To hate the Daily Mail and its anti WFH vendetta

[catsliketowearsocks]

There is yet another DM story doing the rounds today about people 'working from beach'. Apparently it's council worker this time rather than civil servants. I work for a council and we would not be able to live abroad as we have impromptu office meetings, but even if we wanted to for the short term (like, for a family emergency or flight issues) we would have to apply for permission due to cybersecurity rules.

The DM would like to ban WFH which is just nasty. There may be a small number who take the piss but I don't believe that's the norm. WFH has vastly improved my life and mental health.

I'm willing to bet many DM journalists work remotely.

Everyone complaining about evil Tories and capitalist landlords does know that some of the biggest investors in UK commercial property are pension funds, right? So it's not just a handful of wealthy individuals who would be affected by a collapse in office rents & values, it's millions of normal people.

That's total crap. A huge increase in wait times is caused by companies unable to hire cheap EU staff, putting pressure on recruitment across the board. The Eastern European lorry drivers that propped up our haulage industry have gone home, meaning that hauliers are incentivising Brits to get LGV licences, putting pressure on other industries.

Cost of living crisis means that more civil servants are striking or working to rule to improve their pay, my dad waited months for his driving licence review because of that, not because of WFH.

Cost of living crisis, especially costs of childcare and the cost of the "shortcuts" (e.g. ready meals, ironing services) used to make working parents' lives bearable, means that it can be more cost-effective to be a single income family, removing (usually female) people from the workforce, again causing recruitment struggle.

Increased red tape after Brexit means that some of the staff that used to answer the phones are now filling export paperwork.

Staff can be monitored just as well at home as at work. Call centre staff are monitored by the same software on their PCs that they use to log the calls. The PC being at home doesn't affect that. Same goes for data entry staff.

People can’t ask their manager questions

I can ask my manager any question I like from my home office, and if his Teams status is busy then I can ask his boss or the whole of the rest of my team simultaneously. And the great thing is that I don't have people shouting questions across the open plan office any more when I'm on the phone to someone. I don't have people holding stand-up meetings next to my desk. In programming, systems administration, and other work that requires deep concentration, WFH is a godsend.

Again speaking from experience of WFH for over a decade - it also enabled my social life to blossom.

When I worked in an office, I didn't really click or make friends with my colleagues. Partly I wanted to keep work and play separate, partly because my focus was always on my actual work and partly because the pressure of being "on" all the time frankly left me exhausted. Too exhausted to do much more than go back to my flat and collapse on the sofa all evening.

When I started to WFH, I had so much more energy now that I didn't have to commute, didn't have to manage small talk around work, got to work to my own schedule. That was a lot more energy to actually get out into the real world, meet people, make friends, all the things you're saying. I wasn't on the sad little hamster wheel of home-commute-office-commute-home-sleep-repeat any more.

I don't really recognise the value in the little gestures and facial expressions you mention either. Not to say other people don't find value in them but in a professional context I prefer to have clear communication, preferably in writing, without having to overthink and analyse every little gesture someone makes - I've never been good at that. Maybe this is because I communicate better in writing than face-to-face but that's not unusual, there are plenty of young workers like this and as I said, this type of talented young person was often overlooked before in favour of the loud, blustery types.

Oh, so basically today's workers are propping up today's retirees? And tomorrow's workers likewise with today's workers?

That's what you get for making your pension system a Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable and it might as well break this decade than next. At least I can plan for the consequences if it breaks sooner.

I will respond more politely this time.

I voted for Corbyn, so did my 78 and 93 year old next door neighbours.

I don't rant about any of the things your grandparents and parents do (and plenty of younger people do too if you bother to take note). All over 50s are not the same. All people born between 1946 and 1964 are not the same.

@Goldmember

Retired people do tend to be more susceptible to it as they are the ones who will buy their paper as part of their routine and absorb every word. It's often their only link to the wider world if they are not mixing with working people or kids

This is horrifically offensive, not to say ageist. I'm retired now - and shock, horror, retired at 59! - and I lead a very full, active life in which I mix with all manner of different people. I still manage to use my critical faculties when I'm reading the paper or watching the news.

@gannett I'm not being argumentative, I promise, but I don't understand how you can genuinely not understand the value of in-person interaction?

Presumably most of the people here claiming that working in complete isolation is absolutely fine wouldn't want to conduct their marriages, relationships with their children and/or friends via Teams meetings only?

In which case you understand the value of human interaction versus that which takes place on a screen. The previous poster who said that life was moving increasingly online isn't wrong, but if human interaction has any value, then it has value at work in a different but related way to the way in which it has value for family and friends.

You simply cannot build the same relationships, trust, contacts, network via screens and emails as you can through in-person meetings. I won't give details from my own profession, as it will out me, but I'm sure the same principle is true in most professions.

As so often happens on Mumsnet, this conversation has become really polarised in a way that it shouldn't. Flexibility, hybrid working, moving with the times, some WFH time... all of these things are important. But so is in-person interaction and so (for most people, leaving aside extreme disabilities) is leaving your house occasionally to do some work.

And also... as a previous poster said... the idea that evil capitalist landlords are the only people who pay the economic price if city centres collapse - that's very naive.

@cathyj77 You simply cannot build the same relationships, trust, contacts, network via screens and emails as you can through in-person meetings. I won't give details from my own profession, as it will out me, but I'm sure the same principle is true in most professions.

You can. I did.

I built a career from scratch in the late '00s, doing most of my networking online. Was pretty successful. Now work for an international company where I've never met some of my team (because they're not based in the UK), and those I have met have only been a handful of times. I have a much better and easier relationship with them based on both professional and casual daily online chat than I ever did with some of the colleagues I sat next to in an office for years.

I would also note that online networking enabled me to work for clients around the world and take my career to a level that office-based London work wouldn't have.

I'm not saying actually meeting people has no value. I'm just saying that some people, like me, find it easier to build relationships and rapport via text than in person. That rapport then becomes the foundation of a real-life professional or social relationship. Would I want to WFH with the prospect of never meeting colleagues IRL? No, but that's not what I was arguing. Does WFH prevent mentoring, rapport, strong relationships in the workplace and good career progression? No, not in my experience.

Of course this highly depends on what your job actually is. This is just my perspective from my particular role in my particular industry. I can 100% say that I wouldn't have been nearly as successful had I been forced into an office every day - as I said, the sheer frazzled exhaustion I felt on a daily basis in an office negated every single one of the putative benefits. I didn't talk to my colleagues, got out of post-work drinks wherever possible, felt vaguely annoyed at them 90% of the time and haven't even kept in touch with a single one. Most of the contacts I built up online, even those I haven't worked with for years - they're still there and we can banter about all the things we used to, even if I've still never met them.

Yep that makes sense @gannett - it clearly is very industry dependent, then. It would be impossible in my industry - we have loads of flexibility and even did pre-Covid (I worked both part-time and flexibly when the kids were younger) but I couldn't have got to the role I'm in now without significant in-office time.

A large amount of my job is meetings - often about quite difficult issues. When it was 100% online during lockdown it was utterly exhausting. I struggle to read body language on Teams. I used to log off at 6pm utterly mentally wiped out.

I used to work with a woman who ordered her grocery shopping instead of working.

And another who spent every morning from 9 - 12 ranting about how much work she had to do - and everything else under the sun. The rest of the office used to sit in silence while she was ranting and raving and there was always an atmosphere.

I left that place long before covid but I'm sure her current colleagues are grateful to WFH just to get away from her!

@Eleganz There’s a much larger infrastructure at stake here - if commuters don’t want to commute - train services are cut - what do you suppose would happen to Midland house prices? What about the train drivers, station managers and other support workers who HAVE to commute? Whether a train, bus, art gallery, museum, restaurant, cafe or office is full or empty the cost for it to open/run is the same, which poses an affordability issue. What to do? Close everything? That to me would be truly myopic.

London has 2,343,000 economically active people aged 16-65, 74.7% in employment. If they didn’t have jobs (some propped up by commuters, who in turn are propped up by tax payers coughing up for faster trains) how would Londoners pay the incredibly overpriced council tax - which central government has to flow back to poorer parts of the UK- just to cover their basics like healthcare and education?

What you’re outlining won’t make us more economically diverse- a similar very small-minded narrative was peddled to get Brexit through. The result will be mass destruction of UK house prices, the north south divide deepening and job losses reaching across all sectors. Your final conclusion that your tiny village ‘won’t feel the ricochet’ seems highly unlikely.

During the lock downs reading these threads it occurred to many how much money they were saving by not visiting coffee shops daily for a coffee and a sandwich. They saved on travel too. Credit cards were paid off, money saved for a rainy day. We didn't need new clothes , foot wear. We were finally ahead financially.

Now who can knock that.?

Vaguely reminiscent of the push against cars over a century ago. Think of all those jobs involved in horses .. breeding, training, feeding, shoeing, stabling, treating, saddling ...

(Another strategy goodie was that Henry Ford once said that if he'd bothered listening to the experts, he'd have made "faster horses" ...)

Why? Why can't you build the same relationships, value them or benefit from them online or on zoom as opposed to face to face in the same room?

You think valuable human and social interaction has to be in person?

Why? Based on what?

There are many MNetters who say their online interaction on MN was life-saving and MN is their primary form of social interaction.

And if that's just because they feel they have no alternative, that's not brilliant.

But what about the posters who choose that?

It is not the case that people who do not seek out, enjoy or want to engage in in-person contact are missing out in some way.

Thats an old paradigm which is changing and should.

You may be right @HufflyShuffly and I may be a dinosaur.

I can't argue or prove the point that in-person interaction brings something that online interaction doesn't. It's something I feel strongly based on my own experience, but others may feel differently.

I do believe online interaction can be really valuable/a lifeline as you say - and I do have strong relationships I've formed online. I don't think it's exactly the same, for the vast majority of people. Obviously not for everyone.

Online interactions add convenience and benefits to our lives but nothing replaces good old in person human interaction, it activates different parts of our brains.

I liken it to the difference between a home cooked from scratch meal and a ready meal. Both will do the job of feeding you and keeping you alive but long term if you only lived off ready meals you would notice the difference

I think that's a better way to put it.

When weighing up the benefits of in person v hybrid v remote, the answer is almost invariably 'it depends'. Can't generalise.

Are you actually comparing colleagues to family here? What is wrong with you? Why would I want to build strong relationships with the egotistical brogrammers I work with, one of whom has just been written up by his boss for bullying me? In over twenty years of having a job, I have never met a decent person who doesn't have most of their friends outside of work.

But of course, it doesn't follow that in person interactions with colleagues are particularly beneficial in themselves. Nor that working remotely means people are having less interaction. Only that it's not with the same people as it would be if they were working in person.

If you want a food based analogy, we cannot assume that an employee who isn't eating the cooked from scratch meal in the work cafeteria is necessarily having a ready meal. There are other healthy eating options available.

The reason why he got written up is because he bullied me over Teams, so I had it all in writing.

That wouldn't have been the case if it was snarky comments at the water cooler.

But of course, it doesn't follow that in person interactions with colleagues are particularly beneficial in themselves. Nor that working remotely means people are having less interaction. Only that it's not with the same people as it would be if they were working in person.

All of this. I socialise with people I choose, not the ones my employer imposes on me.

If you like. It is just online and in person interaction are not like for like replacements. We all have different jobs that may require different levels of human interactions.

My work life is not the be all and end all and my employer is not some sort of happy family - but it makes me really sad the utter contempt some people seem to hold their colleagues in on threads like this.

Yes there are annoying people but the majority of my colleagues are decent, interesting people who I need to work with effectively day to day to get my job done.

it makes me really sad the utter contempt some people seem to hold their colleagues in

That's life as a woman in IT. I'm reliably informed that female construction workers have it still worse.

The contempt is deserved.