To think that employers will have to pay more for working in the office roles?

[MrsMarieMopps]

Following on from the poster who is annoyed she will have to come back into the office two days a week, I honestly think this argument will come up again and again.
I have never been able to work from home, apart from the odd day when I had COVID. Worked through the pandemic in an office. I am an NHS employee and need to be in the hospital even if not necessarily clinical.
My trust is now fully back to pre covid 'everyone must come in every day'. I don't disagree with this. We should be in supporting the clinical staff and patients!
This means spending on

• transport (£12 a day for me)
• parking
• childcare including wraparound and school holidays
• food which can be transported. Milk for work, butter for work etc. I was home I could just make something out of what I had at the back of the cupboards
• some have cleaners as they are out the house more.
• some gym memberships are cheaper if you can go off peak. Which I can't.
• contributions to leaving presents, maternity leave, big birthdays. These contributions are presumably are less pressured if not in person.
• sickness. There's many days when you can't pull yourself in to the office, or when you're contagious, but you probably could log in from home. I have defo noticed my friends are rarely 'calling in sick' anymore for their children or themselves but WFH instead.

So whilst I appreciate that not all jobs require an office presence, if I was a job seeker why would I choose one that's not hybrid or working from home, especially nowadays. I feel there is going to have to be some sort of reimbursement for taking on a job which requires you to make all the sacrifices in order to do it. Also can't help noticing that it is generally the lower paid who are having to keep paying all these necessary costs. We don't have people falling over themselves to do jobs in care, retail, hospitality as it is and I think this would really help with adding an incentive. Otherwise why would anyone become an NHS band 2 admin or a cook in a nursing home? Also I'm aware heating costs may be more but that's just one thing and most just put another jumper, my workplace is freezing anyway!

DH & I can wfh, we still use childcare though & still have a cleaner. I often go for a walk for a lunch & buy a sandwich plus contribute to my colleagues collections.

Obviously if no one wants to be a retail worker, carer etc salaries will increase.

@dameofdilemma I agree and it is not a race from the bottom. I am all for others working from home, from an environmental point of view especially. However the government need to thin of creative ways to get people into jobs based in a workplace.

The post about office supplies made me laugh. We haven’t been given so much as a pen since 2010! Trying to find a stapler in our office is like the hunt for the holy grail - at least at home I know where to find one!

hardly any of the parents in my daughters class are planing to use holiday clubs whilst my childcare bill for the summer is close to £1000

I don't work much during the summer & still use clubs!

So they are conning their employer by using their paid work time to save on childcare? Were their employers to need to shed staff and decided to get rid of those using worktime for their personal gain no doubt there would be hell to pay.

I get what you mean. I feel those jobs like those in healthcare, hospitality, etc need to provide incentives for people to work there as otherwise, if they are paying minimum wage and a basic call center for example pays the same but offers flexibility, people will rather do that. However, sometimes it’s supply and demand really, there’s people willing to do those jobs for the pay and that’s why employers have no incentive to increase the salary.
With regards to working from home and childcare, I understand that you need to put young children in childcare even if you’re wfh, like my younger child goes to nursery but during school holiday, but friends with older children, year 6 and above who work from home won’t necessarily need holiday care for their children really because you don’t actively need to provide care for them, just make their lunch as you’ll normally do if they go to school and most of the children just spend the day in their room on technology, etc so for them, hybrid or wfh will mean more savings for them

I'm sympathetic as a lone parent but I think those of us without that luxury should be reimbursed

the logical thing to do is get a wfh job

I work from home, I certainly don't have time to clean my house during the day, or go to the gym, I'm working, I rarely have time for lunch let alone running the hoover round

I work from home part of the week and I am the same. However, there was a thread not so long ago that showed that a surprising number people on MN working from home don’t spend their full paid working hours actually working. Not even close.

Most people don't have primary school aged children and your situation doesn't apply to many people that do. Even if working in a workplace many people managed to juggle things around so they can drop children off without using childcare. For example when my children were that age DH would drop them off at 8.45 and he'd be in work by 9:30. He would then finish at about 7:00. Many other people did the same thing.

Tax free childcare entitlement ends at 12 for children without disabilities. So presumably the government expects children of that age to not need childcare.

Mine will do one week veging at home while DH works half days, after that it’s a mix of annual leave, holiday club, the odd grandparent day. Oldest would rather be seen dead than at holiday club but can’t have them sitting around all summer!

This is why there is a recruitment crisis in many sectors (childcare; elderly care; teaching etc).

So we will have lots of people in call centres to sell us insurance or update us on our Ocado order but noone to look after our kids or elderly relatives while we work

It's because we have an ageing population & more jobs than workers.

In the winter it was costing me £1 an hour to heat my home. Had I been in the office I could have saved hundreds. As it happens my employer has cut down on office rental costs and now there aren't enough desks for all the team so WFH is a must.

Different jobs, come with different perks though. Some give away free gym memberships, some free food, some brewery jobs give you free beer - do you think you should get reimbursed for those luxuries too?

If you want a particular perk, then find a job that offers it.

My DC is desperate to get a part time hospitality job at the moment. On third round of sending out CV and has contacted 30+ places, all advertising for staff. Can’t get anywhere because despite years of volunteering and a nicely done CV etc, doesn’t have experience and no one seems to want to do any training (despite most of the adverts claiming experience not necessary). The rates of pay most places are offering don’t look much less than my current home based public sector office job however and I do have experience so am wondering if I should have a go instead.

So it doesn’t look to me like places need to offer more to entice people to work for them, it looks like they must be getting the balance right.

Your list highlights exactly why employers want people to go the the office. Nobody should be doing childcare, school pickup, going to the gym, or cleaning during the work day.
Travel costs are additional, but could be offset by not having to heat the house. You can take a packed lunch if that's a big cost for you.

I'm sympathetic as a lone parent but I think those of us without that luxury should be reimbursed.

What about people who don’t have children should they be paid less because they don’t have childcare costs, or get the same higher salary because they’re in an office.

Its cheaper for me to work from home, but not because I’m saving on childcare.

It doesn't mean that people who work at home do those things though. OP thinks they do but she doesn't work from home so doesn't really know. I'm sure some people took the piss during the pandemic but those that work home now generally only do so because they get stuff done.

People have always gone to the gym in the working day, doing so on your lunch break while WFH is no different. Nobody’s suggesting people are doing it while claiming to be at work. Ditto cleaning my loo or hanging up washing - I clock out, do the task, clock back in. I free up time when kids are home that would otherwise be spent doing these tasks. Employers are doing to have to get used to the mindset shift that many people want to work to live now, not live to work. The post above about a parent working until 7 to account for a school drop off and then commute is a perfect example of what many people aren’t willing to accept any more - a modicum of flexibility breeds a better work/life balance, happier employees, greater retention.

Erm because they like looking after people and they’d get more job satisfaction out of it compared to answering calls from shitty members of the privileged society.

I live about 5 minutes from my children’s school but half an hour from work. Working from home would save me almost £600 a month in wraparound care.

It was much worse for us to work from home as we lived very locally to work and didn't really have any extras to pay, I took early retirement after enduring a month of it and it also meant that 2 spare rooms in our house would have been took up for workplace offices. As it was it was just for a year as DH retired also, he had had enough but it would have been horrific if we had been younger and couldn't retire.

@Mumtothreegirlies I am that sort of person but there isn't much longer that I can do it whilst paying so many extra costs, costs which not all of society are having to pay. Generally, on MN, these people are already in better paid jobs so it's just widening the pay divide.

Nor really, no. If the job requires presence on site or in an office then that's that. And it doesn't matter whether individually people feel they can work better from home, because it is up to the business leaders to balance that with team morale, wellbeing, collaboration etc.

All those expenses you listed are laughable too. You need childcare when you're working, wherever you're working from. If you "need" a cleaner, you need it irrespective of whether you're working from home, the office or the moon. You can choose what food you take into the office. You choose whether you contribute to collections or not. You still wouldn't be able to use the gym off peak because you're working!

Senior people won’t be fully working from home as that’s not where the action is, and they won’t be hiring fully remote people for senior strategic jobs because they don’t hit it out of the stadium that way. The flexibility to do a few days from home is amazing but won’t ever be fully home based on my experience. I was just at drinks saying while the future is hybrid, and we do 2 days a week in the office mostly, if I had a few junior staff I’d want 3 days in the office a week so they aren’t missing the development opportunity it offers.