5 days in the office - rant!!!

[DonnyDoris]

My company mandated 5 days in the office a couple of months ago, which in principle I have no issues with. However, my commute is just over an hour on motorways that have long term roadworks, so massively tedious and today I have no meetings so absolutely no reason to be here other than presenteeism. Could have got so much more done and also all my housework if I could've worked from home 😖Just needed to get that off my chest!!!!

It would be highly irregular and discriminatory if the sickness absence of people with disabilities that related to their disability was recorded and 'used against them', yes. However this doesn't mean to say that absences related to disability cannot form part of the picture when assessing a person's capability for the role, provided this has included consideration of reasonable adjustments.
Think about it. If you have an employee forced to work in a workplace who has a disability that meant they couldn't get in, so had to keep calling in sick, you think the employer could just ignore that they were hardly ever there, and retain them indefinitely? The employer would have to show they'd considered RA (like WFH) but if this was genuinely not an option, the disabled person could be dismissed.
WFH prevents this and helps disabled people stay in work.
I'm not sure why you keep picking at this with me. I know what I'm doing and it's working in my organisation.

I’m working from home. In my lunch hour I tidied up, made dinner, put washing away. This means that when children are home I can spend time with them. Everybody wins and I’m not looking for a new job. Everybody carries on winning.

We are in the office 5 days a week and have zero issues with recruitment. We pay staff extremely well and offer a lot of flexibility (paid time off for sports days, school events etc) plus occasional working from home (if the electricity company needs access for example).

Now reconfigure that to: we pay minimum wage and micromanage. Now you aren't recruiting people again. So you offer other benefits rather than WFH and it works for your company. My old company? not so much, they were pernickety micro-managing fuckers who expected 60 hours a week but only paid 40. When they offered WFH due to covid, people realised that it could work for them, but only under those conditions. When they tried to mandate 5 office days they very nearly lost all their bad staff.

So what companies have to realise is that they need to be attractive. Whether that is with flexibilitiy like yours, or a bit of WFH or a bit from column A and a bit from column B.

It's a miracle anyone got anything done in the days before the internet. Can you imagine everyone working in an office !!!

Exactly - well put. The younger generation of workers are being very short changed just so those at the other end can get their housework / dog walks / marathon training / childcare fitted into working hours

The younger generation of workers also ultimately wants flexibility and to work from home.

An element to this discussion is that as we now have the technology that means people with office jobs can work from anywhere, companies don’t have to base their whole workforce in one location.

Which means they could create smaller satellite offices in less dense towns across the country. Or even the main office if they don’t need to actively be in a big town or city.

We don’t have to have everyone battling to get into central London etc.

Start putting offices in places that are cheaper to live, where people could walk or bike to the office within 30 mins.

It could regenerate so many areas, somewhere like Cornwall would give people the chance to live and work in a beautiful place and stop the death of communities from the second home / holiday rental crisis.

If businesses start to build real life balance for employees into their business plans I bet there would be many people who would see the advantages of being in the office.

@CloudPop
I WFH in my 20s no issue, my younger siblings and cousins are all leaving/left uni and either went into or are looking for minimum 3 days WFH.

I don't know a single person under 30 who wants to be in the office full time - and I work in a young industry. I'm only 33 myself - so probably don't speak on what an entire generation wants when you are clearly out of touch.

Agree. I do not think people can have a decent standard of living on minimum wage, we don’t pay anyone that, everyone gets significantly more, including trainees. Average pay rises this year were 10%. We cannot increase our sales prices, so that comes off my bottom line but I am only as good as my team so I am more than happy to do it.
The other side of that though is that, with rising unemployment and the increased reliance on AI, employees also need to be attractive. Flexibility works both ways.

Yes one work task, multi tasked with another work task and so on.

You are obviously entitled to a lunch break and other breaks though.

Mentioning the housework isn’t going to help your case.

@soupyspoon so is she not allowed to multi task on her lunchbreak - waiting for the toaster/microwave while popping the washing on etc.

My old office - back in 2015 - had a dishwasher, and I would often load/empty it of mugs while waiting for the coffee machine - there is no difference doing the same thing at home.

Can you let me know which company via a private message. I’m willing to relocate for a decent job!

If you’re doing housework during work time that kind of explains why they want you in the office

You’re missing the crux of the statement though- “our sickness absence reduced by 80% by working from home”.

People who are having time off to deal with their disability, or disability related sickness should not be in those stats. Those stats, by their use, reflect and improvement in short term sickness.

I know, we were a lot less productive back then! During Covid our employer noted our increased productivity, so we stayed hybrid afterwards. We get a couple of days of in person collaborative working, and we know those days are less productive give, and then days at home to get on with work properly. It works very well compared to olden times.

YANBU. I'd be looking for another job, the commute is such a waste of everyone's time.

Just imagine us little plebs clawing back a bit of comfort by WFH. Imagine the audacity! It's only 40 years of hard graft, pull yourself together woman!!!

But oh no, Mr. Brownlow wants to see bums on seats so we have to trudge into the office, completely unnecessarily.

And some of the plebs agree with him!!!!! They think they might someday actually be like him!

😂

Dont think employers will have the last laugh here. Plenty of people lined up who are happy to come into the office. My daughter is currently looking for a job, doing applications is a full time job in itself and she’s not whining about WFH.

@ilovepixie

She isn't

She has a 3+hr total commute on days that she is in the office

She would be doing housework in the commute time - not during working hours.

CEOs calling people back to the office: "People who work from home don't get any work done."

WFH'rs: "Do you think they get any work done when they're in the office, then or...?"

FWIW I work from home and go into the office once a fortnight. My company has no office (the previous office was sold off in lockdown and we've been WFH ever since), but it rents out a co-working space. Fortunately the co-working space is a 30 minute walk from home for me and I get the bus if the weather is rubbish.

It really depends on your job, but I do agree a lot of it is about being present, if only so you can be pulled into a meeting so the middle management can say you met their collaboration quota for the month.

Do I even want to know what a “collaboration quota” is?

People get soooo angry on here when people who wfh dare leave their desk!

I wfh and I've watched 2 episodes of MAFS today 😁 seethe away.

how is filling your own dishwasher or emptying it / putting a wash on a problem at home - when at work people often wash all the dishes in the sink or put things away / clean the kitchen area while waiting for the kettle to boil or heating my lunch up! In my workplace we are encouraged to stop for tea / coffee breaks and have it away from desk for breaks from the computer!

You can't literally sit at a computer for 7 hours and be doing work only the entire time.

I’m relatively senior, been in the business years, a good listener and like a laugh. So when I’m in the office I tend to get a succession of people who all want to come for a chat, they know I’ll ask after their health, families etc. If that benefits them, great but I really don’t need it and it’s a distraction, though I’d never refuse them. Joining teams calls in the open plan office, can’t hear a thing so I take my laptop to a tiny booth and I’m now on 1 screen, not 3, so can’t screen share, view the attendees, make OneNotes at the same time. The work I do during my commute time before core hours commence isn’t imaginary. It is often done in my pyjamas, then I’ll shower.

After my last call is done on wfh day I can be in the kitchen getting dinner sorted, leaving me time to go for a quick drink with my partner, so quality of time for me and I’ve delivered for my employer.