To be losing the will to live with staff who chosen a job with a long commute & then complain about it

[Benibidibici]

I work in a well paid industry - think 6 figure salaries.

We've made really clear through hiring processes that roles are hybrid, not remote, we as a team really get a lot from collaborative working so we expect 2 days a week in the central office. There's flex about which days but we ask that people try to mostly hit the core days of tues/weds/thurs. As a line manager I'm not watching the clock and we are happy to play around with what time people start & finish - eg. One guy leaves at 4.30 to collect his kids by 5.30 & this is fine.

We've hired 3 people this year and made all this clear and they're all grumbling about their commutes and regularly asking to come in less. We offer what we can in terms of flexibility but when we insist we need them in 2 days, they are basically sulking. Its clear one of them in particular never had any intention of coming to the office more than a day or so every 2-3 weeks and expected to get away with remote working.

Its really frustrating. We were honest about what we needed and people just seem to think they can insist.

Why do people do this? One lady has moved 2 hours from our city 3 years ago, and during that time consistently keeps applying for and taking jobs here rather than in the large city where she now lives. Her husband also works in our industry and between them they'll have an income of £200k plus, so they aren't forced to live in a cheaper area.

Its really shit for me to have to go through the unpleasant process of monitoring people's attendance & imposing formal consequences etc (I'm not that kind of manager at all) because they took a job they don't want to turn up for.

What can I do to stop people doing this?

I've been managing communication in remote and distributed working environments for decades when most companies considered it impossible. However much we communicate on IM and virtual environments it does not meet the level of co located interactions and takes longer to reach the same level.

Its not a matter of "looping in juniors" to planned meetings and conversations - the whole point is these interactions are not planned meetings, they are small and casual interactions which juniors learn from in teh same way that apprentices learn much of their trade by watching, not just in formal training days. If I paused a casual chat on Teams with one of my clients to add in all the staff to listen the client would rightly think I was mad.

We do the scheduled online meetups and virtual sessions. We were market leaders in getting other companies digitised and working in different ways to collaborate effectively online during covid. We also found that however much collaboration and virtual gathering we fostered on line, the teams of juniors working on site together developed and learned much faster. Hardly surprising because they communicate and share so much more than when physically isolated.

I have the direct comparisons on record between groups using different techniques. I saw this pattern replicated not just in clients typically poor at collaboration but in those who would be considered leading in both technology and processes.

I find the same with training - I serve as faculty on a number of our advanced courses and see a marked difference in learning and experience in the virtual classroom compared to the physical classroom centres where they spend break times, meal times and evenings in the bar sharing experiences, networking, learning form each other etc. The virtual classroom is far better than nothing but it significantly reduces the shared experiences.

@girlswillbegirls Yes, I agree. But the fact is currently demanding people back in the office benefits those without caregiving responsibilities (which, at the moment, is usually women). Not saying it should be! Just that it usually is!

Just because you were able to fill your vacancies in your company, that does not mean that there were not neurodiverse and disabled people at home who were out of work.

In any case, the economic outlook has changed and there are now global labour shortages.

The Labour government only plans to make it a right to ask, and receive a reply. So if there are managers who want to be in an office for whatever reason and can make a case (even if the reality is a lecherous man who wants to gawp at young women and avoid childcare tasks), and replies with a no, they have complied with the planned law.

Agree

It’s not going to, because we have such low rates of fertility that there aren’t enough people of working age to provide all the services and tax that is needed to run the country. We have an aging population and a labour shortage. This isn’t going to change any time soon.

@fpqand yes, I've found similar as we work in same industry - also have a friend who admits she is doing 10 till 2.45 every day and still getting her £35k a year- to be fair she's good at what she does so hasn't ever been pulled up - and no she doesn't make up hours in an evening. I realise many people aren't like this and in some jobs it's more quantifiable than others-

I guess it depends what you do as a business whether to make a big deal of it if she still does the same work

It would if we started processing some asylum claims and let those people work. A recession means exactly that - fewer jobs and fewer people needed to do them. It’s easy to see how man people have never experienced one.

@Crikeyalmighty then I have to ask, if you work in the same industry, and have the same experience, why on earth you're discussing it from the point of view of your husband?! Really grates me women talking about their husband's opinions on here, particularly on work threads, but it's even weirder if you have your own experience to draw from!

It’s the changing outlook due to below replacement fertility rates. There’s a labour shortage, so workers have more choice about which job to take and are empowered to negotiate more favourable terms, and employers have less choice of candidates and have to work harder to attract and retain the best staff (or even sub par staff).

@C8H10N4O2 it’s not mad to sight additional people in an unscheduled interaction, it’s completely normal. Just like if someone popped round to your desk and you said ‘oh Steve should be in on this too’ and tapped him on the shoulder, you can do that online too. We have a culture where if you’re in a call and you realise someone else should be in it too, you quickly check their calendar and if they look free you just invite them to the call, or if it’s an IM obviously you can just add people to the chat regardless of what they’re doing, or with emails replying just to add someone to the chain. There’s absolutely no reason for not doing this sort of thing.

Teaching can't get staff as the pay is shit. I work in IT in a role where I wouldn't say it's particularly hard work, level of responsibility or stressful. I earn in the region of a headmaster

Maybe WFH is teaching companies that they can no longer treat training as something that senior staff have to do constantly, even if it is not a specific part of their job and even if it means them staying late to do work they didn't doing before 5pm because they were talking a junior through a complex issue. Maybe WFH is teaching companies that they need to specifically go out of their way to find the money to train junior staff members (whether that is much more classroom based training, or by bribing senior staff whatever it takes to given up 3 hours a day to a horrid expensive commute.)

This. Companies just need to be more intentional about shadowing, training etc. This will probably be of benefit to the new employees because they will have a more comprehensive and considered induction programme, rather than it being ad hoc, and unplanned. It’s already the way it is done in other industries eg medicine, education. I do, we do, you do. Gradual release of responsibility.

For 2 weeks trainee will shadow Julie and they both work from the office. Julie is aware that part of her role is to explain to the trainee and she will engineer specific learning experiences as well as allowing trainee to see how she deals with things that pop up. Julie’s workload is adjusted or pay is increased in recognition of the extra training work she is doing. Then for 2 weeks the trainee shadows John, who comes into the office, while Julie goes back to WFH.

After the onboarding, perhaps you have a longer period of time where staff are rostered on one day a week in the office as a designated mentor, until the trainee is up to speed.

You incentivise the role of “mentor” in some way to make it mutually beneficial.

No people don't want to teach because parents refuse to parent their children and don't support the school with discipline.

Immigration can alleviate some of the problems temporarily but fertility rates are below replacement across the whole world, bar a few countries in sub Saharan Africa and eg Afghanistan. And fertility rates are dropping in those countries too.

Scotland already has a declining native population soon this will be nationwide and worldwide.

At the same time, there are many more older people who are economically inactive and needing services and pensions paid. This is an unprecedented demographic situation and is going to require social change unlike anything we have seen before.

is it possible to create a eg how to guide, that can be used instead of an actual person

The boomer generation (which isn’t a global phenomenon) will be gone in 20 years. Current declining fertility rates are irrelevant, any children born now will reach adulthood after the bulk of the problematic ageing population has shuffled off the mortal coil.

Or an overly heavily curriculum has stifled all creativity and draconian regimes destroy relationships - all the joy is gone.

@fpqand to be honest, I don't tend to moan about it as much as he does as he has far more of it than I do in our business. I do more back end stuff and if someone doesn't get back to me for a couple of days it's not so much a big deal- whereas for him he often needs more time critical responses .

But a new generation of older people will have arrived to replace the boomer generation. And there aren’t enough babies being born at the bottom to balance them out.

Our economy is based on a pyramid of fewer retired people at the top supported by a larger number of young people at the bottom. Due to decades of below replacement fertility, that pyramid is now inverted. And it’s not going to change unless we can increase the number of babies being born.

But no country on Earth has ever reversed its declining birth rates, despite a lot of effort from politicians.

Gen X are the next generation of pensioners. The original generation "don't give a fuck" closely followed by generation "accepted they'll never retire and have been screwed at every turn".

Gen X is far smaller than the boomer generation. Many of them will have significant inheritances, as will millennials.

We shouldn't have to be willing our parents and grandparents to die to be able to afford to live!

Nobody said they should. But people receiving inheritances of hundreds of thousands of ££ are hardly screwed and should be able to retire.

Will they? A Xennial is 40-42, their boomer parents are late 60s/early 70s, many of them have parents still alive in their 80s and 90s.

Assuming each generation lives longer than the last by a couple of years Xennials won't inherit, and by your accounts retire, until their mid 70s.