To find it annoying when people moan about being in the office?

[justfliptheswitch]

Pre covid I was in an office 5 days a week. Since returning it’s been 2 days.

I think this is a great balance. But I’ve had two colleagues moan about childcare and that they shouldn’t have to come etc and for the last year they’ve got away with doing one day but now have to do the same as everyone else … like how did they cope before when it was 5 days?!

No I’m not half arsing either I catch up when kids are at nursery and after bed, not a single email gets by me without a response so infact I’m working twice as hard! I also get up at 5am to do my housework.

But my point in my comment to the thread was because it suited people fine when we could work remotely without childcare even as a option! And now it is back being a option people are pissed off that it absolutely can be done!

It’s like people are thinking well I struggled with paying my childcare and had to drag myself to the office so it’s not fair! Wrong. What’s not fair is if you can competently do a good job from home and it’s easily done from home why not?

Fwiw I had massive childcare expenses for years with my eldest 3 now 16,13 and 11 but I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone the dropping off the stress of getting to work on time once your in peak school run, already penalised for being a working mum and needing time off for sick kids etc the traffic trying desperately to try and make it into town it was horribly stressful.

People believe they have proved they can do their job just as effectively without going into the office, so resent what they see as a pointless management instruction that doesn't improve their performance and makes their life harder than it need be. In some cases they're right.
In other cases they're failing to take into consideration other priorities for managers, such as team cohesion, the ability for junior colleagues to learn from being around more experienced people, the fact that some colleagues benefit from the interaction and can only interact if other people are present too and the possibility of a lack of shared opinion between themselves and the managers as to the quality of their performance.

the fact that some colleagues benefit from the interaction and can only interact if other people are present too
we are not babysitters, there's Team etc, and many options to interact while at home. I interact more with my team when I am at home than when I am trying to avoid people in the office because I want to get on with things but I am interrupted all the time.

It's reasonable to give everyone a chance to meet in person regularly, but it doesn't have dragging everyone back in the office for no reason other than someone needing a social life.

and the possibility of a lack of shared opinion between themselves and the managers as to the quality of their performance.
that's a bad manager, if they can't point out they have a problem with the quality of the performance, they are not managing properly.

Depends on the role and industry. In some places being around more experienced colleagues, watching how they handle the job asking the odd quick question you wouldn't bother requesting a teams meeting for, is part of the learning culture that the experienced colleagues themselves will have benefitted from in their earlier career. Not very team minded then to call it babysitting and pull up the ladder behind them.
And why would you suppose that managers haven't said that performance is improved by being office based? Many say exactly that but still get push back from staff insisting otherwise.
Managers have to take a wider view of performance than merely considering whether Emma meets her targets at home. Their concern will typically be for the performance of the team as a whole, which will usually be prioritised over any individual preference.

This is true: the benefits of working in an office are very asymmetrical. For younger people learning the ropes working collaboratively is really helpful for learning and obviously they get a fair amount of social benefit.

For an older and more established person and particularly one with children and families for whom socialising at work is usually an irrelevance, it’s irritating to have to build all this social stuff in because it’s not necessary and makes it much harder to work. If you have a lot of large written projects as I do, having to constantly break your day off with brainstorm sessions and coffee meetings is a distraction. I’d much rather power through in the quiet of my home office than try to do it at work where I will be interrupted five times in a half hour.

I actually believe it’s very important to have the social factor and the mentoring that comes with being together physically so I am very happy to go in 2-3 days a week to help support this and happy to support people who need it at the cost of my own ability to work. That’s part of being in a company.

But I do resent the micromanagement that often goes with this and the idea that I need to justify time at home. I am a competent adult and have been promoted multiple times at my company so I shouldn’t need to be checked on. And I dislike the assumption that because I am wfh I am less productive and need to have tabs kept on me. The reverse is true and I find it infantilising and silly.

And why would you suppose that managers haven't said that performance is improved by being office based? Many say exactly that but still get push back from staff insisting otherwise.

Their job is not to say things and express an opinion, their job is to manage! Since when do you let the staff work all over you? If you recruit someone and the contract specifically states they will WFH but it's working out, it's your mistake. If it states, like most do, that it's based on business needs and you NEED them in the office, then you .. let them know when to come in?

If you tell your staff that they need to be in the office 9am to 5pm because they need to be, you don't listen to someone moaning they would prefer to 11am to 7pm and let them choose . 😂
It might be ok for an accountant depending on exact role, but your receptionist, as lovely as they might be, doesn't get flexible hours, because you need someone during office hours. If a client meeting is booked at 8:30 am, the staff is there at 8am latest.

This is where the question of staff power comes in. Some employees are in a much better position to enforce their own choice of working conditions than others. Leaving aside obviously impossible situations like remote receptionists, it really depends how easy you are to replace.

So I wouldn't necessarily assume a manager who isn't trying to put their foot down about place of work is doing it wrong. Some of them will be doing so in the awareness that they can't assume they'll be able to get someone suitably qualified at the rate they want to pay and willing to do the job in person. It really depends. The fact that a manager thinks, correctly or otherwise, that it would be better for the organisation to have staff fully or partially in the office doesn't actually mean it's a realistic possibility.

Yep. I think people need to start seeing the COVID years as a blip, and not the start of the 'new normal'. I have colleagues that claim they can't afford to travel in, so come in less than we've been told to - but yet are going on holiday, buying new clothes, all things that I can't afford to do. Since when was travelling to work not a priority cost?

That's fine if you decide you don't want to commute but get a job nearer home, move nearer work, or get a job that is fully remote.

I think we've all had enough time to recover and readjust and now people need to sort their lives out and get back to 'normal' (which for most places won't actually be 5 days again anyway!).

And people not using after school clubs / childminders as well to save costs (and at the same time spending money elsewhere). I think it's awful that's it's become so common to collect kids from school and put them in front of the TV for 2hrs every day. Once a while fair enough, but every week?!

Also having the laptop on in the background and responding to emails as needed isn't really working to full capacity..

My DH still works from home five days a week, not all employers are wanting their employees back in the offices if the job can be done just as well at home.

If my wages matched the increase in travel costs and the cost of living in general, then I would be happy going in more, but they haven't so I resent spending a greater portion of my salary travelling to work than it cost pre-covid. My personal opinion is that is that I was willing and happy to work from home during covid so my employers should be willing and happy for me to carry on doing so (luckily for me they are!). I understand this doesn't work for all jobs though - mine is not public facing or a location dependent manual one.

Yep. I think people need to start seeing the COVID years as a blip, and not the start of the 'new normal'.

Best of luck with that one.

I am a freelance tutor, one day from home one day in the office. I am looking for at least one more day, but I would be very reluctant to accept another job outside of home. I do not miss the office at all. I am an introverted person, I have a 'face doesn't fit' situation in offices and have been bullied out of most (employed/PAYE) jobs I have had. I remember how exhausted I was, how overwhelmed I felt, how I found life/work balance impossible. I'd be straight in bed as soon as I got home-and on my day 'in' I still often am! I would honestly rather be skint than go back to working fulltime/almost fulltime in an office-or at least if I was offered a job like that it'd have to be for MEGA £££££ for me to even consider it. Sorry OP!

Hybrid seems to work well, and to my mind 2 days in the office works best.

Thing is it taught us some things, and this is one of them.

Its also a result of properly prices and interest rates pricing people out of living in city centres etc within easy commenting distance of work.

That touches on a really important point: covid and lockdown accelerated and built on changes that were happening already.

Part of it is housing, as you say. Then there's also the fact that remote working was already on the increase, and had been for years. Lockdown obviously made this spiral overnight, but it's a phenomenon that was already well established. Part of this is the civil service reforms in the 2010s- compulsory wfh for some of the week means less office space needed.

Scroll down to no 2 on this link which has figures for homeworking amongst employed people in 2019

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/coronavirusandhomeworkingintheuklabourmarket/2019

1.7 million people worked mainly from home and 4 million had done so in the last week, when surveyed in 2019. 8.7 million had done at some point. Figure 2 shows it was on the increase between 2015 and 2019. Bear in mind as well that of the 32 million employed people in 2019, loads will have been in roles that can't be done remotely. The 4 million who'd done it in the last week are going to represent a significant minority of people who had laptop type jobs.

Clearly hybrid working is here to stay (as someone else mentioned it was going that way anyway).

Not suggesting it will go back to 5 days a week as standard. But when offices are asking people to come in 2 days a week for whatever reason I think they should prioritise travel costs above going on holiday/ buying new clothes etc.

As much as we coped being all WFH in the short term there are definite advantages to being in the office in person for the majority of jobs.

People thought the 'new normal' would be everyone wearing masks all the time, social distancing everywhere etc - yeh, best of luck with that one, it pretty much all dropped off shortly after the vaccines had been rolled out thank god!

Your last paragraph is a massive generalisation that you can't possibly back up, because nobody could.

But even assuming for the sake of argument that it's correct, not only do people clearly not 'need' to start seeing the covid years as a blip, they won't. It's not happening. We've had a massive societal shift. Genies like that do not go back into bottles. Particularly not when there's a genie shortage in society generally and lots of them know full well that if their current employer tries to insist they do, they can get another one easily. As I said upthread, the fact that an employer thinks their workers are better fully or partially in the office doesn't mean they're going to be able to enforce that.

If you want a comparison with masks and social distancing, notice that people stopped doing those when they didn't have to. They had the choice, and they did what they wanted. It's the same with the increase in remote working. The working public are about as responsive to people's vague general principles about them 'needing' to work in the office more as they have been to covid era restrictions once they became voluntary.

I used to work from home pre covid and it certainly helped to avoid having to pay for wrap-around care or as much holiday cover when ds was younger.

Nowadays I work from home, and go into the office once a week, sometimes a bit less often. I don't go in unless there's actually a reason to like a face to face meeting. Fortunately my employer realises we are adults and can make our own decisions about where we can work most efficiently. Most go in two days a week, sometimes three if they are supervising someone.

Making people travel unnecessarily seems to be completely contrary to responsible business policies too. More employers need to walk the talk on that, as far as I am concerned.

Maybe people don't need to always be working to full capacity. Plenty of studies show that you can only really do about four hours of intense work each day anyway.

Of course not working to capacity 100% of the time. But I think a lot of people are not doing anywhere near '4hrs of intense work per day'. And building in 2/3hrs every day where you're half working half looking after children after school I personally think is unfair to both employer and child.

All jobs are different obviously, but I'm general people starting out in their careers / young people / people new to the company benefit from people being in the office to learn from, not get isolated, develop the team and ethos etc.