Why does it seem most are against WFH?

[user6776]

Just read an article that has said civil servants are now to work from the office at least 3 days a week. I'm not a civil servant, but my company adopts the same approach. WFH is generally frowned upon and they are all about being in the office as much as possible.

I prefer WFH. Less time commuting, more productive as no office distractions, can get stuff done on my lunch hour. It's a no brainer for me. I agree going in the office periodically to meet with the team and for important meetings but other than that I don't benefit much

What does everybody else think?

Most of those problems were pretty recent, though, the last 2/3 decades really, particularly the physical distance from job markets, which only really became a big issue in the 90s when there was the trend to close local/regional offices and centralise everything, particularly into the London area. Before then, there were usually plenty of local opportunities for working in offices, banks, insurance firms, professional firms, etc.

That comes under bad employers surely?

My previous firm pre covid did flexible working (we had to work core hours and 35/week but otherwise flexible), we could work from home or another office if needed, meeting rooms available for quiet time, a colleague was legally blind so WFH half the day, two colleagues worked fully remotely (after being in office for a few years) due to their husbands jobs.. so it was possible to meet everyone’s needs without working from home 5x a week.

I work in a very paper heavy environment (tax in accountancy) and the office was able to move to electronic files pretty easily over about 2 years. We used Skype instead of actual phones for a good few years before covid too. The technology has been there for a long time but not all employers bothered to keep up.

That is one problem, of multiple, and it's only half true anyway. While it's correct that London centrism is a more recent thing and there were greater regional opportunities, that still doesn't cover people living in more geographically isolated areas. What you mean here is that there'd have been more office based opportunities in places like, say, Walsall and Doncaster before the 90s. That's not wrong, but it also didn't mean full time office based work didn't exclude people because of their location.

So yes, full time office based work as the normal, across the board standard fucked over whole groups of people. It just did.

No, of course it doesn't.

There not being office jobs in a particular area doesn't mean an employer has done anything bad. It isn't the company's fault if a person's health condition means it's the travel to the workplace rather than the work itself that's a problem for them.

These are structural barriers, they're not automatically within the control of an employer to wave a magic wand and fix. And the solution to them has been shown to be the availability of more fully remote work. The fact that some needs can be met by hybrid, as in your examples, don't change that.

I agree with you about some employers not having kept up though. Things were moving that way anyway, but gradually, and then lockdown came along and blew everything up.

Yes - most autistic people. I'm half the employee in the office that I am WFH - the very nature of open plan offices (and what everybody else seems to love about them) prevents me from being effective.

As a result, I looked to management like a useless body taking up space. It's only when I started working from home about 15 years ago that I suddenly realised I actually had value.

I don't think most people are against WFH.

I think they're against a certain group of WFH staff taking the piss.

Putting a load of laundry on the line while your kettle boils isn't much different from having a coffee break at work, so isn't an issue, but the number of threads on here that can be paraphrased as "I want to WFH because then we can save on childcare for my 18 month old" is awful.

My concern is that WFH is going to be rolled back, along with flexible working options that support men and women with family responsibilities because some people seem to think that WFH means clock on and off all the time, do a school run on work time, look after your kids whilst half arsed replying to emails.

I do understand those concerns. It's a total logic fail the way so many people will identify the work location as the problem when it's wfh that's being used to facilitate skiving but refuse to do the same when being in the office is the vehicle for it. Still, something being a logic fail of an attitude doesn't mean some people don't think it. You're right to acknowledge that.

However, I don't think it's going to happen as a widespread thing for multiple reasons.

One is that it's very obviously working well for some employers.

Two is that even those who don't like it aren't necessarily in a position to change it. We have a tight labour market at the moment, and lots of employers simply can't get the staff they need at the wage they can afford, in an office at set times. The problems with the childcare sector and public transport strikes make this problem worse.

Three is that office space is expensive. Some employers owned their premises, but others leased, and as time passes, the number of those who still have their pre March 2020 leases that can actually hold all their staff will reduce.

”But was anyone truly fucked over by being in the office 5x a week? Or was it just annoyances and bad employers?”

I have been Hybrid working for over a decade. My employer noted an increase in employees with disabilities and caring responsibilities.
Those people matter too!

So that means you have a good employer who got with the times early on 👍🏻

I’m sorry about this, sounds a horrible experience. Any office I have worked in has had quiet rooms and I’m sure employers need to try to offer reasonable adjustments for disabilities now.

They're supposed to, but even the ones who genuinely do make provision still can't necessarily replicate being in the home environment. Quiet rooms are great and important, they don't mean the inevitability of having to be around other people in workplace premises isn't an obstacle for some people. As a parent of an autistic child, I'm so happy about the expanded opportunities remote working is providing.

WFH does affect other businesses though, like sandwich shops for example but I guess times are changing (as they always do) and certain things will die a death.

Absolutely and I’m very grateful. I wish all people could have the same and they should. I believe hybrid and flexi working really encourages certain demographics into the work place who otherwise might not be able to work.

Putting a load of laundry on the line while your kettle boils isn't much different from having a coffee break at work, so isn't an issue, but the number of threads on here that can be paraphrased as "I want to WFH because then we can save on childcare for my 18 month old" is awful.

There's another current thread about wfh and the number of people that can get all manner of other stuff done (housework, laundry, cooking etc) and still allegedly get their work done is surprising. And anyone questioning it is old fashioned and only interested in presenteeism. And if you can get the job done in 2 hours that's fine.
I kind of get that but in real life that would surely be a part time 1 or 2 day a week job. if you were consistently getting " a full days work" done in 2 or 3 hours in between childcare, hobbies and household chores ...then it is it actually a ft role?

I'm not FT myself, but there are full time roles that don't involve doing a consistent amount of work at set times. People get paid to deliver a certain amount of work, sometimes within set-ish hours. There are roles where you have to be responsive to other people and that often involve a certain amount of dead time because of it.

And, well, some workers are just more efficient than others. What takes Worker X 2 hours takes Worker Y 1 hour 45, and there's your load of washing or your prepped meal. The employer might not be aware, and even if they are they don't necessarily feel willing and able to try and reduce Worker Ys hours. Worker Y is an asset.

Some of it is also a response to employee scarcity too. For remote workers that looks like doing housework in the middle of the day, the office version is long lunches, pissing about on the Internet, long chats etc. People knowing their value.

There’s also a thread from a few days ago where a poster’s friend wanted to wfh together to create an ‘office environment’ The Op wasn’t keen because different jobs and company which makes complete sense but that was the secondary reason. The main reasons were not only does that op do household chores and cooking, she also spends her days napping, reading, and drinking wine.....While supposedly working ft.

Thanks...of course, it would've helped if I'd known I was autistic at the time ;) However, back then I doubt it would've made much difference, and even now...the only viable solution is to get your own office, which tends to cause issues with co-workers (it's seen as a perk, rather than an absolute necessity to get work done).

The most likely scenario is that autistic individuals would be offered the opportunity to work from home almost all the time (ie unless it's rendered impractical with in-person activities etc), especially now that most companies where it would theoretically be possible have been forced to build that capability, technically-speaking.

When I read that thread I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been inspired by this one!

I much prefer WFH. I really wouldn’t want to do any more than 1 day a week in the office.

I feel it is sad for women especially to want no life away from home

But working from home/remotely allows you to have a life outside the home because you don't waste hours of the day commuting. For example, yesterday I had to go to London so I missed my club running session. As a one off it was fine. But if I worked in the office all the time, I'd always miss it. That would be really rubbish.

People say they want to be in the office because they want to make friends. Well if you have time for hobbies because you are not spending hours a day commuting, you can make friends that way.

We are not responsible for other businesses. And where one business fails another will take its place.

As I said on another thread, I am not sure how that fits in with the government's desire to get people off benefits and into home-based jobs.

This is true, but neither of those policy preferences are actually likely to be implemented in full. The current government aren't really in a position where they need to worry about coherence, they'll be off soon enough.

The kind of arguments you outline in your post are exactly why we have a productivity crisis in this country.

If someone is really efficient at what they do or find that for other factors they can complete their workload in less time than originally envisaged then they should be proactive and look for other ways they can use their time to help their employer. I have my own business and the nature of the work means that the same task can take hours or literally a few minutes. There are always ad hoc things though that come up that someone with spare capacity could help out on. I would not be happy for an employee to use their 'spare time' to crack on with housework etc whilst there are things technically not completely in their remit that they can do.

I think most people can understand this, especially if they pay for a cleaner etc themselves. If you paid a cleaner for 5 hours to clean your house and they did it in three, would you expect them to leave early and deal with their own personal stuff or look for extra things they could do like deep cleaning the bathroom or perhaps doing some ironing? I have seen countless threads where people have been outraged at their cleaners leaving half an hour early and yet people WFH clearly think they are completely within their rights to do all sorts of things for an half an hour here and there whilst they are being paid to work.

This issue is quite a common subject of discussion online!

Ultimately, when it comes to labour and money, people respond to incentives, rather than other people's 'shoulds'. If you as an employer want Worker Y to work to the full limit of their productivity, and you do happen to have suitable work to fill the missing 15 minutes, you need to incentivise them.

People can and do argue the toss about whether this is right, who owes what to whom etc, but this is what it comes down to. If you want to talk about reasons for low productivity, failure to incentivise workers is the other half of the pie.

Because we now have a tighter labour market than we did a few years back, many workers are in more of a position to require more incentives than they used to. To the extent that telling them they ought to do more work than someone less efficient but on the same wage, doesn't cut it. Some of those workers might be house cleaners, I don't know much about that.