To think this is a surefire way to insist that everyone comes back into the office?

[Pleasebeafleabite]

Latest BBC News link today. If I was an employer and I was forced into giving staff compulsory four day weeks based on compressed hours, I’m be making sure they were doing them in the office.

Yet more unintended consequences

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gl5w83z7do

Circumstances? Like what ? You won’t pay for childcare and expect your employer to let you do both at home?

How are you measuring productivity?

If the daily work tasks have been followed up and completed before the deadline. If meetings have been attended and full focus given. If customers are happy with the service provided. If employees is available and present during work hours. If targets that have been discussed and agreed upon are met.

That’s really all I ask.

My personal belief is that if companies managed workers 'salaries per year' based on outcomes rather than 'hours worked' this would be easier to manage. Just because you are logged on for 8 hours per day means nothing. It's what you deliver.

No.

Like the fact that in some roles, working flexibly can be done.

In some roles, it is possible to make time up later when the other parent has come back.

In some roles, there are no customer facing requirements.

Sometimes, nurseries close. And others have extensive waiting lists. If that happened to one of your employees, are you going to sack them because until they can source other childcare, they have no options?

Or because the children went to a grandparent who became ill or died, and the nursery waiting list is too high?

Or even, that the person actually manages to do both?

Circumstances. They are all different and they can change.

I think it's both person and industry specific. My job is client based and I manage a range of clients and all their needs. I can bust a gut and get lots of work done for them to a high quality in a shorter period of time, which in turn enables me to have some downtime. OR, I can work slow and steady and fill my week with the same work. I can't maintain the bust-a-gut work rate for a full week without very quickly burning out.

I also want to add I am a manager and I would totally trust my team to WFH on compressed hours. Again, maybe my industry lends itself well to this when others don't.

In the interim, of course while they are rectifying the situation. Long term no. If an employee cannot do the set hours I need.. then no.
If it is a job where their hours are from say 5 pm when their partner comes home to mind the kids and they work then till midnight for the hours I am paying them for.. absolutely no problem providing the job is not front facing.

What's long term? Because some nurseries have 2 year waiting lists. If someone can't find another nursery place, you're sacking them?

So because it affects you, your employer must make allowances? Menopause might cause the odd relapse, it might also mean almost daily issues, as well you should be aware of.

But no allowances for a younger woman with a child, struggling with childcare.

I can see your argument ha ha!

Find a childminder, what would happen if you were actually in an office? Leave or find a childminder pretty quick smart.

😂😂😂 menopause does not stop people from working. PAY for childcare like the rest of the bloody world who work. Excuses excuses.

That. Exactly.

Somebody I knew through another forum maintained that managers focus on the most complicated thing they can understand. If that's timekeeping it tells you a lot about the manager's skillset.

It's not bombproof as a theory but if the work's getting done to the required standard and quantity why worry if folks do exactly 7hrs 15mins 'on the clock'?

That said being away from your desk when you're supposed to be there is an easier charge to nail on somebody than working out where they were...

Commuting time is not counted as working hours though, so it is just the ‘office chat’ time and an employer would rather we do that than the 5 min household chores here and there that WFH allows us to do. At least coffee machine chat is team-building.

(I’m very pro-WFH, don’t get me wrong!)

So you would sack someone if their childcare fell through and there were no spaces elsewhere.

Good to know. I hope you can't be identified.

No, I would give them time to find alternative arrangements but as stated in the contract, children CAN NOT be present during work hours.

@ClowningAround21 You've quoted me wrongly as you well know.

I applauded your employer for working to find a solution to keep a valued employee.

But your argument that people can commit to concentration in work without childcare - not flexibly around it - is just not true.

And comparing it to the menopause just isn't a good comparison. You're grasping at straws and it invalidates any good points you make.

We are transitioning into a more grown-up way of working, enabled by technology to be more possible than before. It's going to take time for employees and employers to get this right, but a good starting point is getting rid of this seemingly prevalent attitude that WFH employees would be in this odd sort of void in which normal company protocols don't apply.

I have yet to have an answer about why doing the same job in a different location means productivity cannot be monitored and managed in just the same way it is for that same person if they worked in an office.

It's not people WFH that is the problem. It's the inability to adjust management styles and working practices that have been in place for generations. It's presuming that we can't do anything about people taking the piss just because they aren't in front of us every day.

There is absolutely no reason why WFH should equal lower productivity. There's no reason why it should be easier to take the piss, either.

Fitting our work around our lives isn't always possible. It won't work in every industry or for every worker. But it's progress to look at change, instead of just writing it off in favour of outdated assumptions and 'how it's always been'.

The option to compress hours is, as many have said, not new. Neither is WFH, it's just gained traction since COVID and is easier given available technology.

We can't be dinosaurs and dismiss alternative options to the traditional office 9-5 on the basis of assumptions and unwillingness to adapt. So much has changed in working practices over the last 40 years in so many businesses. I am old enough to remember supermarkets being closed on Sundays and from 6pm on weekdays. They have adapted to changing needs. Other industries based on 9-5 in office models may find they too need to adapt to changing needs.

We need to stop being afraid of this, and above all, we need to stop assuming it 'won't work, because people will do this and this' and start thinking, 'it can work if we implement this and this'. We can't go on pretending it's acceptable to ignore the challenges of continuing to work with small children, or being closed-minded about those who struggle with traditional structures.

As employees, we can't expect every job to cater to our needs, but I don't think we do. I think more people are just refusing to accept a mulish adherence to traditional patterns of work where it is demonstrably unnecessary.

I'm actually a bit confused about this announcement, because we already have the right to request flexible working, and to me, it's just another form of flexible working. However, it's possible there's an official legal definition thst I'm unaware of.

To me, flexible working can include:

• Early or late start or finish times
• Split days (had a colleague who finished at 2pm then started again at 6pm and did the rest of his hours - his contract was updated to reflect this.)
• compressed hours where you do the same total number of hours over a shorter week, usually with the same day off each week
• flexi time, where you can do extra hours to build up extra days off, where you book it like leave
• shorter hours, be it one less day a week, or earlier finishing times (one department in a former company all went to 4 days a week to avoid anyone being made redundant - pay went down by a fifth to reflect it, but better than going to zero for anyone, and the days off were spread round the group, so they weren't all out on the same day.)
• options to work from home or alternative office locations
• probably other things I can't think of.

A lot depends on the work in question. My father was a farmer do essentially always worked from home. If he was actually working in the house, taking calls, doing paperwork etc, we knew from a young age not to interrupt if the door was shut. At this time of year, he'd be flat out harvesting (especially as it's been a wet summer.)

It's very different from most of my work in IT, which I've been able to do from home for a quarter of a century (I've been doing on-call that long.) I have a hybrid contract, and we're encouraged to be in on the same day every week, for team-building, collaboration purposes, but I can go in other days if I wish. I've worked in global teams where we've all been in different countries and timezones, so it didn't really matter if we were in the office or not, as long as there was a working network connection. And most of my paid work in my student years was on casual contracts, and we worked it all out with discussion, covering shifts which could go from 6am up to 10pm, which worked for the gaps in their schedules, and mine.

Obviously some jobs have to be face-to-face or in person. Some businesses have to cover particular hours. Some have out of hours work. The output of particular jobs will be different. The cycles of different jobs vary - farmers are harvesting, teachers see ready for a new influx of students, my work's been fairly steady through all that.

So there's not going to be a one rule that fits all. Different employees also have different needs, just as different employers do. But if people are having discussions about it, it may help less enlightened employers realise there are other ways of doing business and managing people, maintaining productivity and improving employee loyalty. Technology today gives us lots more options. IME, employees who feel their needs are recognised will tend to be more loyal and more invested in the business, whatever sort of organisation it is. There will still be some skivers, but they were still around before we had the capabilities for homeworking too.

I have friends already doing this. It generally means getting five days work done in only four and being paid pro rata. So not always win win.

Compulsory compressed hours? Ridiculous, it stuffs up the work life balance for those of us who do activities after work or have other commitments.

I'm a teacher, I would like to see how this will work 😹Clue - it won't.

Age must come into it, I don't think working from home all day with a baby or toddler is fair to the child never mind the employer. An 11 year old in school holidays or for an hour after school is very different.

Then they are people who have chosen to go part-time. Which is another option but isn't the one being discussed. Compressed hours is exactly 5 days work in 4 days (or 10 days in 9 days) but paid the same because the total hours are the same.

My husband used to work Mon to Thursday one week and Monday to Saturday the other week. I loved it, the week he didn't work Friday I came home to the house vacuumed, bathroom/kitchen cleaned, shopping done, laundry done, meal in the oven. Then we had the weekend free. The following week I did all that stuff on the Saturday and then we had a nice Sunday. It worked really well for us.

Absolutely. An 11 year old can look after themselves.

Four day weeks are great for couples working F/T with kids who need childcare imo. They can reduce the cost by only needing childcare 3 days pw if they pick the days right.

I think it's an excellent idea. The only drawback is that nearly everyone will want Monday or Friday off, so services may be more stretched on those days, but managers should be able to sort that out.

Going back to the office f/t isn't going to happen where I work, either. They've sublet 25% of the office space, so there wouldn't be room and are happy with staff in office-based roles going in 40% of their time. And the 40% rule is only applied to those roles that are wholly office based, most staff spend a significant part of their time in community settings.