Issues with working from home

[Awmum42]

With lots of jobs becoming wfh in the long term now with only a few days in the office if any. What’s stopping companies gradually moving more and more jobs overseas, why pay a U.K. wage to someone you rarely see when you could get the work done for cheaper rates overseas. It would seem to make sense and a worry for both of us.

Not really clear what you are asking if YABU about, so haven't voted.

I think this is going to very much depend on your skill set, your particular job, and your company or organisation.

People have outsources some work to countries where the workforce is cheaper for years, but it can create as many issues as it solves.

There are plenty of issues with people working at home - some more than others. There are also some advantages, and again, some people will not have the same advantages as others.

What I hope is that a lot of companies find the right balance, and learn from this very strange year, and now accept that people don't necessarily have to be in the same room to have a meeting but also, that most people struggle without company ever. Also, that people have different circumstances as well as different personalities. As ever, what suits one person won't suit another.

I think you’re right to be concerned, I am too

before c-19 most of my time was spent at on or around the sites I look after , but when the restrictions kicked in i worked from home 2 days a week , then in April it increased to 4 days a week with me been expected to go to each of the 6 sites i look after 1 day a week but somehow not going to more than one site a day
Since then it has changes innumerable times but we still keep getting told to work from home when ever we can ( sodding hard to do building inspections when I am sat on my sofa )

I guess some jobs could in theory be done entirely from home and with Zoom and Teams etc we can still hold meeting but i would hate to outsource to someone that does not understand all of the uk building regs / laws / and the speed they change

In my experience remote working wouldn’t have been so successful if we hadn’t already had a good team relationship beforehand that had been built up through years of working together in the office. I imagine that’s the case for many organisations and expect it would be difficult to build a remote team from scratch.

YANBU - my company has already outsourced all our lower paid/administrative roles to Poland!

It just seems to make sense that if people aren’t working in an office now why pay U.K. wages. Think this will affect all levels skilled and less skilled. In the next few years I think we will see a large shift

Well, I'm an English-qualified solicitor. You can't really hire a Chinese-qualified lawyer to do the same job.

@Awmum42
Nope. I changed jobs in May last year and have been to my office twice (the first time was on day 1 of my role for a meet and greet). I have a great team of colleagues with whom I speak daily and we all get on really well, even though we don't actually see each other in person.

Sorry was meant to quote @MiaMc

It depends entirely on what you do.

DH and I both work by going to see sites and then writing reports. The report writing bit can be done at least as well from home, but we still have to see sites in person.

So our jobs could move to being home based (indeed, mine always has been, for nearly 20 years), meaning our employers would need no office space at all (meetings could continue virtually), but we would still have to be based locally in order to do our site visits. I think there are a good number of jobs analogous to ours.

I actually don't think outsourcing abroad will change that much. A lot of professional jobs already allowed for 1-2 days wfh. I think there may be a shift within the UK though.

Outsourcing is very different to employing someone who is located overseas.

Plenty of companies have functions that they don’t want to outsource. In that case it isn’t as simple as someone sitting in Greece or China doing the job - there are tax implications and particularly tricky if the company has no legal entity in the country where the employer is based.

I work for a huge company with a lot of experience of WFH. Will still want teams to be able to meet easily, periodically.

When large scale outsourcing started (many years ago), people worried like you are - but not all the jobs went.

I do think there’ll be changes as more companies were forced into new perspectives - but I don’t think they’ll be as dramatic as you think.

A friend mentioned this to me. It might be tempting for some companies - I really hope it doesn't happen.

Have you ever experienced BT's overseas customer service call centre OP? I use the words 'customer service' loosely. It should be studied in Business School as a lesson in how to lose customers.

There would be some disadvantages to using foreign labour but these seem small compared to the savings companies could make. If someone rarely came into the office would the employee being based in Manchester or Asia make much of a difference?

My DH company has already discussed phasing out London weighting as a result of staff wfh going forward

If someone rarely came into the office would the employee being based in Manchester or Asia make much of a difference?

Yes time zones & cultural nuances make a difference

Time zones will be easy to overcome, lots of people all over the world work night shifts etc and over time cultural nuances will be less of an issue. I really do think this will be a trend over the next 5 years.

Depending on the longer term implications of Brexit, the value of the pound relative to other currencies will have an effect.

We might in the future see countries like Ireland outsourcing work to the UK because paying salaries in £ is relatively cheap.

Especially if this government holds a bonfire of employment rights.

Time zones will be easy to overcome, lots of people all over the world work night shifts etc and over time cultural nuances will be less of an issue. I really do think this will be a trend over the next 5 years.

I disagree, as I said upthread all of the above could have been done pre covid. I don't have any friends who don't already have some form of remote working in their working week. two friends have worked 95% remotely for yrs & their salaries are high.

It depends on the job. I’ve worked from home for over a decade on many international projects but being based in the U.K. So there’s always been a demand for U.K. workers internationally as well.

I currently work for U.K. arm of an American tech co and have always wfh for them- at any point any of my clients could have chosen a lower cost resource from outside the U.K., but they haven’t. So I’m not worried because it’s not a new threat; I’ve always been up against this type of competition but it’s never been a valid alternative in my role (business development). But appreciate for some jobs it will be.

I definitely feel that London wages in particular will change.

We work with people all over the world and time zones are annoying but we work around them.

The one thing we have going for us is you can’t always wfh as a scientist...still need to do lab work so I’m not worried.

However I can see if you are based in london this is concern. If you can pay someone in Nottingham 10-20k less for wfh than someone in london why wouldn’t you?

I don’t think they will be shipping jobs out to other countries however I do think it will cause the houses prices in london and other big cities to decrease and countryside locations to increase (which is already been shown in some places)

I've worked from home for nearly 5 years. My company was office based originally and over the last 5 years has moved to home based with some people going into offices if they wanted to. None of our jobs have been outsourced elsewhere. In fact, we opened up an office in Australia so that we could help more of our clients in different time zones.
Some companies might look at outsourcing options but I suppose it really depends on the business.