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)

Yes like a tracheotomy. I don't have to do those and nor does anyone I manage.

The answer is to speak to HR or the cleaning team, or have a memo put out to all staff to be more mindful and respectful of others when usingshared facilities. The solutuon is not to just not turn up for work.

Why is it skiving if the work they are paid to do is done?

It's an utterly bleak world view to think people should be sitting blankly at desks for no reason at all. Black Mirror stuff.

I voted you are unreasonable on the boomer comment alone. I imagine your staff are quite happy not to have to interact with you. Stay WFH for their sake

We expect people to be in for three days a week. I am the manager and usually go in for four.

It is the corporate and contractual expectation as it is that if people work from home they still should have appropriate childcare arrangements in place.

It facilitates on site compliance requirements, on the job training, support for matters that have to take place on site, on the job training, and community.

I would never ever, as a manager, expect my staff to be on site more than I was prepared to be. I am flexible about emergencies and sickness and of course people can wfh if they break a limb, have a mild illness, etc., a sick child.

Sadly, the couple of people who resist coming in also seem to be the piss takers and they are about to be put on performance improvement plans.

I still believe work is a social construct and that if early careerists come in they will progress further and faster.

We have a rota and I expect it to be adhered to. And if the toilets are dirty, I contact facilities. It is rare.

black mirror is the wfh
all teams/zoom meetings
no face to face

You sound like a lazy person who is making up excuses why you can't go into the office because you'd rather be at home in your pyjamas.
This is also incredibly entitled. You have been asked to do something perfectly reasonable by your employer (actually attend work a couple of times a week) and you're refusing to do as asked. Your employer has every right to expect you in the office. Good luck finding a new job. I don't think many employers would be happy to employ someone who has no interest in complying with company policy.
I'm a teacher. Imagine if we all started refusing to go into work. The country would grind to a halt! And do you really think our toilets are lovely and pleasant because I can assure you they're not. We also don't have places to work during our planning time as we get kicked out of our classrooms to allow other classes to use the space. A lot of people like you would have plenty to say if us public sector workers started using nonsense like this as an excuse not to go in 🙄
Learn some resilience. You're hardly going to die.

You are allowed a lunch break when WFH. When I went in to the office it had a running club that met at lunch time. Why is this different?

To add to the post above, I also like to have a divide between work and home. It supports my well being and when I put my key in the lock it leaves the day behind.

I find working from home productive and I can have confidential meetings. That is not the case for those who live in shared accommodation of cramped quarters. If I can hear someone's children on a teams call, that staff member cannot possibly be giving work their full attention.

It's policy that camera is on for all teams calls/meetings. Only once at the beginning of covid did someone turn up on their pyjamas.

That works if its project type work or piece work. Most jobs I've had just continue, you finish one thing you move on to the next, there's always something that can be worked on, or researched, reports, using initiative instead of being fed work etc.

She is 'actually attending work' though. She's just not attending a specific location to do it in (and that location appears to be unnecessary).

Also - the teacher thing is nonsense. Of course some jobs have to be done in person. A surgeon can't work from home either. Your choice to do a job that involves a face to face necessity. Plenty of people can do their work very easily from home.

I’ve been steadfastly ignoring the 1 day a week mandate for about 6 months now and it’s worked out fine. I’ll always go in for important team meetings, like our quarterly one, but don’t bother otherwise 🤷‍♀️

If doing your job means you sitting "blankly" at a desk, you probably ought to be made redundant anyway! Most of us are active at our desks (home or office).

That is such a strange view from a senior manager. There is strong evidence that skill development through sharing of ideas and experiences is enhanced significantly by colleagues being together face to face.
You started out as making reasonable points, but dismissing the importance of human interaction within an organisation as rubbish and saying everything can be learned by yourself, is a generalisation that is surprisingly unreasoned and irrational for a senior manager.

I'm a civil servant ...

As if that wasn't obvious

The whole attitude is just so indicative of almost the entire sector

6 months isn't that long. You think it's going unnoticed but have you had an annual appraisal in that time? A pay rise or a bonus? Be careful. You aren't above the rules.

Well good luck finding a new job when you're sacked and cross your fingers that you won't need anything more than a basic reference from them. If you're not going to adhere to your contract of employment then they'll find someone else who will.

Well, her employer clearly thinks it's necessary for her to be in so who is she to argue? Get in and get on with it. It's 2 days a week. What's the big deal? She's totally overreacting.

I really appreciate the days my manager comes into the office.

She works from home far more than other equivalent managers do and as a result doesn't always pick up on when the team are feeling a bit fragile or when she can resolve an issue there and then - when she is WFH then onus is on us to contact her if there is an issue as she obviously isn't telepathic. If she was in the office often the issue may not even occurred in the first place.

She also misses out on the 'watercooler' chat/gossip with her peers which often means as a team we are a little out of the loop of what's going on elsewhere which puts us at a disadvantage.

She's very nice and otherwise good manager, always there for us when we do teams call her, but ultimately there is a disadvantage to us and her when she works from home.

Where I work you can either comply or leave. So far the only people to have left were those that were well known for taking the piss so bonus.

''@SlapTheMelon
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?''

Equally it can be a case of the employer misrepresenting the job at interview stage.

I live two hours (each way) from the office and I have a long term health condition which I made clear when I was interviewed. I was told my team worked remotely and I would only need to be in the office once every 3 month for staff team meetings.

Six months into the job, my manager said I should be in the office once a week just so I could 'show my face'.

Of course I refused to do that. The salary they pay me (this is a charity) would not make any sense if I had to commute weekly and I only took the job because I was assured of remote working.

Many office role can be easily done remotely or with hybrid working. Office attendance is just dinosaur, controlling behaviour in many cases.

No. Supposed to do 2 days a week. So far seem to be averaging 1 day one week, two the next, then repeat.

Our workplace is two days a week and if I had a team member who refused to comply with this then they would be managed out of the business.

It would be reason enough to be displaying an attitude where you think rules don't apply to you, but also in my company, it would have a negative impact on your ability to be a high performing team member.

Clearly it depends on the job you do, and if you're entirely self sufficient and don't have a job that requires any collaboration and building relationships with your colleagues then it doesn't and shouldn't matter whether you work from home or in the office. However where I work there are significant benefits gained by building relationships and face to face collaboration time that you cannot replicate entirely remotely. Hybrid working is a great balance - I get more done when I'm at home without a doubt, but I use my two days in the office for face to face meetings with my team and other colleagues from around the business, which adds value in an entirely different way. It's about using your time effectively.

I also think for more junior team members there's a lot of soft skills you can learn from being around senior managers that are much harder to pick up if you only interact with them in a digital format. You overhear conversations that you might not otherwise have been party to and you can more easily learn from those around you.

We did this. I work for a very small company and we had a shared office which could only seat 2 of us at a time comfortably, and 3 of us at a squeeze, the chairs were horrible for our backs and the tables were too low.

All we did when we were together in person is talk and have long meetings repeating the same thing (maybe to compensate for the fact that we were primarily a remote team). So although we were meant to be in once a week, it was pointless - I worked better at home (I find colleagues so distracting sometimes - but great for bouncing ideas). So I’d do half days sometimes but with a clear purpose.

Fortunatly everyone is remote and people live all over the country so WFH is the norm for us.