Turn down job offer that requires 4 days a week.in office?

[Greenbootgrass]

Hi All

Offered a new role at a different company, salary increase and better pension however....

I currently wfh 2 days a week, new job only allows 1 day a week wfh

Am I mad to say no to this?

Really enjoy my 2 days a week at home, comfy clothes, no commute ( hour each way) and doing errands etc at lunchtime.

Even healthcare and education have woken up and are trying to find ways to give staff time back. Lots of schools now give teachers their PPA time at home, my GP practise now combine online & phone consultations with face to face really effectively and I'm sure it will have vastly improved their staff's lives.

Education and healthcare are also a bit different in that actually, a lot of teachers, nurses and doctors can live nearer their work place because schools and medical centres are distributed widely across towns & cities. A lot of corporate offices are concentrated in large cities where staff cannot afford to live anywhere near by.

Most office workers i know have a commute between 60 & 90 minutes wach way, most teachers, doctors and nurses i know travel 20-30 minutes each way.

Perhaps it's because OP gets interrupted a lot while in the office or it's a noisy environment, people wanting to chat etc that she gets behind with tasks.

@FiftyNotNifty

@letstrythatagain
Have you ever WFH?

Yes, but not for long, and it was during the time the kids were off school,so not real/normal circumstances. I hated it, but a lot of that was kid related stress which you wouldn't normally have.
It did seem like pissing about being able to put a washing on between meetings...at work I'd have used the time between meetings getting something work related done!
My commute is short though, that was something I actively looked for in my current post. Used to be around 3hrs per day as per previous poster, so I don't disagree that gaining that back is great.

I just can't get on board with the general refusal to just go to work!

Did you have to log onto Teams or similar though? We have to do this and the status shows green when you are present, amber when you've been away for a time or logged out.

Absolutely this!

Did you have to log onto Teams or similar though? We have to do this and the status shows green when you are present, amber when you've been away for a time or logged out.

Of course I'm on teams. Im working, just like i am when i'm in the office. Its just at the office my status goes amber for 10 mins when i go to the ground floor cafeteria for a coffee, at home it doesn't go amber at all because the coffee machine is in the kitchen in the next room & there's never a queue, so I'm only gone 2 minutes.

On an office day I'm offline 8-9 because the train is usually standing room & my work is a bit sensitive so i can't really get laptop out.

On a wfh day, i'm offline til i get back from school run at 8.45, then I'm online working.

Yep!

Watching people fume over the workings of job markets they demonstrably don't understand is very funny. The whole thing is just... supply and demand. That's all. It's not rocket science.

A friend , linking up to work with Teams, knows that if she places the 50g weight from her kitchen scales on her keyboard, it looks like she’s working when she’s having a shower, doing chores around house, popping out to the shops, etc. Nice.

5 days a week used to be the norm pre covid, its about time we all got back to some form of normality before the whole country goes down the pan.

I also can't balance the "I can walk the dog/go to the gym/ cook / clean / do the school run" comments with "I work even harder from home".
How can both be true?! I understand gaining back commute time, but that's hours worth of activities everyone is talking about!

My commute takes 90 minutes so it’s 3 hours I get back, and I have an hours lunch break. Working from home I can log in at 8.00, take time to do the school run and be back at my desk by 9.10. I can take half an hour for lunch and use the other 30 minutes for the afternoon school run, then be back at my desk to complete my working day.

I can empty the dishwasher while the kettle is boiling, have time when I’d be commuting to sort the laundry or have shopping delivered. It’s very easy to see how, taking a commute out of your day, gives time for other things without taking the piss at work.

If I were the employer, I would be really annoyed at the recruiter for this. They’ve wasted the time of some fairly senior people by not being more upfront with candidates.

Unless they’ve agreed this as a policy with the employer (who knows that the 4 days a week policy is unattractive). In which case, fuck em.

Long before Covid, when I asked for one day a week at home as I worked long days, with a long commute so regularly didn't see DS at all and this would allow me to get him to nursery/collect him and do bedtime etc.... I came to the conclusion that a mix of WFH and office would be optimum because of exactly this.

If I work from home, I gain the commuting time. I also gain some of the getting ready time as quite frankly, it's a lot quicker and easier to throw a pair of jeans and a top on.

Then there's the social "chit chat" time at work. Which actually, it think is important and why I don't blame employers for wanting people back in the office at least some of the time - the chit chat while making tea, the spontaneous decision to grab lunch together, even just the polite small talk while standing around waiting to go into a meeting room. Plus being able to listen in on colleagues calls and interactions as a way to just sort of absorb information by osmosis. BUT... take all that away and you gain back quite a lot of your day.

The reality is that when you're int he office or working from home, its very unlikely you're sitting at your desk actively working the entire 9 hours. At work, that "non-working" time has (ideally) some general benefit from the company/your career and when you're at home that time is used for your own benefit.

Back in those pre-covid days I used to save big projects that involved lots of concentration over hours for my WFH days because the benefit of being able to sit down and really focus for 3 hours without anyone wandering over to ask me a question was invaluable.

No it wouldn't because people were already starting to work from home. As I said above, I've worked from home in some capacity since 2005. All covid did was accelerate the process and show that it could be done on a large scale.

Way before covid, people worked from home on Fridays as the norm, trains were always much emptier and you could get a car parking space at the station all day, whereas the rest of the week you were lucky to get one after 9am.

I now use my lunch break to do laundry and house tidying. This wouldn't get done if I didn't WFH. Can't go back to a regular job now, I'd have no time to do any of that and it'd feel very stressful.

I would too!

10% isn't enough to justify the move.

Does she know that MS Teams has an embedded keylogger and that her employer could easily check the data?

I WFH pretty much all the time, I only have to go into the office once or twice a month. The flexibility for me to be able to do 2x school runs instead of taking a lunchbreak, to be at home when my kids are ill, and to save money on petrol, and time driving to and from work is worth so much to me

Why? What are you so scared of?

I would not go for a job that was in the office 4 days a week - my job does not actually require it and as it is all possible from home I don't think I should waste that time and money commuting - I wouldn't go for it

So basically they know it's cr@p and that people don't want to do it 😬

I actually work much harder at home without my colleagues distracting me. But I certainly do slop about. Jealous much 😉

Given your priorities I'd probably stay put if you can't negotiate the extra day,

I like hybrid working. I think 2-3 days per week is the perfect balance between visibility, collaboration and quality of life in time saved commuting etc.

Eventually, I think the market will adapt to this. Pay will be reflective of how much wfh opportunities there are because some jobs will always require 100% site attendance (can't be an electrician remotely).

It is also only a matter of time until another pandemic of some sort, and companies that can adapt will fare much better. After that, hybrid working is much more likely to become a norm rather than considered abnormal.

The criticisms of hybrid working are well-founded but it's not hybrid working that's the actual problem. Lazy staff not pulling their weight for example is better addressed by good management and HR processes rather than removing the ability to wfh.

We know that the current population is more overweight, less active, and suffering from increased levels of mental ill health than any previous generation. Hybrid working creates the time for people to exercise more, cook proper meals more, see family and friends more - all of which contribute to better physical and mental health, and probably happier more stable families too. It's also much, much better for the environment.

@Qwerty21

Come on then - where do you work?

I actually work much harder at home without my colleagues distracting me. But I certainly do slop about. Jealous much 😉
No not at all 😊 - I WFH too. No distractions means you get more done. You are still entitled to breaks as well.

I used to work in the NHS and honestly, the about of office based time wasting was ridiculous. Of course the usual suspects would also waste time at home as well, but at least at home they aren't distracting others.

And also time wasters in the office are morale eaters- because so little actually gets done by management about them and other people can see them possing about. Used to really annoy me that paid-as-much-as-me Nicky spent her day farting about and chatting, producing low quality, low volume work and nothing was done about it. At least at home I don't get to see her doing nothing or get talked at by her.

I would have done the same OP

Hate it when people say 'well what would you have done before Covid/you would have been in 5 days a week before covid'
That was 4 years ago! How many people are in the exact same situation and lifestyle as they were 4 years ago? Haven't changed job, moved house, new partner, had kids, health changes, etc.

Added to which it doesn't make sense. Change happens and it's hard to go back once you've got used to the new regime, and if it's a positive change why should you? If a computer system goes down nobody says 'well what would you have done before computers/internet?' because the system is no longer set up for handwriting documents or faxing them across or whatever!