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.

I don't know if the roads, trains and buses could cope if everyone stopped working from home. Also many companies no longer have the main office (one I used to go past there was an amazing canteen where everyone was tucking into full English breakfasts just before 9am). I know people who have to book a desk space the day before.
I worked from home a few days (during the days of self isolation positive COVID test but was well) and hated it.

Agree, call centre staff get away with F all, they absolutely can not spend 53 minutes doing the school run. Call centre work is still the same at home as it is in the office.

Hi, my child was in nursery/grandparents while i WFH aged 1-4. I dropped him off at 8 then worked 8.10 - 4.10ish.
I would never have worked from home with a child, it’s not fair on them and my employer wouldn’t allow it.

I was lucky in that his nursery is on the same road but having no commute time massively helps anyway even if it’s not.

Then for school his dad drops him off and I pick him up at 3.30pm and we avoid wrap around care. I make up any lost time.

My employer is very modern and is totally fine with this. I’m measured on the completion and quality of my tasks, project success etc.

Local councils had flexible working long before Covid. No set hours and you could work where you wanted.

A lot of teachers weirdly get jealous I’ve found, but then I get jealous of their extra long holidays!

NF definitely has backers who own office space and city businesses . Thats what its about . As usual just about billionaires and tgeir money .

The type of people who hate WFH are likely the same people who voted for Brexit.

Er, no. I voted for Brexit and I’m a big fan of hybrid working.

Noting that even if my public sector employer wanted everyone back 5 days per week we’ve sold off 40% of our buildings and it would be impossible

I was under the impression it was referring to council and government employees.

Worcestershire have had Reform council for a while now… still no return to the office full time mandate - our HQ is condemned though which means there’s no space!

Same in Staffs (not an employee but know many).

I worked in academia from the late 1980s and the tradition was hybrid working. Academics are required to do deep reseach, prepare grant applications and tasks which would be impossible in a busy office with the noise constant of phones going off. Not all academics have their own offices. When I began work I was delighted to find that I was routinely allowed to WFH 2/3 days a week. There was no real requirement to sit at a dest 9-5 so long as the work got done. So in theory the work could be done evenings and weekends. The prof I worked for walked her dogs twice a day on her WFH days. The system was that you attended campus for meetings, seeing students, holding tutorials using the ibrary and admin business. Most research was done at home and it was upto you to schedule the work for when it was required.

When you have completed a masters and a doctorate you are already accustomed to working this way and to the self-discipline of organizing your workload. Nowadays I am long retured but still do private tutoring of postgrads. Learning how to organize and manage tasks is part of what I teach them at the onset.

Totally this.

I find working in the office phenomenally unproductive. There’s a pointless one hour each way commute which takes out two hours of the day. There’s then an obligatory 15 minutes hunting for a desk, getting set up before you can attempt any work.

There’s huge amounts of pointless gossip and chatter about Netflix and tea runs. All of which is supposed to be about “social cohesion” but which is just a huge time vacuum. Fighting over meeting rooms etc.

There are legitimate reasons for wanting people to work together but productivity isn’t one of them.

If you're interacting with a human it's human interaction.

Why do you think someone needs to be in an office to be involved in or interested in their work? That's a very odd assumption.

And I don't think there is a dominant demographic WFH and certainly not one where everyone lives in nice houses with family. I live in a rented flat with no family and WFH.

Yep, you have to log what you're doing every single second of the day. Apart from fuck that, it's mad that so many people don't know how micromanaged that area is.

It's bizarre. Some people really think WFH means not doing your job at all and the employers don't monitor, check, or sack people for you know, not doing what they're paid for.

Tell them it can go as far as stroke counters or mouse clicks monitoring and they'd not believe it.

You can gain all the positives probably with only one day a week in an office. Preferably the one with the fewest meetings or calls.

Teams and Zoom for all its failings is a great improvement for most meetings as you can be multi-tasking and doing some work whilst the bits of the meeting you have little or no input into take place.

Anyone who “objects” to WFH are, IME, those whose jobs cannot accommodate it!
There are a lot of low-paid customer/patient-facing workers who are clearly treated appallingly by their managers (who are “on their backs” the whole time, micro-managing them) and these people are the ones who seem to resent the idea of a relatively stress-free work experience: in short, they’re jealous!
It would be impossible to make it illegal for companies to allow WFH anyway: in my Company, they tried to make everyone come back into the office after lockdown, and tons of people threatened to leave! Faced with the reality of losing hundreds of years of experience, the company backed down (it is a huge international business), and also, they realised that they can’t justify making workers collaborate across Countries and Continents if they are also saying that you need to be in the same room with your co-workers, while trying to reduce travelling at the same time!
So IMO, it’s complete ignorance and jealousy that is prompting the narrative that WFH is bad!

Going into the office to then sit on Teams meetings has to be the worst. Absolutely pointless.

So many people seem to think it is jealousy!

I can’t think of anything worse than my home also being my office. It is nice to have separation.

I genuinely think that work is a social activity and the human race needs that physical mixing of people for happiness.

WFH is brilliant if you started your career in an office environment and had all the benefits. And then you got married, had children and live in a nice house, ideally with a home office.

It is awful if you have just started and work from either your childhood bedroom or a tiny flat.

iosh.com/about/media-centre/home-working-damaging-young-workers

Have a look at the sample. They spoke to 1044 office workers aged 18-44, 500 of whom were 18-24 and a minimum of 500 in office jobs. There's nothing to say they bothered polling those who were fully remote, which is by definition going to contain the 18-24s who are least able to work in person and the ones most advantaged by greater availability of wfh.

This matters, because those young people get spoken over a lot. Too many people, and you're very much one of them, don't bother acknowledging all the young people who won't be in the office in the first place.

The results are also being selectively reported. They don't link to the data, but 48% is less than half. Does that mean the other 52% think remote working makes it easier to build relationships with colleagues, or that it's immaterial? A third feel demotivated- it doesn't say whether that's due to remote working but let's assume it is. That leaves two thirds who don't. Yet we don't see that spelled out.

How do you advance career wise, learn from your superiors, get noticed if you're young and ambitious is my question. Surely you're at risk of just being a drone. This concerns me. I have three DC's. Eldest own business likes to mentor the young ones and steer. So mostly office based. Second son, works from home wife hybrid worker, they juggle school runs etc. youngest works two days in office, three days at university. He's still learning and likes the discipline of the workplace.

Personally in my field remote working wouldn't have worked. My skills and personality would have withered.

https://www.agcc.co.uk/news-article/people-working-from-home-least-satisfied-in-their-jobs-new-survey-shows

Another survey of 5,000 young workers.

You can question and critique the methodology of all surveys, but they all point in the same direction and it also makes sense.

So you don't work from home and never have?

But think you know all about it, when it could be brilliant and when it could be awful?

But you think people are just assuming people against it are jealous and that's wrong? but you just made numerous assumptions about WFH and why it could be brilliant or awful? And in fact, made assumptions about the entire human race and what they need.

How odd.

You've yet to prove that the first one even pointed in the direction the report claimed it did! And this news report also doesn't contain the actual data, or even as much information about it as the first one did, so in fact we can't critique or endorse the methodology.

Some of the writing is rather tortured though, which is never a good sign. It says 'almost one fifth of people who choose to work from home say a lack of socialising is the main reason for their job dissatisfaction'. So... the other 80+% don't have a problem then?

The clearest stat is that 60% of remote workers were proud of their jobs, 66% of office and 70% of hybrid. Which would seem to suggest your belief that in person should be the default isn't backed up, ey? They don't say the people are all doing the same jobs, office work clearly covering a wide variety of roles some of which have to be in person. Moving the remote ones back to the office doesn't necessarily mean they're going to become as satisfied as the others.

Are you just googling for sources saying remote working is bad? It looks like that. If you do the same for surveys showing remote working is good you'll get plenty to back that up. The key is to actually think, open your mind. Generalisations on this subject are stupid.