Nigel Farage calls for an end to working from home

[sally037]

Nigel Farage has doubled down on his attack on remote and hybrid working, calling it “a load of nonsense” and saying people are only productive when working face-to-face in the office. He argues we need an “attitudinal change to hard work” rather than focusing on work-life balance.

AIBU for thinking this idea is just bonkers and totally at odds with how most of the workforce actually wants to work now?

I can only think it appeals to the "pull the ladder up" generation. Don't give two fucks about anyone else as long as they are comfortable or those that are unable to wfh and want everyone else to be as miserable as them.

A man who was never in his office asks everyone to go back to the office. Also known as "Farage Fromage" the man who fought all his life to take us out of the EU while living in France with his German girlfriend, driving a Volvo, eating baguettes for breakfast and making sure his kids got European passports. Every now and then he flies to the UK, puts on his tweed jacket, calls the press and has a photo op in the local pub then flies home back to France.

This is the man with the biggest double standards and largest lack of integrity ever to walk the earth. And he wants to become PM.

But isn't that something those companies should be performance managing? Why would a government edict about how organisations should manage their staff be the answer?

I don’t care what Farage thinks but companies are pushing for more people to go back to the office and they are not doing it because they are dinosaurs, they are doing it because productivity is down.

Hmmm.

3 companies I have worked for since 2020 have all openly stated they could not gauge what effect the pandemic enforcing WFH had on their productivity metrics.

I notice - with interest - that a lot of "productivity" (deliberately) excludes recruitment. Which disguises the fact that employer inflexibility is a driver in staff turnover. The magic of cost centres.

My dad worked from home from 1997 until he retired. His multinational corporation got rid of its office in our home town because it wasn't financially viable to have it. He was very senior and extremely productive!

Nobody answered before WFH, it's always been the case for years and years that 'we're experiencing unusually high call volumes, and wait times are longer than usual....' - on repeat, every time you call, so just normal call volumes they should have accounted for, but are too tight and greedy to staff up properly.

I agree that for most places wait times are unacceptably long (especially HMRC), but this isn't new.

In any case, call centre staff are subject to highly intrusive monitoring and ambitious targets, this doesn't alter depending on their location, it can be done for those working at home as easily as those in the office.

This is where I am at. Totally outside the remit of government to dictate how businesses and their employees contract to conduct themselves. They can encourage more hybrid and office based working by lowering business rates on commercial properties, reducing the cost of commuting and increasing efficiency of rail/public transport - and indeed our roads - but to believe you have any power beyond that is farcical. Every time he opens his mouth he proves how unfit for government he is.

That said, I thought Trump had done the same and no one would vote for him again. Stupidity seems to be epidemic at the moment.

This is the man with the biggest double standards and largest lack of integrity ever to walk the earth.

No - he really is second rate in everything

AIBU for thinking this idea is just bonkers and totally at odds with how most of the workforce actually wants to work now?

I agree with you here. Fuck Farage!

I can only think it appeals to the "pull the ladder up" generation. Don't give two fucks about anyone else as long as they are comfortable or those that are unable to wfh and want everyone else to be as miserable as them.

I do think this one is quite ironic though. The one major issue with WFH is not to do with productivity, or working hard or anything. It’s that we trained younger generations and mentored them informally by working in person.

IMO it’s actually the current working generation who are now becoming the pull the ladder up generation because yes we are choosing comfort and our benefits after benefiting from that arrangement - so it is us who are pulling the ladder. Right when AI is coming in an young workers being laid off left right and centre.

This was my thought too

Thing is, in the business sector, there obviously is doubt about whether the things you believe to be the case actually are the case. Because no business is going to operate a model that will essentially reduce its profit.
If banking is allowing home working, then its safe to assume someone has done a careful cost benefit analysis already and decided its a proftable model.
If big business suddenly decides office based working is in its interests, then WFH days are numbered in that sector. But unless that point is reached, what some members of the general public may believe or what Farage brays about is irrelevant.

I'm in a Civil Service dept and all our training and consolidation is office based. You only work from home with a buddy on teams when you're confident.

It works well.

Pot kettle. He rarely turns up to any of his jobs. He’s a workshy dinosaur.

Nigel Farage is akin to Donald Trump and the ilk. Return to "traditional values" aka "get women back in the kitchen where they belong". WFH is an absolute boon for working parents, and a full time return to the office after all this time, when the childcare supports have mainly fallen away and no longer exist due to lack of need (be that formal, paid childcare, or families moving away from grandparents to cheaper parts of the country), would leave many parents (read: mothers) up a shitty creek without a paddle. Ultimately, they will be forced out of their jobs.

Nigel Farage and Reform are beyond vile and will work fast to crash the country for their own personal benefit.

2020 not really a good year to focus on, given for many organisations they were effectively forced to WFH with zero notice or planning. In a global pandemic.

Farage must be judging everybody by his own standards, assuming we all skive as much as he does, given half the chance.

That and his billionaire cronies are sore because they're losing out on commercial rent incomes from their office blocks.

He must be thinking that his core voter base will find this message appealing, as it taps into that resentful idea of somebody else is getting something I'm not, which he's so proficient at playing on - like white van man is thinking 'well if I can't work from home, why should anyone else'.

It is interesting how everyone seems to be a Farage fan (if you believe the media).

But when an actually policy is announced (which is less often than you think. I mean what are Reforms ideological drivers ?) it seems it's shit.

Are they still committed to rolling back the horror of metrication ?

But how do people have conversations with older management about their life and their goals and their career progression?

Elder colleagues offer a wealth of knowledge in so many ways beyond can I do this actual job competently right here right now in front of me.

To an extent, he has a point - to have growth in an economy you need to produce a product and sell said product to those outside of you economy, hence bringing new money into the system, growing wealth.

The kind of operations that traditionally do that are not very adaptable to working from home, well back office functions yes, but not the part that actually generates the revenue.

I can't see us going back to a point where everyone files into the office for multiple reasons, but primarily because a job you can do remotely is low hanging fruit for AI to take over from in the next few decades anyway, and office based roles will become less common as there will be fewer of them.

There are a great many people who do great work from home, but there are equally a good few piss takers as well.

I'm a radiologist. I work flexible hours in / out of the office. Espiecially when the office has sewage running down the walls. Or no air con. Or no heating in winter for 3 months. Or damp mould in the corners. You can say by by to UK based doctors and hello to outsourcing everything for the cheapest price possible and a worse outcome. What's that you say? That's business. Course it is. When your investment firm is balls deep in the private companies that take it over.
No we dont waste money in my department. There's no money to waste.

It's exactly this. He and his supporters are invested in corporate real estate and all of the other products and services that are needed when people can't WFH.

They want you to need to outsource your childcare, laundry, food and drink prep, cleaning. They need you to buy clothes for the office and to go to the gym in the city centre and and and and.

My small workplace is closed 3 days a week with staff required to work from home as they cannot afford their sky high energy bills, requiring us to go into work would be the final nail in the coffin.

Typical Boomer. They had to work in the office for 40 years so Everyone else should too. The world has changed, technology is here to stay.

We (younger people) may have hybrid and remote working but we don’t have the many things his generation had. Many of us are saddled with student loans for our whole working life, unable to afford a house and working just to afford the bare minimum.

Working from home has changed many people’s lives for the better. We work to live not live to work. He can sod off.

Our local Reform Council tried to insist on all of the local authority staff going back to the office full time.

It took them a while to realise that they didn't actually have enough office space to accommodate everyone.

But how do people have conversations with older management about their life and their goals and their career progression?

Why do you think work will look anything like it does in 2026 in 2066 ?.

Do you still worry about who will fill the inkwells ?

Yes.

And hen discovered afterwards they had no idea whether it affected productivity or not.