SERIOUSLY??? People may quit if forced to work from home, Rishi Sunak warns ?

[R2221]

No Mr Sunak. Working from home saves me 2 FUCKING HOURS of daily commute + rush hour stress + travel costs.

I work from home now. I am more productive, less stressed and happier.

@Staffy1

And others need their time at work to escape the domestic violence

If they are living with domestic violence they need to do more about it than escape to the office daily. I think the same when people say some children need to go to school all the time to avoid neglect/mistreatment at home. Surely more should be done about getting them out of the abusive home altogether, not just in school/work hours.

I agree with this actually.

However, I think it's a valid argument for smaller scale home problems, like your home just being very small or just not great enough to be spending 23 hours a day in it.

"I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times."

It's exactly the fucking same for me. Lockdown didn't mean an entire extra room was magically added to my house.

"Who is forcing anyone to work from home? "

The national and regional government where I live (not in the UK). Before I left the UK it was my employer in Wales. If I ever go back to Wales, I'm very, very worried that the Welsh Government is now aggressively pushing more home working egged on by environmentalists.

YABU it's different for everyone. I work with several younger people who live in flat shares. They've been sleeping and working in their bedrooms for a year now and are understandably at the end of their tether. They want to go back to the office.

@eaglejulesk

I genuinely don't know anyone who didn't work from home after hours, like it or not.

Wow, if that's the way of working in the UK I'm very thankful I don't live there!

It's not the way of working for ordinary employees. It's a thing for managers and professionals, but even then some of those who do longer hours do those extra hours at their workplace. I had a teacher friend who had a rule of never taking work home - she just stayed longer after school.

"I'm also in my 40s and enjoy talking to my colleagues."

Yep. Nothing in particular happens at the age of 40 to make us not need social interaction any more.
What could be the case of course is that more people in that age group have husbands and children so don't live alone, but that's not really an age thing.

I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times.

Am I going to suddenly get a spare room I can use as an office @poppycat10?

Even if we’re not in lockdown I’m still going to be working in the living room (or living in the office as it feels like) and DH will still feel he has to stay out of the way.

I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times

Many people didn’t want to do it full time in normal times either. I didn’t. I won’t after lockdown.

I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times.

You don't need to shout it, why not listen to others opinions? I have worked remotely quite a bit before lockdown, and hated it then too. A lot of the reasons people hate it are the same in and out of lockdown.

People DO know that. Why do MNers always assume everyone on here is stupid? We already have a (much) reduced timetable, but it works much better because it is much easier to recover a service when there are fewer trains. Yes you'll have a longer journey and there will be fewer trains, but that doesn't matter if it's (more) reliable and you (usually) get a seat.

I wouldn't call you stupid but nor I do think you're as bright as you think you are if you don't realise that the service will be reduced to the point where trains are crowded again, because that's the point at which they're profitable to run. And I can't really see the point about 'more reliable' - having a train cancelled is clearly worse if the next one will be here in an hour than if the wait is 20 mins. DH now gets home half an hour later due to the reduced timetable, but he's also always on more of a knife edge because if there's a problem with the train there's no longer any others that would get him in later but still in time for work. There's also a lot of 'I'm alright Jack' about people saying it's fine if trains get considerably more expensive per journey and run less often because you won't be using them as much - screw the people who will still need to get them five days a week, right?

@JeanClaudeVanDammit

I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times

Many people didn’t want to do it full time in normal times either. I didn’t. I won’t after lockdown.

Also, you could turn that round and say that the crap level of service brought about - or at least exacerbated - by people working at home might be acceptable during lockdown, but won't be during normal times.

We already have a (much) reduced timetable, but it works much better because it is much easier to recover a service when there are fewer trains. Yes you'll have a longer journey and there will be fewer trains, but that doesn't matter if it's (more) reliable and you (usually) get a seat.

But that’s only currently feasible because the rail network (and light rail and bus for that matter) are being completely propped up by huge payments from government. It’s not a realistic proposition in the longer term.

Poppycat wrote these things:

Just because you are in a cramped bedroom now doesn't mean you have to work in your cramped bedroom after lockdown ends. There are cafes, libraries, co-working hubs.

One other important issue is to avoid a two tier system where some people work flexibly and others can't.

The 2nd idea is a non-starter.

Cafes & co-working hubs aren't free to sit in all day. Is the idea behind suggesting libraries to just use their wifi and have a free space away from home? Because otherwise you can't hook up own laptop to our local library big screens or ethernet. I don't know how many quiet tables there are in public libraries; libraries are just somewhere else to travel to but without tea & coffee facilities, have limited opening hours and noisy patrons. Library wifi can be slow or insecure. That's also pretending that confidential data, need for big screens (big spreadsheets) or ethernet cables to run software fast aren't an issue for some but not others.

Poppycat has no idea! If I'm not supposed to have calls in front of DH I'm not sure what work would think of me working in a cafe or library!

@lljkk

Poppycat wrote these things:

Just because you are in a cramped bedroom now doesn't mean you have to work in your cramped bedroom after lockdown ends. There are cafes, libraries, co-working hubs.

One other important issue is to avoid a two tier system where some people work flexibly and others can't.

The 2nd idea is a non-starter.

Cafes & co-working hubs aren't free to sit in all day. Is the idea behind suggesting libraries to just use their wifi and have a free space away from home? Because otherwise you can't hook up own laptop to our local library big screens or ethernet. I don't know how many quiet tables there are in public libraries; libraries are just somewhere else to travel to but without tea & coffee facilities, have limited opening hours and noisy patrons. Library wifi can be slow or insecure. That's also pretending that confidential data, need for big screens (big spreadsheets) or ethernet cables to run software fast aren't an issue for some but not others.

I used to work from home years ago - I was a self employed consultant - and I would maybe once a week take myself to the local cafe, buy coffee or lunch and work there. But the very most I would have fair or comfortable doing so is 1.5 hours. Big whoopee, an hour i n the working week and still not talking to somebody except to say : Ill have a ham and cheese tastie please. How stimulating! I also took a desk in a shared workspace for a while but it had a lot of the disadvantages of open plan office space with few of the advantages. I didnt have much in common with the people there and while it was nice to see and hear people and to get away from the house, it was a costly enough experiment which didnt really deliver the social but AND work related interaction that being in an office with colleagues delivered.

Excuse the dreadful typos in my last post.

Poppycat has no idea! If I'm not supposed to have calls in front of DH I'm not sure what work would think of me working in a cafe or library!

Quite 🤦‍♀️

It's fine, let people who like wft fullfill those wfh jobs and vice versa.

95% of my company's new starters are home-based. We are expanding massively but not needing more office space.

We can find better qualified people by enabling people to wfh because they can be anywhere in the country or most parts of the world.

I certainly hope that large organisations - utilities services, banks, building societies, insurance companies etc don't continue making all their staff WFH. The service from all of them at the moment is very poor.

Excellent post @BogRollBOGOF. You have summarised very well why WFH doen't work for everyone.

Ideally a flexible approach is what we all want at work, but I don't see how this can happen. We all need widescreen monitors as we use several software applications and large spreadsheets. A laptop just doesn't hack it. We all took our work PCs, screens, keyboards, mice and headsets home to use, and I can't see us lugging all that lot between home and office. I think we will just meet up for the occasional team meeting.

I will SHOUT IT this time: home working in lockdown is not the same as remote working in normal times.

How isn't it?

DP works in mental health, currently partly wfh and partly on-site. When she's wfh, I can't even pop in to the room to grab a book in case I overhear something. Would you really like the details of your childhood trauma and latest overdose to be overheard by everyone in the local Costa?

People who don't deal with anything confidential could potentially work from a coffee shop or co-working space, but why should they have to pay for somewhere to do their work?

I used to work from home years ago - I was a self employed consultant - and I would maybe once a week take myself to the local cafe, buy coffee or lunch and work there. But the very most I would have fair or comfortable doing so is 1.5 hours. Big whoopee, an hour i n the working week and still not talking to somebody except to say : Ill have a ham and cheese tastie please. How stimulating! I also took a desk in a shared workspace for a while but it had a lot of the disadvantages of open plan office space with few of the advantages. I didnt have much in common with the people there and while it was nice to see and hear people and to get away from the house, it was a costly enough experiment which didnt really deliver the social but AND work related interaction that being in an office with colleagues delivered.

I agree

Plus cafes are particularly bad work environments. Noisy acoustics, uncomfortable, small table, short term. Barely worth the relocation

I'm not sure how happy Costa or Cafe Nero would be about folks using their premises as an office, taking up bandwith, hogging the tables with their laptops and documents while getting into a detailed discussion with Jane from Accounts for hours on end, all for the cost of a macchiato.

It hardly resolves the main issue too. F2f conversation with team or client.

It’s not about seeing people mill about, it’s interaction that’s needed and yep ordering a coffee / sandwich is not cutting it.

One other important issue is to avoid a two tier system where some people work flexibly and others can't.

Why ?

And speaking of 4-day weeks ...

news.sky.com/story/covid-19-spain-to-trial-four-day-working-week-in-bid-to-prevent-new-coronavirus-outbreaks-12258129