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!

not everybody wants to work at home doing admin work for insurance companies or any company for that matter. I personally couldn’t think of a more boring way to spend my life to be honest.
there are millions of people up and down the country leaving their house at all hours to work elsewhere and not because they can’t get a job wfh for an insurance company but because they CHOOSE to work in jobs out of the home.
if you go on indeed for every hospitality job applied for there’ll be 500-600 other applicants, same for nursing homes, zoos, shops etc

I found it the absolutely worse experience, stuck in the spare bedroom all day.

What's the business justification for your proposed reimbursement?

That is just you though. Not everyone with children needs to use more wrap around care because they work in an office vs. working from home and not everyone has children of primary school age in the first place.

I agree but isn’t that life in general. The richer have always had access to a better deal.
I came from nothing so I really had to start from the bottom in life which meant I got into debt with council tax and had to spend years rebuilding my credit. Whereas friends of mine who came from wealthier families had their education paid for, weddings, house deposits and never had to get into debt for mandatory bills, or need to fork out for childcare as their parents retired earlier then mine did.

I do think the government need to get in touch with real society and think of a better way to ease the col crisis such as building thousands more actual affordable homes,
cheaper and more efficient public transport etc.
I think if those that can’t afford a mortgage easily could get a truly cheap home then it would have a positive knock on effect in every aspect of their lives. And by cheap I mean £100 a week max.

Nobody reimbursed me for DH having to use a room in the house that could have been used for other things

Incentives do need to be given to get people into jobs such as grade 2 admin/ cook as you said. Or yes we will end up with people not willing/ wanting to work in those areas. I would be a believer that the market would work itself out though.

I wfh, because of where I live it is a God send unless I was willing to commute 2hrs each way daily I couldn't have this sort of job. But I do still pay child care. Even the other day someone said 'that's great you WFH, no childcare cost' I would not be able to do my job! Although I can see that can be different for someone with older children who just need an adult in the house when they come home from school. Not to be looked after necessarily

If having to allocate a room in your house is an inconvenience to you, try getting real problems and think yourself lucky that you have a spare room. When my husband wfh years ago he had a corner of the living room in our 2 bed house.

Fair enough. No point trying to contribute to a discussion unless your situation applies to everyone I guess!

With the exception of picking children up early from childcare and potentially paying less for it (a benefit which applies to a relatively small number of the working population) most of the benefits you mention only apply to people who take the piss. Perhaps you should ask your employer if they would pay you more because you can't skive off as you would do if you worked from home and being at work means you are forced to do your job.

I disagree on the specifics.

I also think that it comes down to proper operational planning, and leadership getting off their arse and working it out. It's been three years, work out a system and stand firm on it, don't fanny about chivvying things along.

FWIW, my own implementation of hybrid was to cut our office costs by 4/5 to the minimum office and facilities required, to mandate whole team fortnightly attendance in office for two days together (food provided), and to allow free and flexible agreement between staff for F2F work on other days. A weekly Teams stand up on the "home" week. And a one off set up costs plus annual home working allowance. It definitely cost less to have people in office all the time.

What happened was that the shared fortnightly time ensured that all projects had regular feedback, good team socialising, better attendance, and due to the synchronised working, we all planned plenty of F2F time in smaller groups as needed.

(side note: I make a lot more mess by being in my house for 20h a day and 3 meals, so the cleaner one is batshit)

I hate working from home. I much prefer to be in the office, for the social side if nothing else.

What about if it were for £300 less, though? As places will reduce what is paid to those WFH, rather than award extra to those coming in.

If you are working from home and not using child care during your working hours, you are probably short changing both your employer and your child, depending on age. Using child care should be no different if you work from home or commute. The only caveat would be if you choose to complete your hours when the children are in bed asleep, but that’s not going to be possible in many roles.

@supersonicginandtonic but would you rather commute and be in the office or workplace every working day?

I just worry about where nurses, teachers, TAs, speech therapists, those who work for autism and learning difficulties teams are going to come from. It effects my life as a parent to a SN child and with elderly relatives who might need carers. We have to make these jobs more appealing.

Your examples don't stack up. WFH doesn't mean you are at the gym, cleaning your house or looking after your kids. If you are then your employer should be pulling you up on this. Generally the lack of productivity will be noticeable if this is what you are doing at home instead of working.
Yes it does save some time/ money on commuting which would have the knock on effect of making your child care costs a bit lower if you are able to collect them earlier due to the reduced commute. Although my nursery will charge me until 6pm regardless of what time I collect them. And there are additional costs associated with heating and power working from home, so this would need to be balanced out.
I see your point to an extent, but not to the extent you have made it out to be.
And obviously some people will work outside of the home because the industry or type of work they like doing requires them to, some people would find WFH for a call centre or doing admin very boring and wouldn't do it just for the benefits alone.
I do think that some types of work ( mainly to do with caring) are undervalued and should be paid better , although not necessarily because you have to work outside of the home to do them.

Loads of people go to the gym or for a run when working at an office - in fact many workplaces have gyms, pools, running clubs etc.

The main problem with WFH I find is too many meetings. It is possible to be in back to back meetings from 8-6 with no break, whereas in the olden days when we might have had to travel between venues for meetings there were natural breaks built into the day, or you declined. We’ve tried to mandate starting meetings just after the hour and ending them just before but inevitably people still feel bound to stay until the hour is up. We also miss those adhoc discussions that happens in a physical room once the meeting has ended - it’s much harder to ask someone to hang on for 5 minutes on a Teams call just as everyone is logging off.

But the benefits still outweigh those downsides for me. Our office is not set up for working well - no second screens, no docking stations, no keyboards or mice, no canteen, limited meeting spaces. It is not a nice place to be, and is almost impossible to do focused work there where you need quiet and no interruptions, whereas at home I can do that with ease.

I WFH permanently and so does my DH, this saves us both 6 hours a week commuting. As a family this 12 hours makes a massive difference to our work life balance. I would never want to go back to an office based job.

OP's point is that employers will need to pay more to attract people who can't work from home because everyone working from home from home saves so much money. If working from home only benefits a relatively small number of people financially that won't be the case.

My DH works from home, I'm a classroom assistant so I'm off but my kids are 10 and 12 so too young to be left alone but old enough to be in the house with an adult upstairs. I don't however agree that people should take the mick with childcare, cleaning, going to the gym etc on working hours.

I’m pretty sure the OP meant there is more time to do things like cleaning or going to the gym if you WFH - as in before work and after when you would normally be commuting. Or sticking a load on during lunch and hanging it up on a screen break - that sort of thing.

I WFH four days and that gives me an extra 8-10 hours of extra time to exercise and do other tasks before and after work that I would spend in the car commuting otherwise. I don’t like stick Teams into away and do a yoga workout at 3pm! I do it during commuting times around my full days hours.

Because not everyone wants to do call centre work?