to be tired of the jealousy towards people who WFH?

[WFHFan]

No one can post a thread about it without someone chiming in threatening if their job can done from home then it could be given to someone in another country or AI could take it.

Other people saying companies want everyone back in the office. Yes some do. Mine doesn't. They do not have the space anymore. Neither will my job go to someone in another country because of expertise and it does involve some critical face to face work. AI can't do it either.

Then some people getting offended saying if someone is WFH they shouldn't do anything else but work non stop. I can work and I do chores, shopping, school pick up, errands. It does not affect the standard or quantity of my work. I don't doubt it does affect some people's work.

I have won two awards for performance already.

@IpsyUpsyDaisyDoos
You make good points.
Many of them would not work for my company, as we are international so in-person meetings are not possible.
We do go to conferences as often as possible which allows for meet ups.
We make sure we are available via Zoom during regular office hours.

But international would make face to face difficult for a lot of you even if you were all office based, so different ways of working need to be applied anyway, don't they?

Things change and evolve constantly, this is just the latest change.

So raise the pay and improve the conditions!

My DH is a PCSO and couldn't WFH, he needs to be out and about. He'd go stir crazy. He was offered a higher paying job opportunity but didn't go for it due to increase in desk work \admin.

He used to be a teaching assistant but couldn't make enough money to live on so went back to work in hospitality before joining the police. The chain he worked in gave him meals and had a cafe close to our house so no commute and saved on food.

Make of that what you will!

How long does it take to sort out an internet delivery? A weekly Ocado delivery takes me 10 mins max to accept and put away. A monthly Tesco delivery (thanks to the no bags pain in the arse) takes about 45 mins to unpack and out away, so I would not book a Tesco order while I am 'at work'.
An Ocado one is a different matter. I can only assume that the posters on here berating such outrageous behaviour have a slightly skewed opinion on how constant their work in any office is. I have never worked anywhere where people are constantly working for eight hours solid with just a lunch break, one toilet visit and one cup of tea, but apparently that's the norm while us homeworkers are walking the dog, grocery shopping and entertaining the children with gay abandon.
What's the difference between 10 minutes spend putting an Ocado shop away compared to 10 mins gossiping in the toilets?

It's the norm forany non office workers though

I do very flexible hybrid with 2-3 days at home. It’s lovely! People should be jealous - I get paid well and can do reading on the sofa with my electric blanket (work reading). They tried to get us in a bit more but then realised we didn’t have enough desks so they have gone back on that 😂 I do work though! My management and team would notice if my output dropped. People struggle to accept that jobs work like that.

I haven't noticed too many people being jealous. I can wfh if I want but like going in. I would actually dislike being at home everyday.
The people I know who are really very keen to wfh every day have managed to find wfh jobs. Most people I know prefer to come in to the office about three days a week.

It's not jealous people who think WFHers are lazy. It's people who have experience of people taking the utter P*

@WFHFan ,

‘In my organisation, the majority of people have office days. On those days are when we have team meetings, socials and other events to help the young people or new staff get to know everyone.’

Getting to know someone on days out is an entirely artificial and forced process. It is no substitute for physically working with someone.

‘New and young staff are assigned a mentor so they have the opportunity to learn and develop.’

This is a tick box exercise and isn’t what mentoring means in a meaningful sense.

‘We have a young intern in my department that has gone from strength to strength in the time she has been with us even with lockdown and hybrid working. She lives in a small flat.’

Of course, natural loners and self starters can still do well. Ths question I asked up thread is how you deliver a hard message and at the same time remain supportive. You can’t ask if they are ok and get them a coffee, or just sit next to them and help them prepare something.

I suspect your young member of staff would love the opportunity to see you working, ask other young staff how they are getting on, and go for a spontaneous drink on a Friday evening with colleagues after a rough day. I know I did in my 20s.

I suspect your young member of staff would love the opportunity to see you working, ask other young staff how they are getting on, and go for a spontaneous drink on a Friday evening with colleagues after a rough day. I know I did in my 20s.

I didn't in my 20s. I wanted to go home on a Friday. I'm not a loner, I just don't drink and don't enjoy being in that kind of environment.

This is a tick box exercise and isn’t what mentoring means in a meaningful sense.

Is it? How so? Are you familiar with what process these mentors/mentees go through? In my organisation there are four or five different ways to connect with more senior/experienced staff such as mentoring programmes, sponsorship, networking events both in person and virtually. You can sign up to simply have coffee with someone too. Our directors don't have offices, everything in the office is open plan and they change the days they're in to make sure they catch all of their team once a month minimum. I talk to my director on a regular basis, more so than I did when we were entirely office based.

The way things work in places you have worked are not indicative of how they work everywhere.

This doesn't answer the question though - are you actually working your contracted hours?

I wfh 1 day a week, and yes I can stick a wash on, hang it out at lunch time. But I couldn't do school pick ups, visit the library, regular errands etc.

It sounds like you really don't have enough work to do, and the bar for "awards" must be pretty low!

I could, and I regularly work more than my contracted hours.

I don't have "set" times to be available, i.e. between 9-5. I can start at 7 if I want, do some work, go to an appointment, come back for my 11am meeting, work a bit more, go pick up my daughter if DH is stuck in traffic, work later on.

I have X work to do by Y time. Providing that's done and I answer all queries in a reasonable time, attend meetings I'm needed at, the rest of the time I can set my own hours. I don't have clients or customers calling.

We all work in fairly similar ways. We're mostly online between 8-6 across the team from day to day but if someone isn't available one afternoon we don't question it. Not a single one of us feels like the others aren't pulling their weight.

So she takes the odd nap for 20 minutes or whatever.

In the office, there's people deliberately dragging out going to the loo/making a cup of tea for 20 minutes. People chat with colleagues for literally hours on many office days (and no, it's not team building or whatever business leaders say about collaboration when Katy from Payroll is chatting to Louise from HR about her divorce for 2 hours.) Then there's stress-head Steve storming around like a tornado saying, "I HAVE SO MANY EMAILS TO ANSWER!" and going on about how busy he is without actually doing any work.

One of the main reasons I hate being in the office is because they are so noisy and people are always getting up to make drinks or wander over to other departments because 90% of office jobs could easily be done in half the time that people actually spend doing them.

I never really get these arguments. Some people thrive when they WFH, some people prefer working on site. Some people prefer doing a mix of the two.

Some people take the piss at work, whether they're remote, site based or hybrid. It's just in their nature.

My SIL started a WFH job and I remember thinking how much I'd love to do that instead of having to commute each day at the crack of dawn.

The same thought cropped up occasionally over about 6 months until I suddenly thought 'Hold on, if you want a job like that why don't you look for one?' so I did. It wasn't easy, they can be hard to find if you don't specialise in something but I got there in the end and I hope I never have to go back to working on site at all.

SIL decided it wasn't for her, and went back to working in an on site role once her training finished.

My partner is the same - he can't think of anything worse, it'd drive him mad being stuck at home all day. So when he was job searching he just didn't consider WFH or hybrid jobs.

People are so different, we'll never see eye-to-eye over this.

It depends on the workload like I said.

No the bar is not low for the awards. Only a handful are given out for over 10,000 employees.

Well if they were also making a big deal about how productive they are they'd also be kidding themselves on. But it's not comparable because they're generally not making an argument that they don't want to WFH because they're less productive there. And no, I don't think napping during core working hours and getting paid for it is acceptable, but again the point was that she was making a point about being more productive at home when that's clearly not true. She likes being at home because it's comfier and a bit of a skive, let's be honest.

People who can’t work from home - because of the nature of their job , like teachers and nurses- should get paid more than those who wfh . There should be a premium added to salaries to compensate for expenses that those who wfh don’t have , such as commuting.
( I know this is unworkable- but it’s what I wish would happen!)

Not all out of the home jobs are office based. This is where the real differences between WFH and not comes in. In my public facing role, I have no spare time in my work day and certainly couldn’t nap for 20 mins! In my previous career as a teacher, I was lucky if I got more than 20 mins for lunch. As a previous poster has cited, I wonder if in the future these types of public service jobs will be paid a premium to make up for the fact there’s no flexibility in the work day etc.

What a load of old shit 😆 I earn a good salary because of my skill set and experience. There’s absolutely no reason why it should cost me that someone else can’t work from home.

My favourite are the teachers.

I have many teachers in my life. They are all absolutely furious about people working from home.

Haha I hadn’t even read this when I posted my post above.

Teachers work like dogs. But so do many other professions. They aren’t the only ones.

My best mate works from home (in finance) and has come on leaps and bounds now the stress of the commute is gone. He gets so much more done and was promoted with a hefty pay increase since doing it. If you can I think fair play, do it. I can’t as I’m in an industry where I need to be there to react to anything that happens. It’s not practical. But if I could? Yeah, I’d do it or I’d do hybrid (house does my head in 🤣). Jealousy has become a big thing in the uk I feel. Everyone thinks everyone else is getting something they aren’t. Unfortunately it’s manifesting as a race to the bottom. WFH people, do your thing. Nobody else’s business really 🤷‍♀️

That’s just bad management
I take around 100-120 calls a day
Calls are recorded, barking dogs and children not acceptable. You can’t step away from your desk unless you’re on an allocated, timed break or 25 min lunch System is the same as at work but if it goes down at work, mine is often still ok at home
Audio and screen recordings - audio just on calls but screen is recorded for my full shift

@ThatNiftyBlueSwan
what about the cost of heating and electricity at home.
Im sure in the office you don’t pay for the water every time you flush the loo, or the toilet paper.
The cost of working from home can be expensive.

DH doesn't like working from home entirely because he's less productive here. He needs to be on site 90% of the time anyway because of the nature of his job, but can WFH to write reports or the like. Unless there's a reason it would work for us for him to do so, he doesn't. Good people will choose what helps them do their job effectively.

And when I was pregnant, we were WFH because we were still coming out of lockdowns. My manager regularly told me to go sleep if I needed it, because I was exhausted and sick for months. Good management is giving your staff the flexibility you need from them.