AIBU to think that if WFH employees aren’t getting their work done, the problem is with their management?

[Chessboardtable]

So many people seem bitter about WFH and claim employees just slack off.

I WFH and have done since 2020 and my output since 2020 has been higher than before 2020. I work in a job where output is pretty easy to measure.

I am also a billion times happier for numerous reasons I won’t list but the main ones are not having to leave DC in after school club until it closes, no stressful commute on frequently delayed trains and more time to exercise.

I do my work flexibility, e.g. yesterday I finished early to collect DC at 3.30pm but I had worked Wednesday and Thursday evenings to get the work done in advance.

AIBU to think if WFH staff aren’t doing their work, they are not being effectively managed?

Probably because the vast majority of jobs have room for "slacking off" without it having any noticeable impact on productivity.

The only issue is that if your job requires you to be sat in an office or stood in a shop, you don't have the opportunity to take a nap/do laundry/walk the dog like you do when you're working at home or set your own hours.

I'm a dog walker and have time in my schedule most days to nip home and do laundry, or grab a coffee, or feed the cats. Yes, I have to fit those breaks around my clients but it's more than doable 90% of the time.

I'm sure they exist, but I've personally never worked somewhere where I was required to be "on and present" the entire time. When I was a retail manager I always encouraged staff to take a break when they could - an extended lunch break occasionally, or to go home on quiet days if they wanted to (all paid). They could all go and make a coffee if they wanted or sit for ten minutes to have a biscuit as long as they were ready to go if it got busy.

Yes - although I work fully remotely, I think I'd quite like 4 days at home, 1 day in the office. But my employer is in London and I'm not, so that isn't going to happen 😄. I also like the alternative idea - how can we work differently to replicate the benefits of physically being at work?

Such a shame. I don't have a job that could be wfh, yet I totally agree that done well it's better. It's also a win for the employer as they don't have to pay for as much office space, saving money in many ways.

I mostly agree. A good manager should have awareness of their employee’s to-do lists and schedules, even if this is only a loose awareness. If someone is sitting there with little to do for days on end they shouldn’t be unaware of that.

Absolutely. Where I worked a couple of years ago we needed to go into the office for admin cover of things like taking in post etc. We worked it out between us, no set rota, were flexible everything was fine. Found out that some offices just were not bothering so post wasn't being delivered or there was no one there to send something urgent, visitors couldn't get in. We were very annoyed that our ability to wfh on some days would be taken away as managers in other offices were just crap at their jobs.

When I wfh I work like I would in the office (except I eat at my desk as I do some chores on my lunch break!). If my productivity dropped or I was never available then my manager will raise it with me.

I agree. There are definitely members of my team who are not getting work done, I know this because it then gets redivided up and shared out again amongst everyone.
I raised this with my manager in my 1:1 and just said I was not going to do it anymore because I am managing my workload efficiently and didn’t feel like gaining other work because of it was very fair - she said she knew but didn’t know what to do about it!
She needs to be raising conversations with those that aren’t doing it and working out why and asking how she can support them - instead she just send it all back out to everyone else to pick up!

WFH is a great thing and not to be begrudged - I say that as someone who cannot WFH. I have a long commute, made longer by ridiculous traffic. I guess that a large proportion of the cars I see on my journey are people commuting to their office jobs. If they were all WFH, I could cut down my journey time by a significant amount. (At the weekend it's a 55 minute drive. During the week it can be as long as 95 minutes!!!)

WFH is better for the planet and better for commuters!!

I have a few thoughts on people who think everyone should be in the office 100% of the time. Firstly they are the sort of people who slack off themselves and need the structure of the office so assume everyone else is like that. Secondly some of them need their ego stroked by having their headcounts in front of them so everyone else can see the power they hold and what a hood job they are doing.

I have noticed that those that slack do so in the office just as much more coffee breaks, chatting excessively to colleagues, always on their phones. It makes no difference if they are at home or not. Its about managing the people that need it and letting everyone else get on with it.

Do people think that when they're in an office, they work for every moment of the day? A slacker is a slacker wherever they are.

Why should in-person work get a special tax break?

Yes. Our team wfh one day a week each. Our manager trusts us and is extremely flexible so we all go above and beyond to repay that trust and respect by working our arses off. I don't think any one of us would slack off when wfh and feel comfortable about it knowing that our manager is so accommodating and understanding. I dread her saying she's retiring. She's 62 now so it's on the horizon.

I honestly think most of the anti working from home rhetoric comes from jealousy.

As long as you’re in a job where remote working is possible it’s not inherently easier to slack off. As numerous people have pointed out people who slack off will find as many ways to do so in the workplace as they do from home. I find it far easier to from home than the office. Far fewer distractions.

A lot of this is that these are mainly male driven businesses. For decades people were forced to come in even though it was burdensome in terms of school pickups etc. But women had to have their bums on seats in offices just so as not to be seen as allowed certain advantages over men.

When I started at my company I had a three year old and I negotiated a slightly earlier leaving time to pick my daughter up from nursery, but that I would log on at home and do more work later. In my first review I was told the young blokes in the office resented this. Even though I was working most evenings when they were in the pub.

COVID completely changed the rules of engagement and the “bums on seats” requirement was shown to be nonsense. Women are perfectly capable of doing more than a full day of work and also picking their kids up.

The “all back to the office” drive is the last trumpet of the dinosaurs as they desperately try to reset the world to one defined by men’s needs and their worldview. But the ship has sailed. Full time mandated office work is a thing of the past. People just need to stop whining about it.

I work in the NHS where there is a very clear divide between the people who work hard and the people who are unbelievably lazy. The latter are all working from home and agree management need to deal with it as they are all in posts that are paid at band 8 or higher

I’d get the public sector crowd back in the office personally and leave the private sector to work as they please

Interested hope they’d get away with not working at a band 8? I’m a 7 and wfh one day a week but there’s so much scrutiny on productivity. B8s spend most their time on teams meetings so my boss tries to come in but sits with her headset on so it’s pointless. Are your b8s not showing up to meetings? Or is this just your jealous perception?

I WFH some of the time but if the DCs are home it's not as productive. But sometimes I have to because of childcare (late primary/early secondary/SEN so no childcare but not completely independent).

Same, and I say that as someone who is 100% wfh and a manager of a team that are hybrid -remote. I'm mid / senior level and have flexibility on my hours, but always make sure I'm online & available when my key stakeholders / senior managers are. If I have to do school pick up or appointments, I can block myself as ooo and just let people know.

When I do this, I make up the time later to make sure I can still get work done that is expected of me- this week I worked in the evening on Weds & Thurs to get stuff finished.

I have a couple of people on my team who take the piss out of the current wfh arrangement and I call them out on it and they've got shitty. It really really annoys me as our flexibility is a key benefit that's often overlooked and they'd be the first to complain if it got taken away

I also WFH and do far more than contracted to as it's easier to just stay on for a little while. However some of my team really do not. Their productivity is less. Far less. Management let them get away with it because the rest of us step up. It's a massive bone of contention.

It surely depends on the nature of the workplace and the job.

In my work, I’m on the phone to clients having confidential conversations or doing concentrated tasks unique to each client, in a high pressure environment and it works well, especially as we rely on large employers to train new joiners - poaching larger orgs’ trainees - so we don’t have a concern about isolated young people who are not learning the ropes, but I’m nearly 60, with many years of experience. This is a regulated profession, and if you read the reports about people who are struck off, it’s quite often people who have tried to conceal mistakes under pressure and I wonder whether this kind of behaviour may be more prevalent when people work from home. There was a recent case of a young dad struck off for filling in a file management form saying he had completed some non-chargeable file reviews to account for some missing hours in the afternoon when he had children in the house because of an inset day. I felt a bit sorry for him tbh.

If you are a team of people working towards a common goal, that’s two hours you could be supporting the team inbox or helping out someone else who is busier than you at that time.

And, being a pedant, logging off at home and doing something else is breach of contract if you are contracted to work seven hours a day and only work five. I appreciate not everyone is 100% productive all of the time but there’s a difference between that and slacking off because you can.

logging off at home and doing something else is breach of contract if you are contracted to work seven hours a day and only work five.

Depends on the contract and whether you have permission to do so.

Presumably in the next few years, AI advances will eliminate a lot of the non-creative roles that can be performed on your own in your home. There’s also still quite a lot of outsourcing pressure, to move these kinds of roles to another country.

If I was younger, I think I might be worried about the impact of too much WFH on
my career prospects. It shouldn’t become a ‘mummy silo’.

You're partially right OP, but there are also the issues of recruitment and the labour market.

There are certainly some instances of bad management. In other cases, there aren't enough staff and managers aren't allowed to recruit more. Then there's the issue of supply and demand. There are some roles where a manager might be able to recognise that the staff are either taking the piss or incompetent, but also know they can't realistically expect to recruit any better for the package being offered.

People love to link up AI and remote working in this way. But if a role is going to be automated when technology allows, that's going to happen regardless of where it's currently being performed.

Re outsourcing pressure, we're talking about jobs that went remote no later than March 2020. That's a pretty long time. If they've not been outsourced, there are going to be reasons for that.

AI will have an impact on all kinds of jobs, both WFH and office-based.

The whole point of this thread is about managing people slacking off. If that was meant to be a gotcha perhaps read the OP again.