to think some people would be weirdly excited if WFH came to an end?

[LoveWFH]

Why do some posters sound almost delighted at the thought of Nigel Farage stopping WFH?

There’s this tone of “that’ll teach them” whenever it comes up. As if people working from home have been getting away with something.

Here’s the practical bit though. My company couldn’t bring everyone back full time even if it wanted to. They’ve sold off chunks of the office space. Whole buildings gone. Desks gone. Leases not renewed. There literally isn’t room for everyone anymore.

Hybrid working isn’t some trendy phase. It’s how a lot of businesses are set up now. They’ve planned for it. Budgeted for it. Recruited around it.

You can’t magically create space that no longer exists.

If you prefer being in the office, fair enough. Plenty of people do. But I don’t get the satisfaction at the idea of other people losing flexibility that works for them and their employer.

Farage is not going to”end working from home.” For a start, he’s got no chance of forming a government. If he ever gets into power, it will be in a coalition with the conservatives. Besides, the Left dominate academia, publishing, the arts, the BBC, etc, and they are going to do all they can to stop him winning.

Second, what politicians say and what they end up doing are miles apart. Once they take office, they are faced with reality. Even Trump hasn’t done half the things he threatened to do.

Thirdly, whether people work from home or not isn’t really up to the PM. It’s up to employers. If they find it cheaper and easier not to heat and run an office, then they won’t.

Another load of bullshit from Reform to distract from the fact they have no actual policies.

There is definitely a you-should-be-suffering to all the return to workers.

As if you can't really be working, from home

😴

This is EXACTLY my experience. My mother used to complain all the time about the commute, etc.

Yet still thinks I (WFH) should be in the office.

Makes no sense

Part of the reason why he probably said it is that he needs women to give up work and have more babies.
This flexible malarky means that women can actually have both things for once. They don’t spend hours commuting so nursery bills can be cheaper and they can similarly work more hours.

Yes, the billionaires owning the office buildings have probably been whining to him too again.

It’s to win the vote of the gormless. He’ll say anything that he thinks will win him votes. His target audience is retired and wealthy folk and the uneducated and unemployed who don’t work and claim that brown people are taking their jobs.

100%

They want hard work which equals to them suffering and sacrifice

Not anything that makes life easier or better.

They think WFH is too convenient and therefore too easy and work should be hard, inconvenient and involve sacrifice and personal hardship because otherwise, it's not 'work'. They don't care about the terrible side effects for many people working in offices, they want it to be hard. They want you to sacrifice money, time, parenting, etc because work should be hard. It should involve labour even if just in an office.

The amount of MN posters and people in general society who are pissed off about weight-loss treatments because they feel like it makes losing weight 'easy' is insane. They don't care about the negative side effects and risks involved, they want fat people to work hard to lose weight. Suffer and sacrifice.

Pisses them off no end if they think weight loss is 'easy' with the injections. They want labour.

The section of Brits who salivate over having things taken away from others despite this being of no benefit to themselves are the distant relations of American MAGA.

Their American equivalent will vote against their own/families interest and happily live in a trailer, with no health insurance, eating unregulated food, whilst their kids smoke meth, to deny others a good standard of living.

This mentality needs to be studied.

I work in a hybrid role - wfh usually 2 days per week and get so much more done at home! When I'm out and about working in the community, the traffic is awful everywhere, so there are clearly lots of people who do not work from home. When I go into the office, sometimes I can't even get a desk and if I do I find it really hard to focus with all the noise going on around me.
I cannot stand NF and his smug face! He would not have the first clue about my job role, or the work of many other workers. I don't understand how he has the audacity to come out with these ridiculous sweeping statements!

There's a real bizarre fear or hatred of flexibility around work at all. Employers might hate employees having anything other than reverential compliance to rigid working practices but why other ordinary workers? You see it on here all the time, even on a forum for mums, where people complain about other mums being able to do the school run.

It's often justified as being about shit customer service. As though remote work means you must be doing something that involves being available on the phone to random members of the public.

I think a lot of the criticism of WFH is the crap customer service that people are suffering these days. I don't think there's a problem with WFH if done properly, i.e. managed and monitored properly by the employer, but it does seem a lot of staff WFH are taking the piss and/or management aren't managing properly.

I’ve WFH for decades. These days I go into an office infrequently to work with colleagues who go in a couple of days a week. It’s accepted that we are less productive on office days.

For "Joe Public", most times they come across WFH employees will be when they call some kind of customer service, hence the negativity when the experience is crap. Perhaps customer service roles, helplines etc shouldn't be WFH jobs?

I know that lots of WFH jobs do "work" well, I've done it myself and I've had staff who've done it, but we have not been "helpline" or "support" line workers, we've been doing professional work that involves minimal interaction with other people, i.e. specific tasks that take anywhere between 3 hours and 2 weeks which only need 1 or 2 phone calls or emails to ask/answer queries on the task. That kind of work can, indeed, be done anywhere, anytime, so lends itself to WFH/remote working.

Call centres/support work is completely different as callers expect a sensible answer to their query anytime within normal working hours and are rightly annoyed when no one answers the call at 9am or 3pm or when they speak to someone about something important and the call is marred by dogs barking, children crying, door-bell ringing etc that distracts the call handler.

There is poor management, and I agree that's often what people are complaining about. Equally, I'm reluctant to blame individual managers for what is sometimes a consequence of wider structural factors.

Our labour force has shrunk, getting people to work in person is often expensive and people don't necessarily want to pay what it costs to get the service they want. Organisations have tight budgets and are squeezing harder, people with in demand skills can enforce remote working as a condition of taking the job and it can be a way of not having to pay people more to cover the costs of commuting. These are not really things that can be good managed away.

Like many others my employer sold off some buildings which they owned not leased. Imagine they went for a lot of money as in town centre with underground parking overlooking a park - being converted into flats which will be snapped up.
We’re now hybrid working and there’s not enough desks left in the remaining office to accommodate this.
i can’t see how a government can dictate how a private company operates but imagine Reform will push for office attendence in the public sector.
It’s really up to each business how they operate - if my company didn’t offer hybrid working they’d struggle to recruit. Some employees work in the office full time (through choice), some are on home working contracts and most of us hybrid work.

Thing is, people generally understand that there are loads of jobs they don't encounter. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion about customer service, but that isn't a reason to presume that all jobs done in a particular place (in this case home) are customer service. Virtually everyone gets that there are a variety of different roles done in a hospital, for example, and that what's true for a surgeon may not be so of a receptionist. And that there are jobs that don't involve being available on demand to members of the public.

As for whether annoyance is correct, this really depends on whether they'd be willing to pay more for the service they want. And also accepting any wider consequences, ie if people just choose something else. If you (general) want to talk about customer service or helpline jobs not being remote, that involves more than waving a magic wand and expecting the early 2010s job market to come wafting back to us.

That's a fallacy that you've convinced yourself of.

Customer service/call centre workers WFH are strictly and intensely monitored and have to account for every single minute they are not available for calls.

There's no system available where they get to bunk off at any time, let alone 9am or 3pm

What you are experiencing is possibly, some workers shifts work around those times so there are fewer operatives.

Or more likely.. everyone is calling at 9am as that's when they open and a lot of people like you, think WFH people are bunking off to collect their kids at 3pm so jam the 'phone lines at 3pm.

Just think for a second, do you really think any company anywhere is paying for people to WFH and letting them off around school drop off and pick up times and paying them to work when they are not?

Really? do you really think that is happening? do you really think any low-paying company is paying people to be working when they're not?

Either you let businesses do what is best for them - free enterprise, low nanny state etc etc

or you don’t and dictate minute details like where employees sit to do their work

can’t have it both ways

but yes some people resent the super geeks earning huge amounts of money whilst never having to put shoes on whilst they are stuck in wet traffic jams earning nothing of course they do

Ding ding JACKPOT!

I worked from home for 20+ years. I now work in an office (my choosing, w work for myself) and I can categorically state I could not give a shiny shit where anyone else works.

It’s called the race to the bottom. The same people saying doctors shouldn’t strike for better pay because their own pay is shit, and teachers shouldn’t protest about their pensions because they don’t have a pension themselves. The same sort of people who think unions are ruining this country (unless they have a fall out with the boss and look to join one then). Small minded, hard of thinking people.

😆

I’ll start going to the office every day when Nigel does.

Not just the right wants to end WFH
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3ep20drr0o