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?

You get your chosen media outlet to whine about a "skills shortage" and say you need to pay the executives more.

i haven’t read the full set of views - but mine, WFH is amazing for an individual in their isolation and 100% has a part to play in employee well being etc.

anyone who says a business is more effective as a result is a dreamer though. The power of the whole is always greater than the sum of individual parts and that’s only possible with close collaboration.

i love a good WFH day, and whilst I personally get more done, the impact on those around me is at least equal in negative impact.

And let’s face it, if your role can genuinely be done 100% remote with zero collaboration with your actual team, at can be done got a 1/3 of the price abroad.

careful what you wish for!

The employer will obviously need to decide whether it's beneficial to get their workers to work according to their contracts.

And let’s face it, if your role can genuinely be done 100% remote with zero collaboration with your actual team, at can be done got a 1/3 of the price abroad.

Or by AI very soon.

My workplace seems to have managed to move to a policy of a minimum of 60% in office time with little fuss or whining.

I do two days a week WFH and three days in the office and that suits me. I am one of tbe few who does a Friday in the office - I love the quiet time to really focus on writing or analysis work. I think effective hybrid working means being honest with yourself about your work weaknesses and strengths as well. I also think older workers do, to a certain extend, owe it to younger and less experienced colleagues to be present.

That will just lead to a demand for people to project manage. Take if from me, having managed 3 offshore development agencies, quantity doesn't always mean quality and you really do get what you don't pay for.

Most of the really good talent has been snapped up by the huge megacorps - Microsoft, Google, Apple.

If you've been following the fortunes of "AI" even casually, you'll have realised how shit it is as anything you need to trust.

It can't even write a fucking headline - and instant summary of complex ideas is supposed to be it's party trick. If you want "AI" diagnosing your health then be my guest. I'm quite fond of living myself.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/07/apple_responds_bbc_complaint/

With the use of the business skill called planning, I think you can get almost all the benefits of face to face conversations/meetings etc at work in a day or maybe two. Perhaps more is needed when people start in a job.

Employers who after almost five years since the pandemic restrictions started have decided to force people back into offices five days a week seem to me to be poor or weak managers. Not able or willing to deal with poor performers, or manage meetings effectively.

Take a simple example. I host a meeting which starts on time. Always 100%, none of this 'give it a couple of minutes'. Guess what, about 99% of the time everyone joins on time, as they know they will not be kept waiting.

Agree 100% - particularly in Tech as I am. 1x quality PM and perhaps a BA or two. We’re about 25% near/ offshore currently but the more needy people are becoming, I can see it shifting further over time. 🤷‍♂️

There is a predictable feeling that (as usual) education in business seems to prioritise the flash over the practical.

The fact that the world thinks Elon Musks meeting rules are somehow anything other than common sense says it all.

Because as you get older you realise what a waste of time and money commuting is.

I commuted in to London for 20 years and I had had enough by then. If the trains and tubes were reliable then it might be different but I resent using my hard earned money to pay train and tube drivers who get paid more than me and who go on strike at the drop of a hat.

My company are making noises about it while simultaneously reducing office space. Our office is a big shiny building that looks superficially nice, but it's not a functional space. It's noisy, we are crammed far too close together, the blinds don't keep out the sun, none of the meeting rooms is set up well to facilitate how we work and there sometimes aren't enough desks. I'm starting to feel extremely pissed off about the situation.

When I compare what I had when I started work 20 years ago it's hard not to think companies are saving an absolute fortune on office space and we aren't seeing it in our wages.

I had my own desk and pedestal where I could keep my stuff. The desk was twice the size of my current one, due to it needing to fit a CRT. And there was space for someone to come and look at my screen without sitting in the lap of my neighbour. I didn't spend ages setting up and packing up morning and evening. I didn't have to lug a laptop home because there's nowhere secure to store it even if I'm in the next day.

I loved my train commute. I had two hours a day reading my book in peace.

Try training MS Teams to recognise your voice. Search for 'voice isolation'. It's made an amazing difference to my ability to actually take phonecalls. And took very little time to set up.

But I hear you on the shitty office. Those stuff sounds petty, but it really matters. We just feel like we are camping in our current office.

Yep, plus there is always a % of staff on annual leave, non-working day, travelling for work, out at meetings all day.

It is rubbish not having a desk if your own, but 6 for 10 is very rarely a problem if there’s a basic booking and allocation system.

How on earth does the AI claim remotely follow?

The offshoring thing is way out of date, and ignores that roles being done now have almost invariably been that way for half a decade or more. If they've not been sent abroad by now, there's a reason. But there is at least some vague logic to it in that we know some roles have been offshored.

But why on earth conflate AI with remote vs in person work? If AI can do a job more cheaply and/or better than a job that's being done now, that will happen whether the person doing it is in an office or at home.

It's not "AI".

Presenteeism for its own sake seems daft, especially when there are not enough desks.

As a general rule, people who take the mickey do that whether at home or in the office and vice versa.

Company wide mandates about set numbers of days in the office pay no heed to what happened prior to covid (sometimes it made sense for the same person to work remotely for a couple of weeks and be full time in office the next), especially when there aren't enough desks.

There are people at firms who want to be in the office more, but can't because others are using their mandated days to sit on earphones on meetings to people in other offices.

People who vary their work patterns depending upon the project and time zone they are working in. Teams at points in projects where it makes sense for them all to decamp to a certain office can't do this unless it's booked far in advance, taking no account of fluidity of projects.
People who previously would have just worked from home when there were engineering works traipse in - for what? Blanket policies don't work.

Some firms have benefitted by e.g. working from home when able while contagious, whilst others would rather other staff became sick but a tickbox of days in the office was met.

Many people work numerous additional hours to their contracts, are unofficially expected to log on in the evening, respond to emails OOH, write up reports etc. Commuting time (when unnecessary) on top isn't helpful.

I think for the firms that are mandating going back full-time where it doesn't necessarily make sense, this policy will be short-lived. As the next generation move into more senior positions and able to influence company policy, I think more flexible working practices will return. Also, as more and more people develop disabilities (long covid etc) it seems daft to increase inflexible working practices.

I am disabled and wouldn't be able to work without wfh.

Exactly - this is what is happening in the tech industry currently. A lot of tech companies massively over-hired during covid on the mistaken assumption that lockdown-induced growth trends would continue. Many of them have had large scale layoffs in the past year, and a fulltime RTO mandate is a quick and cheap way to lose a lot of staff without having to pay severance or redundancy.

And let’s face it, if your role can genuinely be done 100% remote with zero collaboration with your actual team, at can be done got a 1/3 of the price abroad

well it can, but its hardly my fault. Its a basic admin job 🤷🏻

i like going into the office but as its an hour (if i am lucky) each way i am glad its only 1 day a week!

A lot of tech companies massively over-hired during covid on the mistaken assumption that lockdown-induced growth trends would continue.

So they weren't very good business leaders then.

I love working from home but grudgingly I can see my employers have a point about coming back into the office. Its a struggle though as so many more senior workers, who have been in their roles for years and are quite comfortable are very resistant to coming back in even a few days a week to help support younger and newer staff. Its quite selfish, I'm alright jack behaviour if you ask me. Then these same people turn around and complain about newer or more junior staff not being any use.

Many companies were initially quite excited about the possibilities of home working but it isn't working out as they expected. Productivity is slipping and so they want people back. I've had multiple people tell me to my face that their productivity is so much better at home when I can see from their stats that they aren't being more productive at all. When many say they are more productive they are also including a bunch of personal stuff like getting household chores done, picking the kids up from school and so on along with actual paid work.

It is quite evident the way the wind is blowing and the more people drag their feet and kick up a fuss the more hard-line employers are becoming. I'd agree to hybrid working 2 or 3 days a week before you get dragged in to the office full time again.

The reason we have to go into the office is so that the company doesn’t outsource our jobs to the developing world and pay someone peanuts to do the same thing.

That’s a good enough reason to slog in.