules and you'll make the choice!

Sorry, I don’t follow you @HappyThursdays. You say that wfh encourages silos, then you go on to say that Zoom meetings attract large audiences while in-person meetings have fewer attendees.

Isn’t the definition of a silo where a small number of people do their work without understanding how it affects other bits of the organisation? Surely widely-attended meetings would go some way to prevent that, not exacerbate it?

(FWIW I do agree that wfh raises the risk of silos, but not for the reason that you give. In my opinion I think it is psychologically easier to dismiss the presence of colleagues outside your own team when you are not passing them in the corridor, sharing lifts etc)

@Yesyoudoknowme

This is intriguing me - I am CS and before covid WFH 2 days a week - under protest despite being able to do our jobs just as well. I can't wait to see how they try to persuade us that we have to be back in the office in the future. TBH the Government could save millions of pounds on rent for CS depts by people WFH, our office could go down to a couple of meeting rooms which could be anywhere within the city I work in.

They will probably “persuade” you by reminding you of the terms of your employment contract and telling you to like it or lump it.

They don't need to 'convince' him though? It's not a negotiation; if they say he has to return to his regular place of work then that's the end of the matter.

It isn't necessarily the end of it though, @Hardbackwriter - not true for every role, of course, but if I were to say I wasn't coming back into the office, they would agree or lose me. And they can't afford to lose me. I imagine a lot of companies are going to have decisions to make about whether they retain important personnel by allowing WFH, or rehiring. And yes, there are a lot of people looking for work right now, but if it is the case for longer standing or more crucial members of staff they don't want to lose, that'll eventually trickle down as others want the same.

@CheetasOnFajitas the wider meetings are external ones, not internal. So what we're finding is if (say) I'd have a meeting with the guys that provide our insurance and normally 2 of them would come over to our office and meet with me and one team member. What is happening now is I set up a meeting for insurance, their usual 2 people come along but they also invite 5 other people. Same happened with our meetings with the bank - normally 2 of them would come over to see us, last meeting we had, they also had 4 on the call. It's as though they believe virtual meetings need more people present, like they are justifying their existence. It's happening in almost all my external meetings so much so that we've started to say 'only people invited can come to the call, if you'd like to invite others please clear this with us first'!

the silos are happening on an internal basis. I can feel it myself because I'm generally checking in mainly with my own team and the interactions with other teams are far less (as they have less of a reason to set up a formal meeting - our interactions were mainly of an informal nature in the office, but none the less important!)

That may well be true for you @yelyah22 but there are relatively few people in that position (and some who think they are might be in for a shock!) - of course if they can't afford to lose you then you can control conditions like WFH, but then you always could. If you weren't able to tell your employer before this that you were picking where you worked or you were walking - and most people weren't - then you won't have magically gained that ability.

If you weren't able to tell your employer before this that you were picking where you worked or you were walking - and most people weren't - then you won't have magically gained that ability.

Absolutely this

OP I really wouldn't be worrying too much about this atm. So many office based jobs are looking at remote working possibilities long term. My own company has just announced they are closing 30 of our 80 worldwide offices in favour of WFH and remote working as they have realised (!) how much money they are saving on renting office space. We had an entire company virtual meeting on what working would look like going forward.

Don't let the comments about things being able to be done in India scare you either - many jobs certainly would NOT be able to be done as efficiently abroad, you can't buy knowledge and experience overnight. My company moved a large amount of IT over to India and it has not gone well at all - there have been so many complaints that over half of it has already been brought back to the UK.

YADNBU - I have loved working from home. No stressful commute, no worry about wrap around care, my general anxiety has decreased. I have had a few snide comments from people who have had to continue to go into work (one is an estate agent and the other has a tattoo parlour) but hey, we all choose (for the most part) our careers right.

Also, people who leave their job because it isn't full-time working from home need to be very confident that there will be other jobs available that will allow that - and I strongly suspect that, like most flexible working, most employers will allow anyone new they take on less leeway not more until they're established and have proved themselves. Just like some people are so vital to their employer that they know they can demand anything and get it, but most aren't, for some positions they're so desperate to hire that the right candidate can name their price, but for most that isn't the case.

@yelyah22

They don't need to 'convince' him though? It's not a negotiation; if they say he has to return to his regular place of work then that's the end of the matter.

It isn't necessarily the end of it though, @Hardbackwriter - not true for every role, of course, but if I were to say I wasn't coming back into the office, they would agree or lose me. And they can't afford to lose me. I imagine a lot of companies are going to have decisions to make about whether they retain important personnel by allowing WFH, or rehiring. And yes, there are a lot of people looking for work right now, but if it is the case for longer standing or more crucial members of staff they don't want to lose, that'll eventually trickle down as others want the same.

No one is irreplaceable. Don’t be foolish enough to think you are. Enough experience of people who thought they were the ‘corner stones’ of their company and irreplaceable to see them pushed out just before the big pensions were about to kick in. Also seen enough women sacrificing home life and mental health not to let companies down because they felt irreplaceable to eventually leave and been replaced immediately. Zero fucks given.

I am desperate to be back in an office at least some of the time - I thrive on the chat and exchange of ideas to get my job done well. Ideally 3 days in the office and 2 at home, but the business I work for are looking set to make us all work from home permanently and I am now looking for a new job.

@Chasingpandas

Yes blended office/zoom meetings won’t work. We’ve been doing them for years with people from other offices and there are always problems with it, and people not in the meeting room miss out on chats and don’t get to be involved as much. We only used them for more formal meetings with a clear agenda and even then it wasn’t brilliant. I think most companies are starting to realise that actually it works better with people in offices and the novelty of wfh completely is wearing off. It’s fine temporarily for a well established team to do, but as soon as you need to work with other teams or you have new starters or need informal cross team meetings it doesn’t work.

There is a flip side to this that I have observed. We used to do a regular meeting which brought together teams in three different offices plus a few people dialling in by phone. Each team would get together into a meeting room in their office and we’d have a vidcon screen with a camera showing all three rooms. The sound was terrible, people would sit too far from the mikes and could not hear or be heard, you’d get the sound of someone pouring coffee drowning out someone else and people would not realise that they were off the edge of the camera. The phone in people had no idea what was going in because they could not see the gestures and people were shit at saying their names before they spoke. Since lockdown everyone has been in Zoom. All visible on own camera, all able to hear and be heard, all on a level footing. Meeting can be recorded to help those doing the minutes.

It’s been a revelation. When we are back in our offices we plan to have a new policy which is that of a meeting involves someone on a different site we all participate by Zoom from our desks, regardless of whether or not some participants are in the same place.

I think a shift to more-WFH-than-not will be quite a disadvantage for young people. You'll be working from your bedroom in your parents house/flatshare, missing out on a lot of the social and learning aspects of working with colleagues. And if you do get a couple of allocated days in the office (what they're talking about in my place) you'll only get to see a handful of the people you work with and nit get to build the same relationships. Same for new staff with a lot of this.

All my colleagues think we'll be working from home whenever we like forever but I've noticed how senior management were back in early on.

As a member of the senior management team in my organisation, we were expressly told that we had to lead by example and go back to the office early. We're still the only ones working in the office (1-2 days per week) and the expectation is that by not yet compelling anyone else to return, not making a big deal of it but showing our own presence, the rest of the staff will have no option but to accept it when the time comes.

Already though, I have several team members demanding their right to wfh permanently. I'm all for more flexibility in future (we were strictly against wfh in the past but can't argue that anymore) but our staff are kidding themselves if they really think that they can do 100% of their jobs from home. This year has shown that a great deal of the work can be done but it takes longer, is less effective and some vital aspects are on indefinite hold.

We had an interesting discussion at a board meeting recently. Some managers were complaining that staff are missing or not engaging with vital communications and requests which have come out by email and there is no excuse for this. My take on this is that everyone is overloaded by email and many people take a cautious view - i.e. they are not sure if a directive really applies to them or what the consequences will be for not following, so they wait to see what their colleagues are doing. Or maybe they are behind in their inbox and don't see the email immediately but, when grabbing a coffee, will overhear other colleagues talking in the kitchen about "did you see that message?" which will prompt them to have a look. I do think that people rely on others more than they give credit for and this side of things is difficult to replicate in a remote working environment.

That's a deal breaker for me. I only work for companies that allow home working and have done so for a while. I am disabled and being able to work from home the majority of the time is a must.

I love people saying they’ll have to be “persuaded” back to the office. Mmmm.

Opposite experience from HalloumiFries above. Or senior managers are the ones waxing lyrical about WFH. Maybe they're just trying to keep spirits up while we have no choice at the moment (Scotland, public sector). Or maybe they're the ones with office space and money to have the heating on all day...

I hope must companies say purple can just wfh forever. It's made my commute into school half the time so I don't miss all those people driving in when they don't need to! Stay home so those of us who have to go in can get there without sitting in traffic!

@HappyThursdays ah OK, that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.

I quite like the seeing people aspect but hated my commute after my office moved location. So torn personally.

As others have said it’s not your decision or my decision, although you can obviously make a case.

@thedevilinablackdress

I think a shift to more-WFH-than-not will be quite a disadvantage for young people. You'll be working from your bedroom in your parents house/flatshare, missing out on a lot of the social and learning aspects of working with colleagues. And if you do get a couple of allocated days in the office (what they're talking about in my place) you'll only get to see a handful of the people you work with and nit get to build the same relationships. Same for new staff with a lot of this.

100% agree with this. It's fine for us middle aged folks who all know how to do our jobs to do them from home (I have for many years). But when you are in your twenties and learning the ropes, this needs to be in an office with lots of people to learn from and with.

Obviously, the pandemic has been wonderful for me

Have I really just read this?