Looking after kids. Working from home

[Dressassistance]

Hi 😊 I wfh as do the majority of my team. It seems that after school pick up and during school holidays, some of my colleagues with children are not really available. They take ages to respond, are inactive on teams and don’t answer calls. This of course impacts negatively on other team members. They are not catching up or anything after work, they work their standard hours.

I can’t get my head around this being acceptable when people who work from office / other people working from home (including myself) would have childcare in place and working as normal.
What are other people’s thoughts on this? Am I being harsh?

same here, full time wfh tech role
my kids are grown up now but everyone in my wider team is allowed to pop out to get kids from school and have them at home, guess may be different for pre school
i see it that everyone appreciate the privilege and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone abuse it. Doesn’t bother me at all, we aren’t customer facing and all work is project based

I don't see a problem as long as the time is made up earlier or later in the day. If not, that would obviously cause resentment among those that don't have young children. Could you pop out for a coffee or something to make it even out? Otherwise you're doing more work for the same pay and that would be outrageous.

Yes, you are right. It shouldn't be acceptable for office-based workers to pick up the slack of parents who are unavailable after 2:30 even though they are contracted to work till 5pm. I WFH and basically I have put a late 1h lunch brake in my calendar at 2:30, so I can pick my kid from school. When I get him home, he just eats his big snack and then plays some Lego while I work. However, I rarely have calls and my job is basically deadline-based. I sometimes work late evening, too, if work demands it.

Nope, my colleagues do very little over school holidays.

There’s a huge difference between someone using their lunch hour to do school pick up and blocking it out accordingly and someone taking the mickey by downing tools after 3pm and looking after young DCs through the school holidays.
Men are usually the worst and seem to want some sort of medal from their female coworkers for picking up their DC from school.

Unfortunately all this quasi flexibility seems to have reduced companies desire to accept reduced or compressed working schedules.

WFH is still working! I have my grandkids today (half term holidays) so I have booked a day's annual leave. They aren't toddlers, they're old enough to amuse themselves, youngest is 10, but my work time requires me to concentrate on the project at hand, not to constantly be refereeing squabbles and making snacks.

OP, why not slack off yourself from 3-5? Go
to the gym?

Managers need to manage. Strong objectives, monitoring output, calling it our every single time, and misconduct action if necessary.

As a parent I’m finding because a lot of parents are not finding childcare during working hours in the holidays th holiday clubs are going out of business as there is no demand. Which is very frustrating. I WFH but at most I only have my child at home from 3:30 to 5pm on a Friday because I literally have no childcare options some holidays (not all holidays) because the holiday clubs are finding less demand so not worth operating longer.

Unless you have agreed a split shift working pattern, that would be completely unacceptable at my workplace. You’d be fired.

Now I take my work very seriously, I don't mess them about. Often working outside of my hours. My 7 year old son is dropped off and picked up by my other half who had this agreed with his employer (full disclosure they are a family member and do not mind) he is at home while I work from 3.30-5.30/6pm. He comes in and I make sure I stop and ask about his day, grab him a snack and a drink and ask him to do his homework on his tablet and then he can have the telly. This is 5-10 minutes. He knows that then if he needs anything he will need to sort it for himself or if he needs help to ask his dad until I come down. This is his decompression time after school and he is generally very good. As soon as I'm done it's dinner or clubs and my smallest comes home from nursery. I mean technically i am never the primary carer. This thread has made me panic a bit as I'd never considered that I was doing anything wrong. I work 4 days a week and do pick ups and drop off on my day with my small one.

I'm pretty sure someone else might already have said some of this, but it's almost 7am and I've not slept at all for more than 30mins total in the past 5 days, and I'm not going to read 5 pages of replies to check, so apologies if it's already been said.
If someone is WFH and being paid for FT hours (ie 37+hrs), then that's exactly what they should be doing for that number of hours, working on what they're being paid for, in exactly the same way as someone working at their employer's place of business would be expected to do.
If you work 'on site' you couldn't expect your employer to allow you to be doing school drop-offs and pick-ups during your working hours and to pay you for the privilege, or for your kids to be in your presence, wanting/receiving your attention outside school hours and during holidays, so why should those who WFH be allowed to do it?
I can understand if something has been specifically agreed about maybe 30mins morning and afternoon to do the school run, but that time should either be made up within certain parameters that work for the business, or unpaid, but no, just no, when you're working, the kids shouldn't be anywhere near you (unless you're a childminder or some such job).
I'm retired now and my kids are adults themselves, I worked in offices and had to pay for childcare outside school hours and during holidays, and we all used to have something to say about the smokers 'slacking off' for 15mins out of every hour so they could go outside for a 'fag break', whilst the non-smokers carried on working. Those multiples of 15mins soon added up. Think about it, 15mins every hour for let's say 7 hours each day, 5 days a week, that's 8hours 45mins every week, multiply that by say 46 weeks to take account of average-ish A/L and bank holidays, that's 402.5 hours or 53days 5hours or just under 11 weeks per year (based on a 37.5hr week), of lost productivity every year for each and every smoker, whilst the non-smokers are quietly seething about either having to pick up the slack or simply about the smokers getting paid for having all this 'paid' time to have a ciggy and chat!
In theory, it's exactly the same.
This may not be popular, but it's MY opinion.... if you want to smoke, do it on your own time, and if you've got kids, get cover for when they're not in school, everyone else has to do it and work the hours they're paid for, so why should WFHers and, using this example, smokers, get away with it?

It’s almost as though there are different workplaces with different rules though.

During school weeks they should be booking wraparound care as anyone working in the office would have to. I can sympathise in the holidays though, we’ve had to do the same on occasion. We try to get grandparents to help but they’re not always available. Can’t do holiday clubs because youngest has SEN and would need specialist provision to keep him safe. Needs must I guess, we make it work.

This!

With these type of threads, the amount of people who want to put it on their colleagues often not knowing the circumstances of their work contracts instead of expecting the managers whose job it is to sort such matters to do that is wild.

Bad managers cost more money and cause more issues than lower level employees do than most workplaces want to admit to.

A decent manager knows who is doing xyz, their output, if people have to pick up their slack, etc.

The ones from my experience that often complain can also be the ones not particularly doing as much as they think, have a lower output than the person they assume is not doing enough, the other person is actually doing more or doesn’t take into account that others start their day way earlier than they assume and leave ‘early’ because they’re done for the day so they can do xyz.

I think it's better for society to take care of their kids than make companies rich so... i think it's fine. Obv there's a balance and the work should get done eventually.

However many families have 2 parents working, kids are losing out a lot on just relaxing and getting bored at home (which is good for them). Wfh enables this.

However i expect the parents to manage their kids well enough to not be interrupted during meetings and disrupt work too much etc. A little is expected but not more than, say, talking to a colleague about the weather. Parents should let the kids be bored and not be entertaining them.