To be so glad WFH became a thing (and to absolutely hate anyone who tries to curtail its availability)

[Designless]

It's just life changingly good

I phoned HMRC and it really sounded like the call handler was working from home from the noises in the background. Wouldn’t be that bothered but it meant that she ended up cutting me off and I had literally been waiting for hours to speak to someone. Totally unprofessional.

Even if that happened, it what way was your customer service experience really effected by her WFH?

Did she not deal with your complaint?

Probably totally against company policy, the fact that the person on the other end could have many personal details about someone on her screen, and this is now just there for her partner to see. This is not just unprofessional but, more than likely, falls foul of WFH policy, GDPR, cybersecurity, etc. Christ, we have a policy for using free wifi, but it's okay because the issue has been resolved.

I can do my job from the beach, but that doesn't mean I should.

Interestingly I had this too with DWP a while back last year.

It was so frustrating because it felt like I'd been "deliberately hung up on" , rather than it being a genuine accident.

Or worse, it was a WIFI call connection being dropped, which isn't ideal eithe!

Another 45 minute wait to get back through to the next person, who thankfully didn't discard me.

Again brilliantly said, but you will sadly be shouted down @40YearOldDad by those who feel everything should take place from home.

As I've said before, I'm very lucky , I'm 100% remote if I want to be. I'm not sour grapes.

I am however robustly against people contravening all the training and guidelines they were given by a company.

I'm surprised so many people feel they are more productive when they're WFH - I find the opposite. I find it hard to motivate myself at home and end up procrastinating more, and I always feel much more tired. Yes, in the office I'll have chats with people, but that's part of what makes me feel more alert and spurs me on to actually do my job and focus on it when I need to.

Since Covid my company has adopted a hybrid model of two days in the office and the rest from home, which I do like on the whole - certainly there are some days when I have too much to do to be able to spare the commuting time, or days when I feel lazy and don't want to travel. However, at the moment we're "between offices" so have been WFH full-time for a bit, and I can't wait to actually have a base again. I get on really well with my colleagues and several are friends I see outside work too. I don't want to just chat to them over a screen, and there are many tasks in my work which I just find a lot easier being able to do in person.

WFH is not for everyone. Some people feel isolated and demotivated and miss the cut and thrust of office poitics. There is also the possibility of being overlooked for promotion and training opportunities because you are not as visible as in office staff. It takes a certain personality to enjoy just being able to sit down and get on with the job without the need of constant supervision. This is putting aside all the arguments in favour of allowing the disabled or those with special needs to avoid a long and time wasing commute just to be present.

I work fully remotely as do all of my department and most of the company. Does it make life easier? Yes , and also saves money on travel and wraparound childcare, but I do miss being in the office for the connection. That’s just a personal preference though and I know for many the benefits outweigh any negatives.

The biggest plus in my opinion is the bank of talent that it opens up to for recruitment. We can pick from the crème de la crème all across the UK without being restricted by commutable distance. It was the trick my last employer was missing (insisted on hybrid 2 days in 1 office location). People still applied on the off chance they could change our minds I suppose but we wouldn’t even interview them even if they were excellent candidates.

I’m almost certain that I was hung up on deliberately.

But as a new starter how do you know what you don’t know?
There may be all sorts of things going on that you might not have considered. What about the conversations you overhear between other colleagues which may be useful in the future.
Emails/phone calls take more time than asking a workmate and there will often be a delay in getting a reply, so in the meantime you may carry out a job slightly wrong.

You're really reaching with the GDPR crap and not at all addressing the point of whether or not that persons customer service experience was reduced because the operative was WFH.

And it wasn't. It was just a reason for the person to complain.

To address those who have said they have heard background household noise when being connected to a customer service advisor who is WFH - I have had customer’s complain about background noise in my office also.

We in the call centre share an office with departments who are not telephone-based, and they often completely forget that we are trying to listen to our customer’s. Just the other day I had two Team Leader’s stood directly behind my chair talking about how they’ve booked Majorca for Spring half-term, and it made it incredibly difficult for me to communicate with this poor customer who was already struggling as English wasn’t their first language.

When WFH my partner will sometimes bring me up a cup of tea, but he’s very quiet and discreet and doesn’t say a word. Calls get listened to and audited at random by a dedicated quality assurance team - if they were to hear a toddler or sometimes partner watching the footy in the background, the person would absolutely get pulled up on it

There's a bit of not knowing what you don't know and things not having been considered in this post.

It's absolutely not the case that emails requesting information must take longer than going and asking the person. That presupposes the person will be available to speak to you at precisely the time you want, which cannot be assumed. I often had to make multiple attempts before a more senior member of staff was available when I was training, not least because they had so much work themselves that they often weren't very interested in training me. Which I get, actually. Much more efficient to be able to send one email instead of having to scurry back and forth until I happened to get them in a free moment, and them reply to that email when convenient.

And she's right, the organisations you're dealing with quite likely have reduced their staffing. That's been very common since covid. You do need to think about other things that have changed in the last 6 years as well.

It's absolutely not the case that emails requesting information must take longer than going and asking the person. That presupposes the person will be available to speak to you at precisely the time you want, which cannot be assumed.

There are also times when emails are more use, since then you’ve got the information written down for future reference & people then don’t come back to you wanting a repeat of what you told them last Thursday.

Yes, I have been put through to a call centre and I could hear the clacking of keyboards and other agents talking to customers. I guess it all depends on the headsets etc they are using. I seriously doubt they have an old landline phone on their desk anymore.

I remember seeing a video of a man on a Teams call who somehow used some computer magic to show a clone of himself bringing him a cup of tea. Probably confused the hell out of his colleagues 😆

110%. DH and I were talking about this the other day. It’s enabled him to condense his full time hours into 4 days, and I hope to do the same after being part time (4 days) since our eldest now in Y6 was born.

DH tends to go into the office 2 days a week, me 1 day maximum but sometimes there’ll be a couple of weeks where I don’t go in at all. We can fit so much more in, exercise, dog walking, the odd chore. My job is peaks and troughs and some days I barely leave my desk at home, but at least I’m at home and don’t have the added commute on both ends of the day.

The only thing it hasn’t helped is my waistline! I cook healthy lunches but my snacking habit has grown, I was more disciplined when people in the office would judge me!

Yep, this too!

So basically as well as working full time WFH enables woman to carry on doing all tbe domestic work as well. Thats handy.

Yes I completely agree - some sectors need that regular in person-collaboration.

In my post I was more critiquing companies where WFH full-time has proven to be effective, and yet the company insist we still have “in-office days” for arbitrary reasons such as “team building” (even though during every working moment we are on calls to customers, I barely know my colleagues as we don’t get a chance to talk). Training, welfare meetings, performance reviews etc are all performed over Teams with headsets on, even if the manager is sat next to you in the office. When I had a meeting to announce my pregnancy to the manager, I was WFH and she was in the office (we have differing WFH days) with colleagues sat next to her - it certainly didn’t feel like a confidential meeting with her. The others in the office wouldn’t have heard me but they’d have heard her asking “So when you due, Espertillus?”. I’d have felt much more comfortable if she’d invited me into the office to have the meeting in a private room - but logic seems to have gone from my workplace on how to use the office space appropriately.

My workplace employed people from all over the country during Covid and has kept them employed on permanent WFH contracts. Post-COVID they only hire people in the local city, and we are expected to do 2 days in office. One person ended up with a leg ailment that made commuting hard and had requested to go onto a permanent WFH contract as a reasonable adjustment. The business declined on the basis that it wouldn’t be fair to other office staff, that office days are part of her contract and that they hadn’t had a chance to offer her accommodations in the office yet. She appealed based on the fact that there are 20 people doing her role who are based fully remotely, and she won.

It has a set a precedent, and I’m prepared to fight the same fight when I return from mat leave, as being fully WFH would save me a massive logistical issue with managing a commute and nursery pick-ups.

I think it depends on who you are. I find WFH much more productive because I can get my head down and do a chunk of work. In the office I'm easily and frequently distracted and find the constant context switching really difficult.

It's brilliant. I used to think, oh, if only working from home was a wide- scale thing. And then it happened.

Unfortunately for me, I've been trying to get a work from home job but I can't get anything. I've no skills apart from warehouse and shop work and stuff like that.

I always get anxiety talking on the phone for work, but maybe I could work on that anxiety. I was thinking about doing some courses to learn how to do payroll and things like that

Not really, and on one call with a government agency (can't say which one 🤐) I was specifically told that they have 'privacy screens' on their laptops to avoid passersby, wives, husbands, etc., peeking at their PC screens, and they'd had issues with 'auditors' zooming into buildings.

If you visited the Dr's and the doc had their husband/wife sat next to them, or a kid running around, would you be happy with that as a service as long as they gave you a prescription? Or would you expect some level of privacy and confidentiality?

I used to work in a place (pre COVID) where we were given bonuses for the number of calls we got through in a day. It was really really easy to meet the quota if you just hung up on several calls which were going over the average time. I wonder if that still happens?

It had nothing to do with WFH (we were fully office based) but everything to do with daily quotas. They then introduced customer satisfaction surveys after calls and surprise surprise, everyone did fewer calls per day!

I think you should look at it another way - it allows women to carry on working and maintaining financial independence when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to due to the restraints of family life:

I finish work at 5:30pm. My train home is at 5:52pm and takes 12 minutes (and this is often delayed). I will then have an 18 minute walk to the nursery - my nursery shuts at 6pm. My partner works 8am-8pm (and no, he can’t request flexible working or WFH as he is a crane driver on a dock and needs to be physically there during the required hours).

The 2 in-office days my workplace insists on suddenly become impossible.

When WFH, I can log-off at 5:30pm and be home with the baby by 6pm.

My options are as follows

• Quit and become a SAHM until I can find a job with appropriate hours - this drastically reduces our household income and it may take me months/years to find something, especially in this job market. It would leave a permanent dent in our finances and my pension
• Get a part-time job or request to reduce hours at my current role - this reduces my income, reduces pension contributions and reduces opportunity for career progression
• Request to go fully WFH - I still earn the same income, and the business still has a full-time staff member. Everybody wins

Well, it allows me more family time when we're all home and we don't spend half a weekend day doing laundry, food shopping and the like.

Similarly, once I finish work, we're back home spending family time together within 25 minutes as I no longer have a commute.

So it's actually made all the domestic labour much easier due to lack of commuting time.

It's also allowed a career change and significant pay rise, allowing us to have a weekly cleaner.

So I can't get angry about it to be honest!