To ask if you (also) just ignore your "required" days in the office?

[Everythingisnumbersnow]

I am supposed to do two days. But the office is a minging hotdesk box full of coughing weirdos and the toilets are smeared with shit by 910am.

I can't do my job well in the office so I just don't go. I do manage people and they seem to appreciate the flexibility (half go into the office sometimes, half never do, we perform well).

Anyway it's been a real eye opener for the power of low key just defying silly rules.

Anyone else?

(If they cracked down I'd go elsewhere)

I’m supposed to be in 40% of my time. In the three years I’ve worked for my organisation, there has been one person in the five teams I’ve worked in based at my office. So I drive half an hour to sit in an office surrounded by people I don’t know to spend the day on teams.

Collaboration it is not.

Our toilets are nice though.

about once a month I drive the several hours to the office location where the majority of my colleagues are based, and remember that in person stuff is fine (in moderation!).

I haven't read the full thread yet - so forgive me if I say anything out of turn.

My company is mandating 4 days a week, where failure to comply can/will be taken up as misconduct and can be terms for termination.

This is a job that has been operating as WFH during the pandemic, so not a role that can only be executed on-site.

So.I don't think there will be much scope to ignore the required days. I can already see them making the rounds and taking notes and our card passes are obviously monitored too, especially as they're not longer physical passes, but on your phone.

Maybe it's great cost cutting exercise -

The job market isn't great at the moment in my industry, with constant layoffs happening, so I will be complying. However, they are flexible and will let me manage my schedule for school pick ups and drop offs as long as the work gets done and clients are happy.

3 days a week would have been my sweet spot.

I’ve just found out that ours is monitored by desk booking!

I had been doing it but hadn’t been booking desks - I’ve told my manager and she’s fine with it - I’ve only been there a few months. I was just leaving my teams with out a background so that people could see where I was!

What sort of caged animals work in your office?

The thing is-if you pick & choose which rules you want to follow you won't have a leg to stand on if one of your team chooses to ignore some other rule.. and you'll certainly never be able to enforce a disciplinary sanction on any of them if needed. Employment Tribunals tend to take a very dim view of a 'one rule for me, another for them' approach to team management. So unless you are sure that none of your team is EVER going to need a performance improvement/disciplinary meeting then I think you should do what you are supposed to do-go to your office as required-and also have a chat with your organisation about the frequency of toilet cleaning in your POW.

That's not really how life works

Stupid rules can be ignored without imperiling logical ones

Ok, your choice. But what I have said stands. You might not like it but that IS how life works when you anre dealing with employment contracts and performance. Informal arrangements are all well and good until they're not. And if you ever end up in an ET (defending or making a claim) you will discover that. Good luck! You'll need it if you are going to remain as a team leader, or even just an employee.

I would work on the interpretation that you may be required in the office up to two days a week. So, if they needed you for a meeting or a collaboration for example, they could insist you're in the office 2/5. Otherwise I'd just continue WFH.

Who said anything about toilet walls?

That’s exactly how life works! You’re clearly another mums netter that asks a question but only wants answers validating what you want to do. If you worked for me you’d come into the office when I asked you to or you’d never come in again. Work is not a ‘do as you like’ environment, you’re paid to do your job, where, when and how your employer asks you to. Arrogance and entitlement in my opinion!

Our team is unusual in that it is small (just 6) and split over 3 countries. So I do my mandated days in the office, and send a mail if I cant get in, to explain why. My manager is on mainland Europe, so he wouldn't know anyway, and thinks the mails are hilarious, but appreciates that log-in for London staff is tracked online, and I'm just covering myself. We were all on some level of hybrid arrangement for years before the pandemic started.
Broadly, work for many staff in the London office requires some level of in-person communication. So although my role clearly doesn't, I think its more pragmatic to comply than to bother a load of senior people trying to get sign-off as special case, when I might need a favour from them in future.

You really are a piece of work. Money's on you not surviving outside of the civil service

Surely you meant to write "Rules I think are stupid can be ignored without imperilling logical ones".

Otherwise who's the judge of whether a rule is stupid? One of your staff may well decide that a rule that you think is a logical one, to their mind is stupid, so they are able to ignore it the way you can ignore rules you don't agree with.

The chances of OP really working in the Civil Service or being a Senior Manager are next to nil. She’s full of shit.

I think I agree. I used to be a middle management Civil Servant, my DBro is a senior Civil Servant, and I can't see the OPs behaviours being ignored. I do know there are still a (very) few of the old style CS around who are very anti to change as such, but those mostly seem to be more junior grades - highest level I ever met that had that attitude as what used to be HEO, and that was nearly 30 years ago.

Unless they work for an exceptionally specialised role, you just can't get away with blatantly ignoring the rules you don't agree with. And I would doubt very much that they are that specialised - specialists in the CS are notoriously underpaid for their specialism (I got a roughly 30% pay increase when I left, for a lower responsibility role in the private sector), yet they say in London they couldn't find a job at a higher salary.

I do, but then my attendance is monitored as there is a report auto-generated from our badge-access (we tap a badge to get in and move around the office). We only need to do 20% over a 3 month period, so some weeks that might mean a few days, other weeks no days, but more often we are all just doing a minimum of 1 day per week on the regular. I honestly don't mind it at all, but our office is lovely and I really like meeting colleagues for lunch and sharing information which we couldn't reasonably do via email/Teams etc.

We don't have particular days required, but have to go in for spwcific activities. I feel anyone who needs to have their employee sat next to them to work has hired the wrong person, but then we worked from home a lot before covid too. Performance was always much more important than presenteeism in my industry in general, but a client the other day commented on 3 days mandated in the office, it's really odd and I don't really understand the reasons.

I used to work for a company where you could work from home every day but they had an ‘optional’ social day when we all came in. The idea was supposed to be that ideas could be exchanged, training would be completed, discussions could be discussed and we could brainstorm for the betterment of the company. There were also daily Teams meetings. The social day sounded fantastic.
The first day in the office NOBODY SPOKE TO EACH OTHER! It was utterly claustrophobic. It was a small office and there were only four of us. Every attempt to ask about something work related was killed stone dead. Everything, was communicated by email or chat, despite the fact that we were only feet apart.
In the end I stopped going in on the social day. Training never happened, ideas were flattened because the directors liked everything to remain the same and nothing was discussed.
Then I was asked why I wasn’t coming in, the directors were furious that I felt this was what the social days were like and suddenly the ‘social days’ became compulsory!
That was when I started looking for a new job.

I have to go in on my required days, but if I could get away with not doing so I definitely would!

Jesus you really are a nasty piece of work.

I remember reading a thread during COVID from a woman whose son was a civil servant and was supposed to be working from home on full pay. She said he logged into his work's system each day then went back to bed or played playstation for most of the day in his pyjamas and it seemed that no-one was actually monitoring his work output or supervising him remotely.

Obviously not everyone is going to take the piss like that, or be able to get away with it, but the fact that anyone can is infuriating. It's not like it's a private company that will fold if the work doesn't get done. The smooth running of the country depends on civil servants to get out of bed in the morning and actually do what they are bloody well paid for, in a timely fashion.

Even if 10% of civil servants do far less at home than they would feel obliged to do in an office full of people, that translates to a huge amount of lost productivity and cost to the state each year. And civil servants were not exactly known for their great work ethic to start with.

VERY much an exception to the rule nowadays! Obviously Department dependant, but numbers have been cut so much and teams combined that I know a team that used to be 2 teams of 6 and 8 people respectively, that is now 1 team of 6 with the same remit. Many teams being cut completely, and their work being shared out among already overloaded areas.

As I said, Department dependant so there may well be some who continue to slack off but the vast majority don't. They just get abuse from members of the public because they dared take a 20 minute lunch break when somebody called, or (shock, horror) went to the loo or made a cuppa between the hours of 8:30 and 5:30. Or took an entire 3 days annual leave. Or tried to prioritise a single mother with a disabled child over the perfectly healthy 25 year old.

Couldn't agree more. Feather bedded public funded employment to start with, now royally abused by this OP., showing her staff what they can try to get away with. 90% of tax office, 70% of MOD, still WFH. Try getting a response out of any of them.

If someone can work from home some days, then logically the security and logistical needs have been taken care of. That is not the problem here.

Working from home does not equal not working; if someone slacks off only at home then that is a problem even if it's one day each week. Allowance is made for 2 days WFH, so slacking is not the issue either, and is a red herring.

There are advantages of doing some work in person; training juniors, workshop style collaboration, personal meet & greet to expand trust, social networking. Those are the reasons why hybrid arrangements exist. Wthout knowing OP's job nor team, it's impossible to know what the impact is of her not going in. I'm not even sure why posters think they understand that by being given nothing more than the info that she is public sector.

Feather bedded public funded employment to start with,

I'm sorry? Do you have ANY idea about being a lower level; Civil Servant? Salary - below average for the level of the work (often because the work is graded lower than in private industry). People on here talking about whether they get fruit etc as well as their tea & coffee etc at work - not for a CS, you can't even get tea & coffee for a meeting unless there's outside people present let alone have anything supplied at tea points. The older version pensions have all been changed nowadays; of course in those older days they would justify the crap salary because of the pension. Many of you get health insurance or life insurance through work - not CS. Many buildings are near enough falling apart as maintenance isn't done for cost reasons.

Yes life's OK for the Senior CS, but anyone below that you really aren't in a "feather bedded" job at all!