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)

At least 6 people at a small exercise class I go to are supposed to be WFH. I know, because they laugh and boast.
I don't care if they still "get their job done", they are skiving.
It's behaviour like that that makes companies distrust staff... rightly in these cases.

My office requires 1 day a week and I was upset about this. But now that I'm complying, it is fine. I hate the commute but you can't deny you do build more relationships in person. Toilet is clean though.

I do however feel sad that we will lose some great talents, those who live too far from the office but are forced to comply.

I am meant to be in 2 days a week and i pretty much always am but occasionally won't be. I am pretty flexible with my teams as well and they tend to be in office as much as they should be but i wouldn't be annoyed if they missed the odd day.

Our policy is two days a week. Our team have an unwritten rule it is one day. However you need a bloody good reason not to drag yourself in on that day. If we have additional strategy days, there is certainly no excuse not to be there in person. Sometimes, about once a year we need to be there every day and we all do it, because our boss is flexible and fair.

However, I like my team. Our office is a lovely part of central London. We go out to a cafe for lunch or buy a sandwich and sit outside and eat it on nice days. Our office is lovely and in general our business treats it's employees incredibly well and very fairly.

Why take a job that requires you to be an office so far away from where you live that you can’t get there? Or is this a case of people who upped sticks to cheaper or more rural areas when companies were more flexible post-pandemic, and are now surprised that they might have to actually go to work?

It's people like you that will ruin it for everyone else when they crack down and make you go in to the office full time.

Defy all you like but don’t be surprised when the next promotion goes to someone who bothers to make an effort and has a good attitude. Yous stinks like your work toilets.

But are they bragging that they are pulling a fast one over on their bosses? Or just that they have time? (It's uncouth either way) But some companies do not expect their employees to be at their desk 9-5 ~ in my company many of us block time out of our calendars for exercise classes and the company encourages us to do so (and subsidises the memberships/classes!) as it's good for our mental health and ultimately makes us more productive.

We are all supposed to do two days too. I don't mind and am often in all week but I don't enforce it on my team unless I'm made to by my own manager, which happens periodically. If I were to make a big thing of it, I'd never be away from HR because everyone thinks they are a special case. I have enough to do without policing bums on seats.

I lot of companies now do not have the office space to have everyone in 5 days a week.

In some organisations possibly. In my case that’s not it.

There are aspects of our roles that are probably better sone from
home / a quiet section of the office. There are other aspects that are much better done face to face. It’s also much easier to train up new staff / coach / mentor / learn from others when you’re working alongside them.

So when people routinely don’t turn up for their office time and it hampers efficiency and / or effectiveness of some of those activities it frustrates me.

No shortage of friends in my case (and it’s generally better for social stuff to work from home rather than in the office for me).

Where I work the managers are as bad. Had a network outage recently and no one on the higher grades was coming in. If it's bad weather no one is coming in except those who are doing the grunt work. Oh it's wet/cold/hot/no trains/office too hot/cold.

If it helps understand:

It costs me more in time, effort and £ to go to the office, and to have childcare for my working hours even when I work from
home.
I do it because:
a) my employers policy says I should
b) it enables me to do my job better
c) it enables my colleagues to do their job better
d) it improves delivery of our organisations objectives.

Others don’t, and ‘get away with it’ even though it has a negative impact on all
of the above. If we all lowered ourselves to their standards then delivery would drop to a level that would not be viable and big changes would be made, so they rely on others essentially covering for them in order to continue with not following the policies.

Same concept as when someone consistently doesn’t cover their share of the bill for something.

We insisted on four days a week in the office after Covid. There was uproar, but we stuck to our guns, and those who had moved to Cornwall and Yorkshire were reminded that their contracted place of work was London. Interestingly only one resigned. We were flexible around childcare, told people to wfh if they had a cold (so not ill enough to be off sick but well enough to wfh), and there was surprisingly little grumbling once people readjusted. The younger people much preferred working from the office, the older ones not so
much.

I would if I could. We have mandatory 2 days a week on site and they are very strict with it. Wave makers are unofficially punished through poor annual bonus so I suck it up. Few requests for 100% WFH get as far as the execs with the power to grant it as they're stamped out by senior management first.

I'm tied there until next year as I have a 5 year sharesave I'm unwilling to give up. Once that matures I'll make an official WFH contract change request and make all the waves I need to to get it reviewed as a last ditch attempt (because I'd rather not leave unless I have to). If no luck, I'm gone. I see plenty of equivalent roles with 100% WFH contracts and I'm experienced and highly skilled. Can't wait tbh.

I do not intend to be trudging into an office for half of my week in two years time though.

I don’t do my mandated 2 days. I do about one day.

a colleague of mine couldn’t make it in one day because of a doctor’s appointment and their manager made them ‘make up’ the day the next day. A day when no one on her team was scheduled to be in the office. So she would be working alone. Just absolute presenteeism nonsense. And now, that manager also doesn’t do their scheduled days either.

Switching jobs isn't like switching a Current Account, it takes time.

Being asked in an interview why are you leaving your current role and answering because 2 or 3 days a week in the office isn't working for me would be a red flag if I was the interviewer.

My role is a mix of office, site and home based. If I said I'd rather be at home 3 or 4 days a week I would not have got the job.

It's industry dependent I accept but until you sit next to someone and hear their calls or listen to their questions or see how they are in a meeting you don't really know if they are competent or not.

My last place I worked a colleague put in their 3 month notice and the management said that's fine but you have to be in the office 5 days a week now to do your handovers.

We are supposed to be in 2 days a week and most people manage it. I'm a senior lawyer and could do most stuff from home but the rationale is that it's chiefly for the benefit of the junior lawyers who need to see and hear the seniors in practice to get the most out of learning. It also helps us spot when they need support and makes it easier for them to approach us for support.

Apart from the train fare which is shocking I actually quite like going in twice a week. It's a refreshing change of scenery and dynamic and the commute gives me a bit of exercise.

Our department head does keep an eye on attendance and allows a some leeway to people who don't usually take the piss. For example I didn't go in at all the week before Christmas as there was no school holiday club. A colleague was having a new kitchen with stuff being delivered every day so it was agreed he didn't need to come in that week.

However there are piss takers who are clearly trying to drop to one day (or no days) by stealth. They have very regular excuses on their usual days (childcare, dentist, bit of a cold etc) but mysteriously are never available to swap to another day. It's a really obvious pattern.

Attendance is one of the KPIs for our appraisal so by not playing ball there is a real risk they will be graded as not meeting expected standard. This means no/minimal pay rise and no bonus. However the attendance pisstakers are usually pisstakers in other ways and probably wouldn't meet the grade anyway. They just scrape along and never bloody leave because they know they aren't very marketable elsewhere.

Insisting staff work in-office is sooo boringly antiquated. It is all about control as well. If work is done properly remotely then it's just cost-saving to have less staff at the office, isn't it? Not to mention better for the environment with less commuting. I don't get it...

I always go in 2 days a week. It’s not too much to ask. And I think in some cases where the rule is abused employers will clamp down on it , insist people come on site more of the time which may ruin it for everyone else working there.

It’s about networking with your colleagues in person, it’s not about checking to see if the work is done. Well that’s the case where I work anyway. I don’t think a couple of days in the office is too much to ask of employees. I feel lucky that I can work from home most of the time but can understand the rationale for coming in to meet people in person.

Doesn't that depend on the role?

Your office doesn't sound very nice, but your negative attitude in general makes me wonder how you achieved a senior management role.

MNers are generally sticklers for the rules so I’m not surprised by the polls, but no, YANBU. I’d be doing the same in your situation.

i dont understand your argument

All of this.

If staff were really more productive working from home full time employers would be doing that. However, with 5 years of working since lockdown employers are seeing the benefits of staff working with each other in person, collaboration, impromptu meetings, being able to sort things quickly without scheduling a teams meeting, building connections across teams, earning social capital and the extra business value this generates. Plus everybody having a role training and inducting new arrivals. If you're not doing this, you're not doing all of your job.

OP. a manager, has decided she knows better and that she's doing enough by ignoring the policy set by her executive, working in her preferred way on her terms. And setting the same example to her reports. As a senior manager I'd be seriously unimpressed with this and would be taking performance action. Maybe OPs employer aren't doing this at the moment but senior leadership teams change and I'd bet on her luck running out at some point.