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.

No, no you do those jobs to earn money to live. I have one of those jobs. I definitely do it for the money, believe me. DH is a nurse. Also does it for the money. If the pay and working conditions get any worse he's considering packing it in to be a dog walker.

If your husband went into nursing for the money, he has way more issues to deal with than other people in professions he doesn’t work in working from home.

Absolutely this. I left a company after they - or rather a manager - decided to make up her own hybrid working policy, which was contrary to the official company one.
No reason given and the laugh of it was she was hardly ever in the office herself. She was expecting us to be in 5 days a week. 3 of us quit within months. 1 to get a job closer to home because coming in an extra 2 days a week and having to endure the commute from Hell was too much for her.

There were plenty of other companies advertising fully remote jobs, so I went down that route instead. The job I do and was doing for the last company does not need to be done from an office.

I absolutely take this point. It's a human issue, really.

I think my hackles were up because I've seen so very, very men get away with running off to the office while their wives/partners work from home and are expected to do the work while also acting like stay at home parents.

It drives me up the wall and back down again, and I'm concerned that the continued framing of this as a women's issue emphasizes rather than de-emphasizes that dynamic.

That said, you're right.

Interestingly I read an article which said that WFH was more detrimental to women's mental wellbeing than men's - because being at home means women have to juggle more and fit more in, whereas men just leave the house and go to work.

I'll see if I can dig it out - gives a different perspective.

It's actually more than presentisam- it's about creating a work culture, training and increasing sharing of knowledge and experience.

About half our team wfh or hybrid and it is increasingly making it inefficient. We work in a fast moving environment and information that could be easily conveyed if we were in the same office isn’t - zoom meetings don’t help in this respect and are time consuming. There are tasks that require a physical presence and they are just piling up waiting for someone to be in. Liaising with the wider workforce is left to those who are in the office mainly. There is a lot more to office work than answering emails (which can
be done remotely)

Yes understand.
I feel hopeful for the future in that in my traditionally male dominated field I'm seeing the younger men taking extended paternity leave, going to part time, working around drop offs and pick ups and even mentioning chucking a load of washing on between meetings or prepping the dinner in the slow cooker.
It does annoy me a little that flexible working seems much more acceptable now that men are taking it up (ie nobody raises an eyebrow when the male manager says I've got to leave this meeting early for school pickup, but women had decades of being called not team players/kept back for the same behaviours) but flexible working benefits everyone.

Even betore covid i was allowed to wfh 2 days a week.

I pereonally got on more at home as I found many people in the office wanted to chat rather than do work.

i’m aware ot increasing problems in certain areas of the country where people can’t afford to live near their workplaces, so have long commutes. I enjoyed not doing a 45 min motorway journey each way and i’m pleased to be contributing less pollution.

I live a 15 min drive from my current workplace but there isn’t enough parking. It takes an hour on the bus and i could really do with not spending 2 hours of my day commuting when i have 2 kids under 5.

My wfh days used to be a saviour from a bullying boss.

At both big companies i’ve worked for, they’ve found it very beneficial to introduce remote working, due to difficulty with recruiting, so they’ve been able to recruit people 200 miles away who have been brilliant.

I do mostly miss office life, but having small kids has meant the flexibility is hugely beneficial for me.

Also just to add, both my employers took the google approach to convert the offices into lovely ‘collaboration sofa areas’ and i’v found it totally impractical to just get on with work or have proper meetings. So i’ve actually found it better to work from home and have meetings via teams.

My closest team member is about 730km away, so when I go to the office I still end up spending most of my day on teams calls. And I get less done because my working day ends up shorter with the commute. I still like to go in for the social aspect but not when I'm super busy.

I'm surprised Boots employs so many people as most things they sell you can get with the supermarket shop or Amazon, Our fairly large branch has hardly any people working in it, no normal tills apart from pharmacy and doesn't even do NHS prescriptions.

DH and I both have jobs which have no WFH due to type or work and very little flexibility. We spend a fortune on wrap around care.

Previously our kids had lots of friends in after school club. Now most children get picked up by parents. Our friends all work full time but they never seem to miss anything. Not just pick ups, but taking kids to the park after school while socialising with each other, every school event etc. Extra curricular things they just seem to be able to be there albeit doing emails.

Younger parents I know from my nursery aged child have literally never had a child without this flexibility and don't seem to realise how good they've got it.

We can't help but feel a little bit bitter when parents kick up a fuss about having to spend an extra day in the office. We are going to get to the point when no parent wants a job which involves anything face to face. And many of these essential roles (NHS, schools etc.) are dominated by women. I don't think it's fair to fight for thr parental rights of just one sector of the workforce.

Definitely a backwards step. I actually find i’m more productive on my WFH days tbh. We’re supposed to go in one day a week and on that day, I tend to arrive late and leave early due to traffic, meaning I generally only do about 6.5 hours of work. Once in, I spend at least 20 minutes finding a desk and setting up my equipment. Then, no doubt, someone will distract me for something.

The irony is that we’re supposed to be in for networking and if only one person can’t make it to the office then we all have to be on Teams
for our meetings to facilitate that person. That means I’ve travelled 60 miles, to work fewer hours, in an uncomfortable environment to sit on Teams. Which i could do from home. This happens nearly every time I go to the office as well.

Great idea…not 🙄

The company I work at is global and there is a 3 day mandate in office for most countries and 2 day in UK (not enough desks) and the hybrid approach is great. I love the days when I’m in the office and I see my colleagues and we can collaborate in person but the 3 days I have at home are actually the days where I get the most work done. I don’t have to do school run’s anymore so childcare isn’t really applicable to me now but it must be great for women, and men, who don’t have that extra stress of having to leave work early to run and collect DC.

As a company we’ve done countless surveys about productivity & mental health and they’ve all said that hybrid working works best for our company and I work for a huge corporate.

I’d hate to work for a company that was so unforward thinking that it would demand everyone back in without any real basis for it and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I think WFH is a backwards step for women. It means that they are expected to do it all. Men would just use childcare.

I agree with this. It's like in the Victorian period when they didn't see the need to build public toilets for women and the Jack the Ripper victims were assumed to all Be prostitutes because why else would women be out in the streets at night?

It is a retreat back into the domestic sphere for women and a withdrawal from public life. a worrying development imo.

The flipside to that, then, is that jobs like nursing and schools are likely to have better pensions than many remote working roles which are often private sector. Uneven pension provision is as much a women's issue as balancing the greater societal expectation of unpaid caring labour on us. Motherhood is bad for women's pensions. So it's a mother's rights issue specifically.

It's always been the case that some jobs have more of some types of benefit than others. It might be wages, pensions, annual leave entitlement, paid sick leave entitlement, and just recently flexibility has become one of those things. Yet people seem much keener to talk about uneven access to flexibility than they ever have for the things where my job lags behind what NHS staff get. The inconsistency is rather galling.

Some WFH men might do jobs like the school run as that has to be done but I can't imagine many are running round doing the dusting and washing at lunchtime and breaks like women all seem to be doing

Yes, same here. I work part-time to reduce the amount of wraparound care we need - but plenty of parents at my children’s school work full-time and never use wraparound care at all. Whenever the school does an event during the school day, my kids are often the only ones without a parent there - many of the others have both. It does feel unfair that I’ve made the choice to earn less to minimise wraparound care yet still spend more on it than people who work full-time.

I’m a teacher (it wasn’t my fourth choice of career though) so for me the trade-off is that I get the holidays with my kids - though increasingly it seems that parents I know who wfh don’t use any childcare in the holidays either and work while their kids are at home.

Without meaning to attack any posters, a few have referenced feeling a bit bitter (or inferred that) towards people who are able to WFH. I have to say I’d probably feel the same but it’s not a valid enough reason for others not to be able to benefit from WFH which in many cases is beneficial to their work and home life. It’s obviously not going to work for all professions but for those that it does it should be encouraged.

And the argument about young people not benefitting from WFH is ridiculous, on my team we have 3 graduates and we have anchor days where we’re all in and work together as a team and they’re really happy with this arrangement. They can come in extra days if they want to and some decide to but most of them don’t. They’re very happy working for a forward thinking company it seems.

No-one’s saying that because WFH comes with advantages that people who can’t WFH miss out on, no-one should benefit from those advantages. Just that maybe jobs where WFH isn’t possible should be recompensed in other ways - not least because, as various posters have pointed out, otherwise no-one will want to do them.

But not everyone wants to wfh, despite its advantages it’s deadly boring.

Out of interest, do you think much about how your employer pension contribution and paid sick leave entitlement will be a lot better than many remote/hybrid workers?

Yes, managing the kids and associated household stuff is a parent problem... and until men are expected, by default, to step up and take a full 50pc of this burden then we have a problem.
Of course there are men who do but the default assumption still remains that women take on the mental and physical load for all this.

One of my closest friends from school is a dentist. She’s always been able to work part time as a job where you have multiple relatively short appointments makes it much easier to limit your working hours. I am a contract lawyer, it’s much harder for me to work part time because if I am working on a complex contract worth millions of pounds to the business, the deadline is critical. In fact I did 17 hours in one day alone last week. WFH has made life slightly easier in what is a very tough job. I have never felt resentment towards my friend because she can work less hours than me. She doesn’t resent me because I can work from home. All jobs have their advantages and disadvantages. If you don’t like yours, retrain.