To wonder how we ever did 5 days a week in an office?

[OptimismvsRealism]

I work hard and love my job (legal). Spent a day in the office today for the first time in months and honestly feel sick. The people flu! I couldn't go back. All those blokes in the City saying WFH was an "aberration" are deluded.

I get that some people love it and there's enough diversity in this world for everyone to find their niche but Oh My God am I glad I don't have to do the daily traipse any more.

You are aware that a lot of people still do have to do five days in the office?

We dont get a choice.

Not everyone is given any option to work from home.

I still do five days in the office. We are required to be in the office every day.

Me too. We have hybrid working but I have no interest in that. The organisation is great. My colleagues are great. My commute is great.

WFH? Nah, nor for me. If others like it, go for it. There's plenty of space in the office for me to perform backflips all the way down 😍

Are you actually serious?

You do know you can't just choose to do another job right. That you have to interview for it for a start, against a lot of other applicants.

There are Many many many jobs that require people to be there physically in the office.

Try to get a grasp of other people's reality

I have to say I prefer working in the office.

I like the social chats. I like the team events they set up.

We have chess groups, book clubs, writing groups at work.

I like the interaction

Well, I guess I'm that certain kind of extrovert. Although my Myers-Briggs is INFJ, making me an introvert.

Ach. Who the feck knows what it's all about? 😬

If people MUST WFH then there should be an air of professionalism about it.

5 examples I have had with 5 different companies

"I'm doing some lunch do you want some" said by someone in the background

"Mum, I need a poo"

Washing machine on full spin making it difficult to hear what was being said to me

Dog barking

Heard a doorbell ring and was then put on hold whilst the person I was talking to answered it.

It seems some people seem to forget what the "W" in WFH actually means.

Lots of us do jobs that don’t give a choice!

It’s not as easy as retraining if it’s a career you trained hard for!

I’m a nurse ward manager, wfh doesn’t work at my level or below!

I've always found it pretty easy to change directions when I'm fed up @Carly944

Appreciate it might get harder as I get older and age discrimination becomes more of a problem

If you hate your job you can usually get another one, though

As a recent graduate, I’m not a fan of wfh. My one bed flat (all I can afford) doesn’t have enough space for multiple monitors and a desk chair and everything else I need to do my job comfortably. I had to move to the city to do my mandatory 2 days a week in the office but for the other three days, I’m alone, in an overpriced city flat. I have to make such an effort to meet friends on wfh days just to see people

Youre a lawyer though right.?

So of course you'll get another job easily. But it's not like that for everyone.

I'll tell you what it was like for me.

I was trying to change jobs last year. I was in a job and I wanted to change to a different job.

I applied for forty jobs last year. I got invited to two interviews. I got one job.

It took me about 7 months from applying , to getting a new job

OP I do think you are completely detached from reality.

You remind me of when I was a child and my family were quite poor.

I had a rich friend at the time. I remember she said to me "well my family are rich because my parents worked hard, yours should have worked hard".

I pointed out to her that my mother did work very hard, but my father left us for another woman.

It was nothing to do with working hard. It was do with circumstance. She was rich because her dad stayed around. I was poor because my dad left. My mother worked extremely hard.

You saying "just get another job, to work from home" to people, is honestly shocking .

Are you not aware of the circumstances that people go through.

Im just choosing one example.

What about people who work in tesco. They can't work from home. Maybe they grew up in a poor background and couldn't afford to go to college. Maybe now they can't afford to spend money to retrain.

Did you grow up in a privileged background OP?

I go to the office once a week now and it’s my most unproductive day, I get nothing done! Then the next day I’m exhausted from the long day (leave house at 6:30am. get back around 6pm - my company moved our office for being local to being 30 miles away!)

it’s funny how it’s changed though as pre-covid I would occasionally wfh and was always distracted by other things!

WFH clearly works for some and simply isn’t possible for others. I have noticed a significant drop in customer service when trying to contact those who were previously in ‘the office’. It’s difficult to contact them in the afternoon particularly on Fridays! And emailing with queries takes for ever as the replies are at 11pm! I assume they are trying to make up hours as they’re not around in the day.

I think to make it fairer on those who have to go in, they should be paid a little more and have a few more days of annual leave as they can’t pop out to do ‘life admin’ during the working day. I understand that’s this may not be popular but WFH is only possible because others go in to work. School teachers go in and teach, the Sainsburys drivers deliver our food, the healthcare assistant comes and takes care of the vulnerable. if they didn’t go in or no longer did those jobs, who would?

In some ways hybrid is the worst of both worlds in that situation.

Your organisation are still excluding all the people who can't work in their office due to geography, disability, caring responsibilities, neurodivergence etc. They're still selecting for the people who like and can thrive in offices. But then those people aren't getting the full whack of the benefits. You've had to pony up for the rent but not got the other part of the deal.

You still changed jobs though, didn't you? 7 months is longer than ideal but better than staying put for the rest of your working life.

My last job was working from home.

I actually moved from a working from home job, to the job I have now, which is office based.

I much prefer the office based job that I have now.
I have done work from home jobs in the past. And I didn't like it.

That is not my point.

My point to you is you're so wrong if you think that everyone can work from home.

They can't.

It is not available to every profession.

I've worked from home before.

I know it is not available to everyone.

Do you see that?

WFH is fair enough for mature people with established careers.

But it's really not suitable for graduates, trainees, etc. So the younger staff still need to move to live near their workplace, which is usually ridiculously expensive, and still struggle to learn because there are so few older/experienced staff working in the office.

My son moved to a different city for his first proper graduate job last year. Supposed to be 3 days in the office and 2 days at home. After the first week he decided he wanted to be in the office 5 days. Luckily, they are very flexible and have loads of desks so that's not a problem. Lots of his fellow trainees/graduates are doing the same. It's very disjointed as there's no continuity as to which experienced staff are in the office to train/supervise them, so a lot of the time, they're bungling through it themselves - even though they're in different departments/different roles, they still congregate together and work in the same corner of a huge open plan office, just to work together and bounce ideas off each other. They've created quite a good social life for themselves too, going out together for pub quizzes, crazy golf, cinema, meals, and go carting etc.

None are remotely interested in working from home as most of them have moved hundreds of miles to get the job and are stuck in house shares or tiny one bedroom flats, so don't even have a decent workspace at home. They occasional do work from home, i.e. torrential rain days, or if one of them has had a late night (travelling back from a visit home etc)., but not as a matter of routine. They absolutely hate it when they do work from home as they're all isolated and are just muddling through. It's only the social life they've created that's keeping them sane!

@Carly944

It is not available to every profession.

Even when it's "available", it's not always for the best of the organisation. I'm a self employed accountant. I started out working from home, and still have a fully set up home office. BUT, I quickly decided I preferred working from an office, so rented a small one very local, just a mile from home. Even throughout Covid, I still went to the office every day to work there instead of going in my home office. There's just something "wrong" to me about trying to work from home. I had no distractions at the time, i.e. no children, husband, etc., but I just instinctively knew I wasn't working to full potential. I'm far more productive at my office - something about getting ready in the morning, actually physically "going" to work, and being in a proper office set up. On the few occasions I stay at home, I just don't get the same vibe at all, end up getting side tracked with household chores, and sad to say, make more mistakes as it just doesn't feel as professional and my mind isn't in the same place.

I hate to say, but my professional dealings with organisations like banks, councils, HMRC, insurance firms, solicitors, etc., are very much worse than a few years ago with massive problems even just contacting them, and far less efficiency in them dealing with issues, i.e. not doing what they promise they will, doing things wrong, having to try to discuss complex matters with dogs barking or children crying in the background, plus often very poor distorted phone signals or them saying that they can't help because their home broadband has gone down. From my experience, WFH is causing a massive drop in reliability and efficiency.

You sound like your personal bias is clouding your perception tbh

The elephant in the room is the house price rises over the last 30 years means few people can afford to live near where they work so it's a long commute for most people - especially once people want a family

@OptimismvsRealism so you'd like all the nurses, doctors and paramedics to WFH? The nursery staff, mechanics and retail staff. In fact a huge part of the infrastructure of the country can just change jobs and WFH can they?!

You are ridiculous.

What baffles me with so many working from home and hybrid, is why the motorways are still so busy in the mornings! The M6 where I live is still rammed every day.

Not everyone works in a city centre, or in an office that is far away from affordable housing.

I don't know why people keep saying this - OP's original post is clearly talking about office-workers. 🙄

It's not some amazing "gotcha!" to remind her that some people don't work in offices.

You're not the first person to do this in the thread, but what's completely absent here is any acknowledgment of young people who aren't like the ones you know and are talking about.

What you've done here is taken an example of a person who clearly likes, benefits from and isn't excluded by in person office work. But people like your son and his colleagues aren't the default. They're a self selecting group that can't possibly be representative of young people as a whole. By definition, it won't include those who couldn't have taken those jobs because they weren't able to live in close proximity to that job market, or because their caring responsibilities, disability, health problems or neurodivergence prevented it.

It's not true that remote working is bad for young people and grads per se, because its just plain fact that some of them now have more opportunities because of it. It's bad for some of them.