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?

Maybe I'll do just that 😂. I'm afraid I wouldn't have the right skills though 🤔

It's the traffic jams that are getting to me - a lot. It's getting worse & worse, so bad that I'm thinking there's more to life than sitting in a jam wasting time & petrol. At almost 60 years old I'm on the verge of quitting to have a few months at home looking for the right wfh/hybrid role for me. However, I'm worried about not getting another job because of age discrimination. It's a dilemma

It depends on the job, my job doesn't have that kind of thing because it's a standard call centre role
I can go a whole day in the office without speaking to another colleague except saying hi and bye! We don't need to have discussions about ideas, we don't have team meetings and it's a very sort of on your own job

Agree...we have become shockingly antisocial since Covid. I hated WFH, no commute but so boring and lonely.

I don't agree with this.

Some people (myself included) just don't enjoy going to the office. I go, because I have to, but it severely impacts my mental health every week. I literally count down the days and am filled with dread the nights before I have to go in.

It doesn't benefit me in any way, shape or form.

Added to which it's such an old person, middle class priviledge. When you already have your own home, not a shared house. You have space, you have relationships, you have an established career. "WFH is great, I can stick a wash on and potter around my kitchen". Not if you live in one room in a craphole and use the laundrette you can't. Loneliness is as injurious to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Don't think of you WFH with your family and friends all established. Think of a 20 yo, just moved to a new place, new job, no partner,
bedsit.
@MrsTerryPratchett 100% agree with this.

It seems ironic that the most enthusiastic supporters of WFH are likely to be Gen Z when actually they have the most to lose by it.

The only time in my career I did more than the odd day WFH was during the Covid lock down. Both DH and I were working at home so we had each others company and yes all those benefits of pottering in to the kitchen, sitting out in the garden for lunch etc.

Must have been bloody awful for someone isolated in a bedsit though a long way from family and friends. Or starting their first job when they have never met their colleagues face to face, and if they need to ask for any help it can't just be an informal quick chat at someones desk.

A PP mentioned the intangible benefits of learning from senior colleagues by just being in the same space. Definitely true.

But it benefits others. Ultimately you are being paid to do a job and the company needs to try maximize profits to be able to pay your salary

Overqualified. Got it. 😀

Which is absolutely fine - and I do go, without complaint and nobody knows that I don’t want to. But to state me being in the office benefits everyone isn’t true. Because it doesn’t benefit me. At all! I go in on Mondays and the whole office is in on a Tuesday. On Mondays, there might only be three of us in. So I spend a fortune on commuting, get up at the crack of dawn and spend two hours in total driving - and for what? Total waste of time.

Why don’t you go on a Tuesday instead then?

So why do you go in Monday and not Tuesday?

This is indeed true. They can't really expect everyone back in then, can they?

Hot desking is totally totally shit. There is a reason senior managers do not do it

Maybe so she can actually get a desk

Ithink there are a lot of good reasons employers want people to go back to the office. But they also need to think seriously about creating a good work environment. If they do shit like hot-desking then they will struggle to get people to want to work there.

no one in our place sits near their team due to hot desking. It makes coming into the office (which doesn’t bother me) totally pointless. No one talks to anyone else because they don’t know who they’re sat next to. It’s terrible and v depressing and lonely.

That’s enough for 60% then! You’ve proved my point. They just have to use the Monday and Friday. With leave days factored in that’s enough.

I’m in the Civil Service. Senior managers in my department all hot desk. They are also supposed to lead by example and do more than the 60% everyone else is doing.

An employee isn't a monkey nor a charity.
Not even a slave hopefully.

I've worked in companies where its hybrid, and people really did take the piss/do far less work on WFH days. It was common knowledge that you'd never get a meeting scheduled/get hold of anyone on a Wednesday or a Friday, which was terrible really.

This was my experience too. A lot of the recent studies have shown an about turn where the increased productivity we saw after Covid has now turned into significantly reduced productivity.

@LiquoriceAllsorts2 @DownThePubWithStevieNicks

I do go in on a Tuesday. I have to. The whole office goes in on a Tuesday.

I just can't see any point in going in on a Monday when the office is virtually empty - but that's what I've been told I have to do.

I've told mr boss exactly this too.
Currently have officially 3 days RTO, 2 fixed days, 1 day of our choice.
Getting by on mainly 1 day, maybe 2 days a week for a workshop etc.

Same with us. Our mandate is ‘majority of your time in the office’, so 11 days a month minimum.
I go in on a Monday, and to another much closer office (drop in zone) on a Friday. The rest of my team don’t come in on a Monday, and my Friday office is worse commute for them, so won’t go there.
On my floating day, usually a Thursday, we are all dispersed on the floor due to the hot desking.
So basically I am meeting them once a week for lunch.
I’ve been with the company for years, so don’t need to build any networks or have ‘coffee machine chat’ bollocks. We don’t employ youngsters, all new hires are offshore anyway, so no one is suffering from lack of office culture.

Ironic to be talking about privilege when the idea that remote working is bad for Gen Z as a whole is itself privileged, and excludes whole groups of people.

Being a young worker doesn't actually exempt one from barriers to office work. Gen Z contains people who have caring responsibilities, disabilities, distance from the best job markets and all the other things that make in person work a problem for some people. The examples given in this discussion thus far are of Gen Z workers who are missing out, not of Gen Z workers who'd never have been able to get the job in the first place if it couldn't be done remotely. Why are the former more important than the latter?

It's quite obvious that what @MrsTerryPratchett is talking about here is actually herself and people like her as a young worker, and extrapolating that to young workers as a whole. Making some who actually could move for a job at 20 the standard (as if that's so accessible to non middle class people now!).

But there were always people who missed out on opportunities due to the norm of in person work. That was happening 10, 20, 30 years ago. It's just that evidently, a lot of MNers didn't notice. If we are going to have discussions about remote working and privilege, this particular failure to see needs to be corrected.

Yes, a sensible employer realises that they need to ensure time in the office is actually beneficial.

We have team areas and team days in the office. So when we do go in we are sat together and see each other. And team meetings.etc. are scheduled for those days. I plan for my office days to be less productive in the "getting things done sense" but hugely beneficial in terms of conversations that are best had face to face. The team days tend to be quite chatty and the the rest of the week we are all very focused