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?

Two days in the office are more doable than 3. I’d push for 2 set days where you come in and have an all team meeting if possible. I’ve worked both fully remotely and hybrid and I think hybrid offers the best of both worlds. I love working from home because I have kids and it means I can drop them to school and have a short commute to their afterschool so they are picked up early. But I value in office days as my job involves working across departments and building trust by having a personal connection with these people is important to actually achieving my goals. I would have an honest conversation about why the in office days are important and non negotiable and take it from there.

Does your workplace pay double time on the weekends? If you’re struggling to find workers willing to work unsociable shifts then it’s a sign you need to pay more to make those shifts more attractive.

I think it’s fine for employees to try to negotiate working shifts that are more attractive to them. If you pay enough then there will be people keen to pick up weekend shifts. I worked weekend retail as a school kid - it should be attractive to pupils and students particularly.

OP, are the people concerned actually getting their allocated work complete? Ie, are they coming in when they have physical testing to do, but then just staying at home to do the rest of it?

And if so, could you consider whether the 2 days stipulation is actually a bit arbitrary and that you could leave it to them that they come in when necessary for the testing rather than a blanket 2 day per week policy?

Or is there physical testing that they are not getting done because they are at home? Because if that’s the case then that’s what I would focus on.

If it was just one person but you say it’s all 3 recently recruited. So it seems you are going to struggle to recruit someone with the required skills that will be willing to come in for 2 days every week. So you might have to reassess your conditions.

I'd be tempted to tell them the business needs them in four days a week now!

Why is it so important for you to believe this and keep stating it? It seems like you really resent the fact that workers have more power to negotiate favourable working conditions these days.

Why is that? Is it because it’s now too late for you to benefit and you are jealous of the flexibility and new opportunities available to the younger generation?

@NonPlayerCharacter they have given me a laptop... but it's a laptop. Can't look at 3 spreadsheets at once on a laptop. I have a £2.5k gaming pc with 3 screens at home and would much rather use that. Also ultra high speed internet that we pay extra for (husband is a serious gamer). I don't know many work places that shell out £2.5k on each pc...

I think conflating WFH with being in lockdown is the problem for some people.

WFH is not being in lockdown. WFH does not mean no socialising. and personally, when I am at work, wherever that is, I do not see it as a social occasion. That is when I do my job, whatever that might be.

When you WFH, You’re free to socialise with friends, go out, visit family, have holidays etc. in fact you have more time to do this, as you’re not wasting time commuting. It’s nothing like being in lockdown. If you don’t like WFH and feel it is bad for you personally, then fine! Don’t do it!

But you should accept it when other people say that they do like it and it improves their wellbeing.

I'm not sure people are thinking that WFH is the same as lockdown. It's people acknowledging that hybrid isn't WFH and that there's skills involved in developing positive soft skills in the workplace.

There's a group of people that seem to think that because they've got a fully WFH job, that people are reasonable for accepting a hybrid job and turning it into WFH by stealth or awkwardness because you don't need to be in the office, you don't have to be in person to learn, you don't need to have positive workplace relationships, you don't have to be together to collaborate, repeat ad nauseum about everything.

Can we not have a reasonable discussion without personal attacks?

I’m not remotely jealous, I’m one of those people who don’t want their home to be their workplace and like the separation. I’m just appalled at the level of entitlement this thread’s revealed.

It’s not a personal attack, I’m genuinely wondering and asking what your motivation and thinking process is.

And it’s of no relevance. It was a personal attack.

I run Christmas stalls with temp staff and many have long commutes.
They get £10 hr and some have long commutes, one girl travels one hour each way and works 9-6 for 4 days, works another job inBurger King for 2 days and is doing a degree in accounting as well while sending her money to India to support her mother and two children (father died).
Another staff member has a 2hour commute and works for 3 days a week, another commutes for 7 days a week (for a month) for 2 hours each way.
Your staff just seem incredibly privileged to me to be on such high wages and I bet the staff who serve them coffee earning £10 hr commute for just as long and more frequently.
I think you need to put your foot down and insist that it’s a necessity to come in a few days a week for team cohesion.

TBF, Blossomtoes isn't the only poster who's come out with that one. There was another barely disguised just you wait from someone upthread, AI themed in this case, and I don't think that poster is retired. It's not an age thing.

A six figure industry and they don't also give you a large screen, dongle, cables, mouse, keyboard and headset?

What industry is this?

The poster who claimed that wanting to work remotely and stating that their DC suffered during lockdown want it both ways was doing just that, though. If they didn't mean to make a lockdown comparison, they wouldn't have mentioned it. What you have written here is something quite different.

As for ad nauseum, you've come out with one of the commonest tropes here yourself. Conflating positive working relationships and collaboration with being physically present in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are some of you who need to do this for your roles, and if you say that has to happen in the office I believe you. But some of us have jobs where we need to achieve that with people who don't happen to live within commuting distance of our employers.

Couldn't agree more OP. I managed a couple of staff who variously opted to move further away and got dogs, and now constantly ask for flexibility around this and say the commute impacts their wellbeing. The majority just come in as asked. We have a very clear onsite requirement as we are customer-facing. I'm very flexible but it is being abused by a few so sadly I am going to have to narrow the reasons for flexibility, monitor, than use HR process to enforce business need. It's really frustrating, the entitlement and lack of personal responsibility.

Yes indeed @LolaSmiles

We discovered during lockdown just how much we can do working remotely. But in many fields - and often the more creative and complex requiring high levels of a range of skills - working remotely is not a substitute for in person co-location. Hybrid working seems reasonable in such cases.

As an academic (thus creative work requiring extremely high levels of complex skills) I’ve always worked in what we now call “hybrid” mode. But my job isn’t humdrum admin or spreadsheets ….

It’s not unreasonable of @Benibidibici to insist on employees satisfying the terms of their contracts.

The poster who claimed that wanting to work remotely and stating that their DC suffered during lockdown want it both ways

That’s actually not what I wrote. I wrote that I’d like to see a Venn diagram of posters holding those views.

It's part of what you wrote. You also put 'you can't have it both ways'.

Of course it is relevant, because I would like to understand the motivations of those who are so vehemently against WFH when other people find it improves their wellbeing. Why are some people so insistently and gleefully predicting that this positive thing will be taken away in the future?

And frequently the opposition is from people who can’t WFH, because they are retired or have an in - person job. Or from managers and companies that are backward-looking and resistant to change., citing problems that could be solved if they cared to try, or worried about their own obsolescence or perceived reduction in status.

It’s not really any type of concern for other human beings, no matter how much people harp on about “the young”. So I just wonder what it is. And I think we should all reflect on our motivations.

In my case, amongst other less important sacrifices, I had a family member lose their life to Covid, and the one good thing that came out of this terrible, awful, nightmarish time, was the WFH revolution.

The environmental benefits, the accessibility for ND, parents, people with disabilities, people living rurally, older people who would have otherwise had to retire. The expansion of options for where young families can choose to live., letting them for the first time be able to buy a proper family house with a garden, instead of a tiny flat in London.

The hours of our lives reclaimed from the misery of commuting, to be spent instead on our families and friends and hobbies.

I can’t WFH, but I want other people to have that choice available, including my children, and I want society to change for the better. Something good came out of this tragedy, and some people want it to be taken away. So I will keep asking these people - why?

Not sure what the answer is OP. From my perspective, I have a commute, I did pre COVID as well as despite a very high income the housing choice and quality of life in the city was poor for a young family.

Anyway I think for me when I moan about the commute it's because it feels like a monstrous monumental waste of my time. Since WFH/flexible working I've realised how much better my time is utilised by doing so. My life has been revolutionised by being able to drop the kids off and be started at work 5 minutes later, work solidly at my own pace without interruptions and then stop 5 minutes before getting the kids. It's SO much better. A day in the office involves hours of travel, chatting, coffees, constant interruptions. It involves setting up my workstation at a hot desk (uuuugh) without my own stuff around me. It is a monumental fucking waste of time unless there is a good reason for me to be there - someone specific to see or an in person meeting. It's presenteeism for presenteeism's sake and it cost MY time and money to do it. So despite commuting for YEARS I now resent every single second of it

i absolutely appreciate that your workers agreed to something, and they should do it. Totally get it. Perhaps it's just harder than they expected, or just a bit more shit. Or just feels completely pointless to them and therefore a waste of time.

I don't know. I think you are in the right btw, I'm not saying you're not. I'm just saying why I find commuting once or twice a week such a ball ache, when it used to be a daily part of life.

WickDittington
I agree with you. I'm in favour of WFH and hybrid working and better flexible working arrangements in general. I know lots of people who had hybrid working arrangements before the pandemic.

It annoys me that the response to people pointing out that hybrid and WFH aren't the same is often people claiming it's hating on WFH, there's no need to be in person, but what about all these people who can't do or would prefer not to do hybrid because it's better for them.

If someone wants or requires a WFH job, they need to apply for a remote job, not a hybrid job.

@BlueberryVelvet
I always find it amazing that people who work from home fail to see the impact on other workers. My daughter is a local primary head and she lost 50% of her staff at the end of the summer term. These ( mainly women) were not going to other teaching jobs but choosing instead to change to jobs that allowed working from home. The recruitment numbers this year are the lowest ever in teaching. Like the NHS they will never be able to sustain workers when their working conditions lack the flexibility of other career choices. My GP surgery is now allowing doctors to work from home a couple of days a week. It is very hard to obtain a face to face point appointment.
If you are going to insist that all women can work from home, will you accept taking responsibility for primary age children to educated from home via zoom. It is such an unbelievably short sighted proposal. Do you not care at all about women who work as teachers or nurses or hospital doctors or physiotherapists etc etc. it seems to me that it is a very select number of women that you are trying to protect and all other women have to put up with impossible conditions because you don't give a stuff about the armies of women required to work face to face.

@NotExactlySuits . I notice you say 'Once you have dropped the kids off'. What are you and all the other women who insist on WFH going to do when schools are sending home classes because they cannot recruit teachers. My granddaughter's nursery has had to send children home because of huge problems with staff recruitment.
It seems that people like you are full of 'don't do as I do, do as I say'
Why should some women get to cosily wfh and yet the great armies of women who do the majority of health care and childcare, don't have the same flexibility.

I always find it amazing that people who work from home fail to see the impact on other workers. My daughter is a local primary head and she lost 50% of her staff at the end of the summer term. These ( mainly women) were not going to other teaching jobs but choosing instead to change to jobs that allowed working from home. The recruitment numbers this year are the lowest ever in teaching. Like the NHS they will never be able to sustain workers when their working conditions lack the flexibility of other career choices.

Roles that need to be done face to face at set times are going to have to pay more in order to compensate for their lack of flexibility. Unfortunately, we as a society haven't yet managed to accept this. Too many people prefer complaining about market forces and trying to argue their way out of supply and demand instead.

With respect to teaching and the NHS specifically, even that might not be enough bearing in mind the general shittification of the health and education systems, but that's another point again.