To ask why employers will bully, stomp and bribe with lunch vouchers to make staff go back to the office

[Everythingisnumbersnow]

But won't in any way make the office a nicer place to be?

Hotdesk serfdom is real.

Just give people a space and treat them like humans?

Without getting into a debate about the benefits of working from home vs not (but I will say that I think there are some benefits to both and therefore hybrid should be the way forward …)

YABU OP because the point is, employers should be able to tell staff “you need to return to the office” and staff should comply. Bearing in mind that the key word is RETURN so this is not a fundamental change to their terms and conditions of employment. It shouldn’t get to a point where the employer has to “bully” anyone. (It would be different if the employee had been hired as home-based in the first place.)

So I would flip it around and ask, why can’t employees follow a simple instruction without practically being bullied, or being bribed?

You still have physical phones?

I don’t visit many clients that still have handsets. They’re generally making calls via Teams / Webex or through VoIP applications hosted on their laptops. Headsets very much required.

But why should an employee mindlessly obey if the request is one to waste vast amounts of time commuting to a poorly planned office day? (It's different if it's well planned, and you are sat near team members etc).

😅😅😅😂😂 FFS.

We do indeed still have physical phones. On desks. That work. As well as meeting rooms and endless pods or booths or whatever to take Teams calls in. And many of us also have work cell phones which we can either use at a desk or if the call is personal or likely to be intrusive in anyway there is the option to move…
There are many companies where people are still able and willing to speak out loud in front of others…

Even if the previous government sold off some of the office space and now there's enough chairs for 1/3 of you and parking spaces for 1/4 of you?

That's just semantics. My point still stands, some people's homes are not nicer than their workplaces. The response was to the argument that it is always beneficial to work from home. It isn't for everyone. Some people suffer microagression at home from non-working partners. We have seen plenty of threads here on partners not understanding the need for the working partner to have space and quiet to do so. For some women, work is their only outlet from abusive partners.

Home isn't great for everyone, that's my point which was made against a backdrop of the suggestion that going into the office should be a thing of the past altogether. I don't dispute that the working environment isn't great for everyone, either. It very much hasn't always been great for me, but it's important to acknowledge that some people find benefit from physically attending work and it isn't just because they are annoying socialites.

Exactly.

If you have an abusive partner, or a partner constantly interrupting you to ask for help with the children, or live in a house share, or near noisy and chaotic neighbours, or your home is hard and expensive to heat.... It doesn't take much imagination to realise that for some people the office is the best place to be just because home isn't a peaceful and comfortable working environment. Several of my team worked from the office throughout the pandemic because home working was stressful. And I knew quite a few senior managers who did the same, in many cases because it was the only way they could focus at work. I expect they told their spouses they "had to" be at the office.

We use headsets, but only when on calls. The rest of the time they are on the desk.

Why are you laughing? There is zero chance of me getting any work done if I don't have headphones on.

It's really, really not.

It actually is possible to be better off at home even when you don't have a nice house with a proper workplace, and that's the key to the whole thing here. The base assumption that a physical workplace will be a certain level of suitable is wrong. A worker who still lives with their parents might still have a shit workplace. As I said, there's no mechanism whereby work being bad or inaccessible means your house must be lovely.

So I don't get why you'd create the example you did if you know the working environment can be awful for some people? You mentioned not having a proper office space at home, but presumably you realise that someone who's eg subject to racist microaggressions or unable to access a suitable physical workplace at all might still be better off working in their childhood bedroom in their parents house?

But perhaps the problem here stems from you thinking you were replying to a post claiming workers are always better off at home. Of course they're not. I never said that, or anything close to it. It's much more complex. People have different preferences and needs. The problem with a lot of the remote working discourse is people universalising their own experiences.

But I am arguing precisely against the 'universal experience'. I haven't said it isn't possible to be better off at home if your home environment isn't good. What I have said is that some people's home environments are not better than in-office ones are not better for them. IOf course there are some situations where even the most difficult of home environments will be better, but also the reverse is true.

I can acknowledge that some workplaces are toxic whilst also acknowledging that some home spaces are too, and that there are people in this world for whom the one is better than the other and that cuts both ways. It isn't a question of comparing microagressive racism to working on a bed. It's not that binary, is it? It was an example I used. I also used examples of abusive partners, which is a 24/7 problem for some, and work is some people's sanctuary.

You want me to acknowledge that in some cases any home environment is better than being at work, which is undeniably true and I haven't said it isn't.. Can you not acknowledge that for some the reverse is true?

This. I think it is important for the training of junior or even new employees to be in the office surrounded by others because they learn a lot by overhearing and casual chats. Also networking is bound to be better if people are in the same place, although you could replicate is to an extent with other types of gatherings.

Then why did you write

It's beneficial if you have a nice house to sit in, with a proper workspace, yes. I think a lot of people here don't understand that not all people doing office jobs with commutes are living in circumstances which facilitate home working.

... if what you actually meant was that you know home may still be preferable to workplace even if you (general) don't have these things? Especially in reply to a post of mine about how there's no inherent reason to assume. If your whole point is that things vary, we aren't actually in disagreement.

On your final point, I've already posted in this thread more than once that there's huge variation in what people like and function best in. Those were my exact words in a post on page 9. But happy to reiterate. There is no one way. Some people are better off fully in work, some fully remote, some hybrid.

It really is a problem when people generalise. See for example the constant repetition that young workers are better off in an office, which MN seems to be addicted to and which ignores all the young workers who aren't.

No that's rubbish. Employees aren't three year olds at nursery. Actually I think nursery tends to act with greater respect than that for three year olds these days!

If you can't convince an employee it will benefit them they shouldn't be going along with it.

The reason why they are doing it is because these businesses have taken out long leases on buildings and they have to pay to heat them and have lighting etc. going to these buildings and no one is in these buildings any more.

It's interesting that before the pandemic many businesses were going about their day and were planning office refurbishments etc. and then the pandemic hit but the wheels were already in motion for these refurbishments where lots of money was spent and now what they have are these lovely empty offices and they are still paying for them but they are under-utilised so they are trying everything in their arsenal to get people back in but people are very happy working where they are now as they don't have the commute issues or expense to deal with.

I will add to my earlier post that my employer had a terrible case of presenteeism before the pandemic. Managers needed to see their employees working at an allocated desk to believe that they are working.

What has happened, at least for me and my colleagues, is that management has seen by at least 3-5 years worth of data, that productivity has not diminished by us not being in an office and being able to work as independent adults who can produce at least the same level of output if not more (because managers are not breathing down their necks or they're being interrupted by phone calls or colleagues stopping by their desks) and that the workforce is happier because they don't have to deal with the stress of the daily commute to the office.

Throughout the pandemic, our team had daily check-in sessions (about 10-15 mins give or take) where we met on Teams and we would just see how everyone was doing. We've kept doing that and it's worked really well for us.

On a personal note - I find that during the anchor days in the office I now get less work done due to the socialising of colleagues, stopping by, having a coffee - these are now my least productive days at work and not my most productive. The noise and beeps (various machines/security doors/whatever) that happen in the office are terribly distracting and I can't wear headphones for a full day as I find my ears get awfully itchy (peri-menopause symptom I believe) so it really is one of the days of the week that I least look forward to.

So neurodivergence is essentially banned at your firm?

I worked from home for years and really see the benefit of it. However, I do think hybrid is the best of both worlds. I manage a team of about 20, mostly early career folks in their 20s - they are all expected in twice a week but once is fine at a minimum if something comes up. We are pretty flexible and I know they work hard so if they work late on something they can finish early another day etc. I trust them (most of them) to do the job well, and a large part of it is quite focused, head down work they can do best from home.

However, when we first returned to the office (one day a week), many really dragged their heels and we began to see a huge difference in terms of progress between the ones they came in and the ones that didn’t. Collaboration in person is a thing. I know you disagree, but being able to turn to the person next to you and ask a question, them being able to come and chat to me without having to call, being able to hear conversations from other parts of the business etc is really valuable.

i get you don’t want to do it, but I think you are being pig headed to deny there is any benefit to it. And I am all for employees raising their voices but ultimately if you have a contract that states mon-fri in the office and you are constantly making a fuss about it, you might have to consider that it’s not the place for you.

I think you are continuing to miss the point that people are different. It really stresses me to be in a room with a bunch of other people. My brain shuts down and I can't work at all. I'm a clever person but never managed to get promoted during the office years. Since COVID I've been promoted twice because working this way allows me to be my best.

I get that extroverts need it just as much as I need to never do it but the beauty of this world is we can structure it to take account of both needs. Surely.

And I definitely won't be going anywhere - contracts don't define everything when you can convince your employer of your value to them

Teams do collaborate better when together.

I'd love to see the actual evidence for this.

In my experience, collaboration on teams is far more effective. It is also less disruptive. A group of people "collaborating" in an open plan office is very distracting.

I think it's sad that people don't even want to leave their houses anymore.

I think it's sad extroverted people want introverted people to live in a way that makes them uncomfortable.

Some people absolutely do take the piss when WFH though and spoil it for everyone who works as hard or harder from home.

People who are not working efficiently when WFH are not working efficiently in the office. It's a management issue.

I WFH, I'm carrying almost twice my workload because the other guy who should be doing the job, who is in the office from 7.30 to 6.30 every day does pretty much nothing all day.

Also for junior colleagues learning by osmosis off other senior staff is really important. Sad that people who have benefited from this are now happy to pull the ladder up behind them and not contribute to supporting junior staff in this way. Training, coaching and mentoring is a big part of my job and it’s hard remotely I’m looking forward to doing it face to face again

Rather than relying on juniors learning by osmosis, I set aside time every day to check in remotely with each member of my staff to review their workload, see what tasks they are doing, talk them through issues they are having, point them towards who can help them. These are guys who are office based and it is really clear that my team are upskilling far better than the juniors in the office who are not being mentored by me and are largely left to their own devices and expected just to ask when they are struggling.