Has anyone refused to go back into the office?

[GreenPepperRed]

Just that really. Have a job that can easily be done working from home. Company is now saying compulsory 3 days in the office. Has anyone just not gone in and carried on working from home? How did that turn out?

The majority of my department is insisting they are not going in. Can confirm they are serious because I went in to the office a couple days back and there was probably 10% of the people in.

Intrigued what my company will do. Fire us all?

@Notyourtypicalvirgo I have post graduate qualifications in applied economics (not just a “business” degree) & work in the same so yeah, if we’re playing university top trumps I’m probably good love

Email is shown to decrease productivity for individual workers - reading email is rarely a productive activity, hence the move to Slack etc.

If output = productivity and technology has enabled this so greatly, why has the UK’s productivity declined since 2008?

Told my boss last year I wasn't having a vaccine and that made me fully remote.

[quote Porridgeislife]@Notyourtypicalvirgo I have post graduate qualifications in applied economics (not just a “business” degree) & work in the same so yeah, if we’re playing university top trumps I’m probably good love

Email is shown to decrease productivity for individual workers - reading email is rarely a productive activity, hence the move to Slack etc.

If output = productivity and technology has enabled this so greatly, why has the UK’s productivity declined since 2008?[/quote]
why has the UK’s productivity declined since 2008?

This is due to low investment and overworking of workers coupled with employing too few.

Email is shown to decrease productivity for individual workers - reading email is rarely a productive activity, hence the move to Slack etc.

I'd love to see the working out for this. In every company I've worked at Slack/Teams etc is used in addition to e-mail so any productivity benefits are highly questionable.

@crispmidnightpeace

Told my boss last year I wasn't having a vaccine and that made me fully remote.

Whether you have or have not had the vaccinations does not determine whether you can work from home. It is decided by your employer and contact of employment.

@GirlInACountrySong

I thought WFH ended?

Well many places have adopted a hybrid approach since restrictions lifted. Some because of insurance who will ask you still take precautions. Some because it makes more sense; people are more productive, can take meaningful breaks, eat better food, cut out travel which can be exhausting and stressful. It's part of the move into the fourth industrial revolution things are going more remote in general.

@catgirl1976

It’s interesting

We are back in 3 / 4 days a week so I’m looking for another job as there is no justifiable reason. My role can be down (and has been done) perfectly well remotely

A blanket “you must be back in the office x days a week” runs the risk of indirect sex discrimination imo. However that’s not a fight I can be arsed to have so I’ll just get another job and vote with my feet as will my colleagues

I'm with you. I looked for remote gigs when this began to supplement my wage and now I have a few income streams that can all be done from home. I'm done with traveling for work.

I'm civil service and officially all office-based staff are now "hybrid" which means minimum 60% of your time in the office and up to 40% at home.

We have a workforce where a good third or so of the staff have to travel all over the country visiting sites, and otherwise are home based. And then a fair chunk of the office-based staff had formal arrangements to work remotely from home some of the time - on my team half did just one or two days in the office a week. They've now banned that, you can't ask anymore.

So it seems a bit ridiculous that a minority of employees are subject to the minimum 60% requirement. Created a two-tier system, where a colleague doing the same job gets to come in one day a week while I have to come in three days a week. Ostensibly because of all the thrilling benefits of being in the office! Where often I'm the only one on the team in, so I sit by myself on Teams meetings all day and speak to no one in person...

With the ever rising price of fuel and current pollution & congestion, everyone who can , should wfh

@Whammyyammy

With the ever rising price of fuel and current pollution & congestion, everyone who can , should wfh

Well I can but I don't intend to as I'm fed up with feeling as though I'm living in my office as I have to work in the dining room.

@Whammyyammy

With the ever rising price of fuel and current pollution & congestion, everyone who can , should wfh

How are you offsetting the fuel they use heating their houses?

I got a new job and negotiated a home based contract because I loved WFH and it suits me as a disabled person too.

@QuirkyTurtle

I'm a manager myself and I couldn't care less if my team pop out to do school pickups, the work still gets done and I'm personally not paying them out of my own pocket.

@Notyourtypicalvirgo - I agree with this. I schedule my mandatory meetings between 10am and 3pm. Couldn't care less if you do nursery / school runs during the work day. Don't even care if people aren't 'making up the time' in the evenings.

I'll go even further and say, as long as my team gets their work done, I don't give a crap how many hours they are working. Some people in my team are better at their jobs than others. I'm not going to have them sit behind their laptops for an extra hour a day because they NEED to be working 40 hours. What a waste of life.

The problem is that the half that aren't doing the school run want a lunch break. So if I can only schedule meetings 10-12 and 2-3 to accommodate everyone, I very quickly run out of hours to get stuff sorted

If you are contracted to work between 3 and 5 you should not be doing it if half your attention is on your children - those of us that pay for wrap around care deserve your full attention on the tasks that need doing. I don't need them doing in the evenings, I need you present and contributing to meetings

If you don’t return… how will you train new colleagues? How will you help junior colleagues have a sense of team? How will you experience any org wide knowledge sharing? I think many people need to move from ‘I’ to ‘we’ again. If you don’t want to be part of something, work for yourself or find yourself an entirely remote role, but don’t take advantage of your social contract with your employer

This. Some people are forgetting they are part of a team. There is more to their jobs than their day to day work.

No way I'm going back. Job can be done wfh. Most of clients are not even in the city I work in. Commute is awful, we have small kids. Wfh is here to stay.

If you don’t return… how will you train new colleagues? How will you help junior colleagues have a sense of team? How will you experience any org wide knowledge sharing?

^

I started a new job wfh and experienced problems with all of the above. Did my boss/colleagues care? Not really. Did I survive? Yes.

The benefits outweigh the cons with wfh.

[quote Porridgeislife]@Notyourtypicalvirgo I have post graduate qualifications in applied economics (not just a “business” degree) & work in the same so yeah, if we’re playing university top trumps I’m probably good love

Email is shown to decrease productivity for individual workers - reading email is rarely a productive activity, hence the move to Slack etc.

If output = productivity and technology has enabled this so greatly, why has the UK’s productivity declined since 2008?[/quote]
I mentioned my degree because you tried to insult my intelligence babe and I had to reassure you that you aren't talking to someone who hasn't had some form of education in this sector

Productivity dropping since 2008 isn't at all related to the point I made and you know this, just drawing up a straw man to give yourself some kind of weird validation. I made a point about how much more is produced with technological advancement since the 70s and it's literally the whole reasoning why some companies are now moving to a 4 day work week, it improves productivity in the hours worked and we do not need to work 40 hours anymore to produce the same output that we did decades ago.

Either we work less hours or we're paid more.....simple, what we're experiencing now with pay flatlining and hours increasing is nothing short of theft from the average worker. Anyone who disagrees with that quite frankly isn't someone that has the interest of their fellow humans at heart.

We're finally moving to a model which is flexible for people to have a work life balance and it's long overdue. Move with the times or jog on as far as I'm concerned.

No compulsion to come back to my office and yet most people are back for 2-3 days a week. The buzzy office vibe is back, except on Friday which seems to be WFH for nearly everyone.

Thank you!

It's a huge problem for junior staff. WFH just doesn't allow for the same organic learning and sharing of knowledge.

Sorry @nothingiswrong but that sounds like a scheduling problem on your part and an unwillingness to be flexible. If you're spending every hour of work in meetings I could potentially see your point (and I mean if that's the case you have bigger issues because there's clearly no time for deliverables).

On my team, we schedule the bulk of our meetings between 10am -3pm and then again between 4-5pm. People who want a lunch break should be adults about it and take their lunch break when they have the time to rather than merely when they want to.

I think we can all agree that child safeguarding is more important than when we all fancy a lunch break and it's a fact of life. I definitely agree with paying for wrap around childcare if you have very young children as not giving them your full attention is a safety issue, but in my case my eldest is 9. Once I pick him up from school he's usually distracted by the PlayStation or doing his homework which means I'm able to log back on at 3.45pm and focus for the rest of my afternoon. It made no sense for either me or my staff pre pandemic to pay for after school childcare for kids this age, it's a waste of money when working from home is always a viable option.

There are 8-9 hours in the work day....if someone doing the school run for less than an hour of one of them causes that much of an issue then again I'll say that's a you problem and the poor parents shouldn't be lambasted for that when everyone is trying to do the best they can both in their jobs and for their families.

As for you not liking people working in the evening....again, I think you need to get over that personally and start thinking more creatively in terms of scheduling. Employees with more autonomy in the way they work have been proven to be happier and less likely to move.

@Puzzledandpissedoff

Unpopular37 on MN the "sex discrimination" is a bit of a knee jerk pattern amongst those who haven't got what they want On WFH it tends to start with the dinosaur/luddite insults, work its way through "contact the union/Acas", and then discrimination's tossed around in the hope that something - anything - will stick

Obviously these fallbacks are important and sometimes genuinely needed, but not necessarily because something just doesn't suit

😀

@TimeToMakeACupofTea

No compulsion to come back to my office and yet most people are back for 2-3 days a week. The buzzy office vibe is back, except on Friday which seems to be WFH for nearly everyone.

Yes I think that’s fairly common. 2/3 days in the office is what most of my colleagues said they wanted last time they asked us. A few don’t want to/can’t do any days WFH, and a few would prefer to WFH forever but also appreciate that’s not going to happen and aren’t sulking about it. (And probably a few people who like WFH are now quietly looking for a WFH job without making a big fuss out of it, fair enough and good luck to them.)

What I find interesting at my work is that there’s a small but vocal group of people who don’t want to go back at all and don’t think they should have to, who also think they’re speaking for the majority. And who do things like emailing the whole department of several dozen people to rant to us about how unfair it is, in a way that comes off as totally clueless.

It started off when work started making plans to get people back in, and there was this flurry of some people being really shocked because they assumed WFH was permanent, or that ‘hybrid’ meant ‘for everyone but you, Dave in Legal’ or whatever.

It’s like pandemic WFH has mentally isolated some people to a point where they don’t have much insight at all into what their colleagues think, or what’s happening outside their own four walls, or how they’re coming across when they take up other people’s time with “I prefer sitting out in the garden first thing in the morning not sitting on a busy train” (lovely for you, Dave, but why are you emailing us all to tell us that?)

@Notyourtypicalvirgo what you're saying is that people who want lunch breaks, which they are entitled to, should be adults and take them when it's convenient for you.

I don't have children but why should I be forced to take my lunch break so someone can pick up their kid? Of course I'll do it to help out occasionally but not because someone expects me to.

Do you need to have a meeting every single day at noon? Or are you just finding problems where there aren't any for the sake of the argument? No grown adult will be bothered if once a week they need to take their lunch break at 1 instead of noon.

I'm a manager. I speak to my team and ask for their input. The general consensus was meetings between 10 and 3. Talk to your team instead of coming up with hypothetical scenarios on Mumsnet.