To be devastated that DH has to go back into the office

[ruraldream2021]

DH and I had it all planned. We were going to sell our home in the over-crowded, over-priced south east and move to a rural idyll many miles away, improving our quality of life and reducing our mortgage to nearly nothing.

DH works in a job in London and has been WFH throughout the pandemic, a situation we were given every reason to believe would continue.

We’ve had estate agents round to value our house and were literally about to put it on the market when DH gets an email from work saying that WFH is not panning out as hoped for them and he will be required back in the office four days a week, every week.

This has left our dreams in tatters as it means we will now have to remain close to London, because (understandably) DH does not want a very long commute.

DH works really hard at home and if anything he does longer hours, as he doesn’t need to commute.

I feel like our dreams have just gone up in a puff of smoke and am so devastated at the thought of staying put.

AIBU?

@countrytown

Check out the recent information from Google about where it is heading. They will allow flexibility of remote working but that comes with a substantial reduction in salary on a sliding scale based on how far removed you are from the office location

It's not quite so straightforward as that is Google in the US. Costs do vary considerably as someone moving from California to Texas will going from one of the highest income tax states to no income tax.

In the UK our employment law means drastic changes to salaries without employee agreement would be a breach of t&c's.

Ah but you're forgetting the Conservative's favourite tool...fire & rehire. I pick on the Conservatives because it's well known that they want less workers rights aka red tape as a political party

If a company can materially prove that the T&Cs have to be changed for future trading to exist they can legally steamroller over objections and fire anyone not accepting of the new contract with the option for them to be rehired on new terms. If the company doesn't have a union presence there's zero chance of that being overturned, even with a union presence the best you can hope for is concessions being negotiated.

Some seriously big companies have done this already, not linked to the pandemic. I'd be surprised if we don't hear of a few firms threatening this to get London weighting removed from contracts where WFH has been utilised instead.

We have a policy which clearly states dependants should be cared for by someone else during working hours.

She’s in for a bit of a shock unfortunately

Some seriously big companies have done this already, not linked to the pandemic. I'd be surprised if we don't hear of a few firms threatening this to get London weighting removed from contracts where WFH has been utilised instead.

Which UK companies?

My brother works for a MC law firm & he thinks employers need to be careful & is advising that.

I must admit I was astonished people were selling up and moving.
I never believed WFH was going to be a permanent thing and if it was then salaries would have been adjusted accordingly

It was from a customers POV completely unworkable. It cost a friend thousands because she couldn’t get a document processed in time. It should have taken a week. She started the process 3 months before and it ended up taking 4.5 months.
That was one extreme but I think a lot of people who had cause to call a company were left frustrated that there was no one there to answer a quick question and you could only leave messages that went unanswered

If you search on LinkedIn and put "remote" under location you should be able to see jobs which are mainly WFH

Another thing to be aware of, if you are planning to move to a rural location and wfh is that the broadband speed can be quite slow in more rural areas (depending on where in the country you are- probably less of a problem in SE England than here in Scotland) and you need to check what it is like where you are planning to live (and don’t rely on BT saying they “maximum speed is x”- this is what they aim for and may or may not actually be achievable). If it is not sufficient for what you need, then you need to factor in the cost of remedying that (4G, setting up satellite connections etc). I mention it as I know someone who moved from SE to rural Scotland and expected everything to be practically the same- including broadband, travel infrastructure etc. They were amazed by property houses up here and bought a lovely big house with plan to wfh etc and have had no end of trouble with connectivity. He was told to sort it or find a way to move back asap. They have spent many thousands (tens of, as things stand) and it is still not entirely sorted. They had the cash to do it, but if they hadn’t it would have been a disaster.

But don’t get me started about the moaning they, and a few others who have recently moved to the area, have done about other things which should have been entirely predictable given where they moved to. It appears that not one of them properly researched the area they were moving to and that is a bit baffling, really. They seemed surprised about things like not having access to a 24 hour shop within a short drive or not being able to get takeaways delivered to you. There is only a train to a major city every few hours and weekend service is less frequent, getting your weekly/monthly shop will involve a bit of a drive and when it snows the un-named road that you live at the end of will not be ploughed. It’s been quite amusing and infuriating at the same time. I just don’t understand why this should be a surprise.

@countrytown

Some seriously big companies have done this already, not linked to the pandemic. I'd be surprised if we don't hear of a few firms threatening this to get London weighting removed from contracts where WFH has been utilised instead.

Which UK companies?

My brother works for a MC law firm & he thinks employers need to be careful & is advising that.

Centrica (British Gas), Tesco, British Airways (although I think they may have fought back and 'won' for now), Go North West and Jacobs Douwe Egberts. I do believe Asda also threatened it but backed down fairly quickly in comparison to others.

They're the ones the media has picked up on because union members created a stink. There are probably more in the background.

These companies were all making massive detrimental changes to contracts and still pushed through with fire/rehire as a backstop. The British Gas one was particularly acrimonious...but the engineers striking substantially didn't stop fire/rehire being used.

For something as simple as removing a salary location weighting when you're no longer living in that location I can't imagine that fire/rehire would be necessary but it is a legal tool companies can use to force through contractual changes. Anyone claiming it can't be done in the UK is naive at best.

oblomov I'm not a fan of wfh for all. If our children, teens, uni graduates, took jobs, say in say .... accountancy, law, graduate programmes, I would want them in the office, being trained, mentored, on projects, being taken out to audits, meeting clients.
Not given a laptop and told to work in their bedroom for the next year.

Yes this ^. I think wfh is great when you are established in your career but it almost feels that the ladder is being pulled up behind these experienced staff, who benefited from this type of mentoring. When younger, I always valued the skills and advice or more senior members of staff and watching how they interacted with clients. Also I agree with pp that customer service has been shocking in some companies sue to wfh.

@countrytown

I think the last 18 months has made a lot of home workers quite entitled.

Why is this a bad thing? It's good for employees to have power.

I agree - employers seem to forget that they would not have businesses without their employees and they are not doing their employees a favour, they need the talent.

Some people take the mickey, so a decent employer deals with those people, rather than using the "lets punish the whole class" approach.

Some jobs lend themselves to home/remote working more than others. Some people will need to be in the office more than others. Some employers will want face to face interaction more than others.

The great thing is that there is now a lot more choice and a lot more employers open to remote and hybrid working. so it should be possible to find a job with a working arrangement that suits you.

*due

Not given a laptop and told to work in their bedroom for the next year

Sigh. I have said this so often on here, but working remotely during a pandemic is not at all the same as working remotely normally. You are not locked in your bedroom, there are loads of options for places to work.

@igelkott2021

Not given a laptop and told to work in their bedroom for the next year

Sigh. I have said this so often on here, but working remotely during a pandemic is not at all the same as working remotely normally. You are not locked in your bedroom, there are loads of options for places to work.

What are the ‘loads of options’?

@jacks11

Another thing to be aware of, if you are planning to move to a rural location and wfh is that the broadband speed can be quite slow in more rural areas (depending on where in the country you are- probably less of a problem in SE England than here in Scotland) and you need to check what it is like where you are planning to live (and don’t rely on BT saying they “maximum speed is x”- this is what they aim for and may or may not actually be achievable). If it is not sufficient for what you need, then you need to factor in the cost of remedying that (4G, setting up satellite connections etc). I mention it as I know someone who moved from SE to rural Scotland and expected everything to be practically the same- including broadband, travel infrastructure etc. They were amazed by property houses up here and bought a lovely big house with plan to wfh etc and have had no end of trouble with connectivity. He was told to sort it or find a way to move back asap. They have spent many thousands (tens of, as things stand) and it is still not entirely sorted. They had the cash to do it, but if they hadn’t it would have been a disaster.

But don’t get me started about the moaning they, and a few others who have recently moved to the area, have done about other things which should have been entirely predictable given where they moved to. It appears that not one of them properly researched the area they were moving to and that is a bit baffling, really. They seemed surprised about things like not having access to a 24 hour shop within a short drive or not being able to get takeaways delivered to you. There is only a train to a major city every few hours and weekend service is less frequent, getting your weekly/monthly shop will involve a bit of a drive and when it snows the un-named road that you live at the end of will not be ploughed. It’s been quite amusing and infuriating at the same time. I just don’t understand why this should be a surprise.

A lot of these people are in ‘big jobs’ as well. How they have no common sense is beyond me!

Very few people who are used to city convenience will be able to survive in less vibrant areas. Doesn’t mean rural villages alone. Knutsford (a town in Cheshire) has nothing on delivery apps, unreliable trains that run hourly (at best) and two hourly on the weekends. Anybody who doesn’t drive is scuppered.

Most of England is like that. The places that aren’t (while not having London house prices) aren’t ‘dirt cheap’ and there’s lots of competition among house buyers. It’ll be interesting to see the mass sell-off in a few years (or sooner)

In fairness, my DPs role has become pretty much permanently WFH - and I have had to have quite a firm conversation with him that if he prefers that to the office then we need to buy a property with a separate annexe or working space, because I simply can’t live in an office and it isn’t fair on children either.

So different reasons but similar outcome if you like.

But (and this is not in any way aimed at your husband OP) I do think some people massively overestimate how much they get done at home and how efficient companies are. I’m sure some are, but equally many just aren’t.

Hopefully you can look to buy something nice.

@squiddybear

We're the same OP. DH was told in November that they would only be required in the office realistically once a month but they would now be predominantly WFH. Unfortunately this was over a centre call rather than in written form.

They've now backtracked on this which has thrown a massive spanner in the works in terms of childcare etc

Wfh shouldn’t have a significant impact on childcare, although a lot of people appear to think it does. If you’re working full time you still need wraparound childcare. I hope my employer will clarify this, although the fact that they have imposed mostly home working on people whether they want it or not is going to make these conversations more difficult.

Oh I don't disagree that some firms will threaten I just don't agree that the majority of big firms will say no all remote working whilst their competitors are offering it. And that the majority of firms will use the fire & rehire system to tackle remote working & changing pay. We shall see though

A lot of these people are in ‘big jobs’ as well. How they have no common sense is beyond me!

What are 'big jobs?'

@igelkott2021

Not given a laptop and told to work in their bedroom for the next year

Sigh. I have said this so often on here, but working remotely during a pandemic is not at all the same as working remotely normally. You are not locked in your bedroom, there are loads of options for places to work.

I’m not allowed to work from a coffee shop or shared commercial space. I’m not allowed to work from the office without booking space for very specific reasons. Some offices are no longer available to certain employees under any circumstances, some won’t have hot desks to work at between meetings so if booked meetings aren’t consecutive you’ll need to leave the building. Many people are indeed consigned to working from their bedrooms and some of them are very unhappy about it and will leave.

What people seem to expect is that they should have complete freedom to do whatever best suits their personal circumstances and obviously this isn’t feasible. We all need to be mindful that many employers will reserve the right to change their approach as time passes and they see the impact of their decisions.

there are loads of options for places to work

Not practical ones.

Co working space costs money. Who pays? It’s not fair to ask the employee and makes no sense for an employers to pay for space without the benefits they’d get from having people in a designated office.

All the other suggestions like coffee shops and so forth are fine for the odd morning, but they aren’t work spaces, cost money too and are unsatisfactory in all kinds of ways.

I think that unless he had it in a new contract that his job would now be working from home, you would have been crazy to move miles away.

Imagine if you had already moved house and then this happened!

@TractorAndHeadphones

For all the ‘plenty of fully remote jobs’ etc I’d advise people to be quite careful. I work in tech - a sector that’s known for full remoteness even before the pandemic and was recently looking for jobs. The most highly paid ones (that weren’t very very specialised) were still London based. 2 days in the office possible but face time still needed.

Fully remote definitely comes with a lower salary from my observation.

I’m currently based in Manchester but won’t be buying a cheap house in the sticks (although we’re likely to WFH anyway). I’m basing my house buying etc plans on being able to commute into London for at most 3 days a week if needed.

Based in the NW and DH who works in the tech sector is finding the opposite problem.

He is having candidates apply on the basis that the job is (going to be) office based and every job thats being recruited for seems to be wfh only. He has had one say explicitly they need to be in the office for mental health reasons.

Dh himself has had lots of speculative recruiters come to him offering him 'fresh new opportunities' with London based firms knowing he is NW based. They are offering laughable salaries based on wfh.

Dh is desparate to go back himself and is in the first wave returning in the next couple of weeks.

His company have found wfh is useful but it has eventually found it has affected motivation and mental health after initially being productive and helpful.

@TheKeatingFive

there are loads of options for places to work

Not practical ones.

Co working space costs money. Who pays? It’s not fair to ask the employee and makes no sense for an employers to pay for space without the benefits they’d get from having people in a designated office.

All the other suggestions like coffee shops and so forth are fine for the odd morning, but they aren’t work spaces, cost money too and are unsatisfactory in all kinds of ways.

I think the idea is that you use some of the money saved from not commuting to make alternative arrangements if you don't have adequate workspace at home. After all, WFH is costing you money too, i.e. higher power consumptions, higher water usage, even needing to buy more loo rolls! By renting a desk by the hour in a shared workspace, you're saving that money and passing on the cost to the workspace provider, hence their charges!

I also think there is an issue with all this “working from home is so much more productive”- it may be for some businesses and some employees.

My experience as a customer is that this is quite often simply not the case. As a client, I have found this in many instances to not be the case. In two instances I have been regaled by the person I am in touch with as part of that contract, with how much better/more efficient etc they are due to wfh. One in particular was quite shocked when I explained that this was not our experience of their service provision. They have lost that (large) contract to a competitor now as things did not improve.

My DH’s business requires a good proportion of staff on site. There were some that could wfh and government guidance was that this had to happen. We weren’t massively keen, as we have previously had issues with flexible wfh (despite contract clauses about childcare etc- this was an issue on quite a few occasions, for instance), and even when people were working hard sometimes it just didn’t run as smoothly- but regulations meant we had little choice. We have everybody back in as before. We do believe most of our employees worked diligently from home, only one really took the proverbial and that has been addressed formally. Several did improve productivity (for different reasons), some stayed the same, some a bit worse- again for a variety of reasons. We took a flexible approach at the beginning- e.g. when schools and nurseries were closed and people advised from travelling outwith their area/having children stay with older relatives- we recognised most parents didn’t have much choice but to have their children at home if they did not qualify as essential workers. We made allowances, but also substantially rewarded those having to pick up the slack (financially, extra paid leave etc). We have several employees who want to wfh full-time and are not happy that this is not practical for us. What they seem to struggle to understand is that there are some employees who the business will bend over backwards to keep (within certain limitations), those that we will make some accommodations to keep and those that whilst they may be perfectly fine at their job, what they are asking for will cause us more problems than the benefits of satisfying their request, or are replaceable. So we may be sorry to see them go, but what they want does not work for us. You need to have a realistic idea of which of these you are before making threats to leave if demands aren’t met. Very few employees are utterly irreplaceable, in my experience- their will be some and certainly mass resignations would hit any business badly, which does need to be borne in mind, of course. But as a general rule.

It is interesting, as I expected more sympathy for the OP given how WFH threads generally go on here where any suggestion that it might not always be particularly conducive are jumped on.

I think taking the WFH aspect out of it, the problem is that there is an offer of a different sort of life and then that hope is dashed a bit and that’s always hard.

I think a lot of people have jumped the gun re moving to the idyllic countryside on the back of Covid. It is very different living and working (albeit WFH) in a rural place - especially over winter. I for one couldn't do it. If you do want to pursue this dream I would suggest you trial it for a period over winter