To think that Boots move to 5 days a week is a step back for workplace equality

[Vistada]

Boots HQ, a predominantly female workforce - has been told they are to be back in the office five days a week from September with no debate and no real solid reasoning (in my view)

https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/boots-to-end-hybrid-working-for-office-workers/

I think the move to hybrid working is amazing for everyone, not just women, in terms of helping to achieve the work/life/parenting balance that has eluded us for so long, but we can't deny women shoulder this juggling act more.

I think this move, and any move back to 5 days in the office (where its really not needed) is a huge step back for workplace equality - and for a male CEO to enforce this just shows how out of touch he is.

Some women did.

OTOH, survey after survey has shown for years that single mothers have often worked PT and/or well below the level they are trained for. The barriers to better work are often logistical.

Same goes for disabled people and people with caring responsibilities.

Those who say it's a "parent" issue have got their heads in the clouds about the proportion of care men so, even for their own children.

don’t women have choice about who they marry?

my lines were drawn in the sand before we were married, never mind before DD came along.

This is an uninformed post. Nursing applications have fallen to the point the RCN have expressed concerns about ongoing recruitment. For someone who knows sooo many nurses, doctors and dentists, you don't seem to have an accurate grasp on their pay and working conditions. Dentists and doctors aren't usually earning 'megabucks', and job satisfaction in dentistry is notoriously poor. Your rudeness about teachers is unreal too.

Rubbish! There is an incredible amount of peer reviewed evidence that goes against what you're saying. This is a patriarchal perspective that arrogant males (that's the arrogant ones, not the others) wish to continue. Don't!

There are always concerns about recruitment for nursing. That has been going on forever which is why so many, for example, Irish nurses always came to the UK to train and work.
Newly trained nurses travel, its one of the perks of the jobs so leaving to travel has always happened. Nurses are aware of the pay when entering the profession. It isn't high but its what they choose it as their career.

Dentists and doctors travel for more money and because gaining experience elsewhere helps further their experience. With experience, their salaries are high.

MN is full of teachers who aren't happy. No idea why they entered the profession or stay in it tbh. If they leave, it would be the same as if they didn't begin. The Gov will have to look at alternatives.

Teachers always sound so stressed and I don't know what to think, having no experience myself. On the one hand it DOES sound stressful. On the other, those holidays...

I don't understand why they're allowed to spoil it. Why aren't they taken through disciplinary when their performance slumps? Or told that if they don't improve, they will have to return to office working.

I don’t know any teachers who don’t end up working quite a significant amount of their holidays, one way or another, on top of working through their evenings and weekends during term time.

I genuinely admire teachers, not just for the skills they have (I am not one life’s teachers in any respect - no patience whatsoever), but their resilience in the face of incessant criticism from people (I don’t mean you) who think their opinion is an informed one because they attended school once upon a time.

I can't understand why they chose to be teachers and presume that its because they didn't get high enough results to do their first, second or third choices.

Wow.

Boots has become utterly shit recently, so I can see why they're doing something to change employee culture. Personally, I think they need a) to get people who work in the pharmacies to pick up the phone sometimes and b) to work out ways to be more price competitive on some products. I no longer buy anything other than prescriptions (and have a prepayment certificate anyway) and first-aid type stuff there. Everything else is cheaper on Amazon (fanciers things) or in Savers (shampoo, shower gel, ibuprofen).

I do project based work and have WFH for years. I only started working in an office , crazily, during Covid and that was then moved to WFH. Now I'm hybrid working.

Honestly I get SO MUCH MORE done at home ! If I have detailed stuff to do I WFH. The office is so noisy and distracting and if you are lazy it's just as easy to do F All in the office. Never mind having a chat in the kitchen, twiddling at your computer etc.

I power through work on my own at home.

I hate wasting the time commuting into the office. It's complete dead time.

2 days in the office really suits me. I'm really productive because time is limited.

There really is no one size suits all. And turning the clock back just seems really really retrograde to me.

My local Boots is sad and dusty. Sounds like the thinking at the top is too.

Can we not hijack the thread and make it about teachers, please? This is a serious matter that is going to harm women.

Let's get back to looking at Boots and being honest about them putting profits first and women second.

Boots infant formula adverts broke rules - watchdog - BBC News

It is beyond offensive to call this a women's issue rather than a parent's issue.

-Not all women are parents, or parents of minor children. Indeed, they're often left picking up the slack for those who aren't taking wfh seriously due to childcare. (Plenty of non-parents also take the piss, but the comments here are largely child-related.)

-Not all parenting is done by women. Statements like this let men off the hook entirely for parenting.

If you wanted to say that this is screwing parents, perfectly fine. But subscribing to retrograde ideas about women and their roles is no way to make an argument based on equality.

💯 this.
I work with many wonderful young people who benefit greatly from WFH/hybrid arrangements allowing them to manage their needs. Also people don't seem to realise how good young people are at collaborating virtually.
I think the going back to the office push is from the dinosaurs who can't move on from the 'water cooler chat' in 'my day'.

It's pretty offensive to call this a parents issue. Plenty of people have caring responsibilities not just parents. And plenty of people have their own disabilities and health concerns to manage. WFH and workplace flexibility are not just parent issues.

Have you looked at the gender pay gap? Why do you think we have that?

For goodness sake, inform yourself by doing some reading via some credible sources.

This is a woman's issue, because it will impact women more than it will men. It is screwing women over. Again.

Here's a stat to start you off - 90% of single parents are women. Single parents facts and figures | Gingerbread

Go and find the stats on unpaid carers, then come back and tell us all about it.

Appreciate my initial post didn’t actually address the op at all.

I think the posters insisting that “women managed before” have a hefty dose of internalised misogyny they’re not willing or able to self reflect on. So what if women managed before?

The office work model was built on men, what suited men, and even that is now 50+ years old.

I would not work for a company now that didn’t offer hybrid working. I invariably spend 2 full working days in the office and 2 half days with the afternoons wfh and a full wfh day. Some weeks I’m in the office every day to some extent. But that is my choice, based on my workload and the nature of the work I am doing in any given week. Some weeks I’ll only do 2 days in the office.

I don’t think it’s right to be wfh with a baby or a very young child and people who do this will cause issues for others.

But why is the solution to keep women at home more to shoulder the burden of family/home life? Why are we not pushing men to do more?

I’d like to see a more flexible stance of “four days a week” for jobs that “can” be done WFH, as a way of creating a change of pace and a bit of flexibility of workers’ lives, and a bit more flexibility than this for workers with young children or other caring responsibilities.

I do a job which is 100% WFH since long before COVID, but I know this has resulted in fewer opportunities for promotion and networking, but that doesn’t matter for me as I am very much the second income earner, and this job was always WFH since forever anyway. That said, I’m hoping to move into a local government job which would involve more office time in a couple of years’ time, as I’d like a job which gets me out of the house and with other people more!

I live in a downtown area and am really disciplined about ensuring I get fresh air, face to face time with people and exercise daily; I arrange meetups, walking group etc. and work my schedule around this. A lot of people who WFH don’t do this, though; my husband is pretty much banned from WFH by me other than as an occasional thing when he has an appointment and decides to WFH for the rest of the day etc., because he has such unhealthy habits - sits around the house getting endless screen time. He also does not have the network of non-work buddies that I have - his social life is centered around work, and if he doesn’t go it’s just a very unsociable way of life.

I also think that a good point has been raised upthread about how recruitment for jobs which must have in^person work has been made much harder by the existence of so many WFH jobs. Which I do find a bit odd, because on the other side of the fence, I’m looking forward to going back to work in person in the future!

@ThisHonestQuail

How have you taken from my post that I think we should “keep women at home more”?

I stated in that post that the office work model was built for men, 50+ years ago. It’s hardly relevant to men now, never was relevant for women.

If we want to centre men (when has society ever not?) - then the Mon-Fri, 9-5 shouldn’t suit modern fathers because of course, they want to be more hands on with their children then men 50+ years ago did.

But honestly - what exactly is the point of shouting “men should do more” when currently the status quo is men are not doing more and ignoring that, taking away hybrid working for example, just further penalises women?

Men are not taking on more child caring responsibilities, nor care of elderly parents.

😆😆😆

You say it like they all did it in March 2020. People like you are an absolute gift to office landlords.

Really? Because I’ve changed jobs recently and have been replaced by someone significantly more junior - and WFH wasn’t even an issue in that scenario. Good staff are hide to find.

If you think the office is a magic cure for that, you are deluded.

There have always been people who fought against changes in working practices. I remember people resisting the introduction of computers in offices for many spurious reasons. And you should have heard some old fashioned manager rallying against flexi time saying it made it impossible to manage people.