To think my work place is selfish?

[CorinnaSinner]

I work for a big global company and they have let 90% of staff work from home.

They are continuing to make the rest of us come in every day. They keep saying every day (for the last 2 weeks) that they are “looking into” us working from home but yet even now they still haven’t ordered enough laptops for everyone.

We are not key workers. They bring us into a small meeting room each day for briefing - no social distancing there.

I’m working from home just now because someone had symptoms. It’s totally possibly and my out put has gone up because I don’t have to go to feedback sessions every 5 mins. So far so good. I have to complete a time sheet and am doing it accurately because they have a keystroke monitor and there’s no point in lying.

Nice call with my boss who is pleased my input is up and while my timesheet is within permissible limits I shouldn’t be taking so much time away from the computer, the implication being that I’m enjoying myself emptying the washing machine etc. Despite me doing more work and less time away from computer than I would be at the office. Give me strength. I’m hoping that at the meeting with the bigger boss on Tuesday we can straighten it out.

Definitely business will always use guidelines to their own advantage. Has to be firmer if the government actually want people at home.

Yeah it's bollocks. I handle extremely sensitive information and I'm working from home. Because my employers don't want me to get sick.

We’ve all got laptops and 80% could work fine from home but because the juniors would struggle on what to do we’re all being told to go in unless we’re a risk category - I think we should at least have a rota system - a lot of companies aren’t following advice seriously enough

My employer is on a rota system, everyone works two days a week on site (where possible), we are a series of small enclosed offices so on your days in no one else is in the room. Each room has a huge tub of anti-viral wipes to clean all shared equipment down.

I handle sensitive information and work from home on a regular basis. Your company are chatting shit.

Also, how are they going to cope when vast numbers of staff go off sick and they don't have enough people to safely man the building? We've had to shut whole buildings on our campus & close off floors due to a lack of fire marshals and security guards.

My entire team are working from home as we help to manage the UK response to the pandemic (public sector). We actually do count as key workers but we're still doing the responsible thing and isolating!

I think this is happening in a lot of places. In my office they have said anyone who can work from home should work from home but people in some roles such as admin roles have been asked to come in.

My DH who is a lawyer for a council also asked to go in although a lot of them work from home.

It’s not fair but there are a lot of you in that position.

The confidential info thing doesn’t fly as many of us work with sensitive personal data and can work from home anyway.

I think we will all be at home soon but for now you could say you are not happy with the briefings.

Police staff dealing with crime data such a sexual crime (which gives victims anonymity) are being allowed to work from home and access their systems, you can't get data any more sensitive than that. Their excuse is BS.

(Sorry I should add some there, I know not all police staff will be dont it, but they're allowing it for staff who would never usually be allowed to WFH in other circumstances).

Have they not heard of VPN?!

They're being really unreasonable not letting you work from home. I handle sensitive information so my employer was sensible enough to have done background checks and have me sign NDA's for specific projects. No excuse at this point really!

At any rate, if they can trust you in the office, they should trust you at home.

Something that annoyed me at work (work in a national company) - guidance from head office says health comes first and if you can work from home then you should and that the bar is quite high for anyone to need to come in. Some managers almost insisted his team go home immediately regardless of role. Another team manager wanted to keep the admin staff coming in 3 days a week and that was still his position on Thursday / Friday despite some of them living with parents who fall into elderly or vulnerable category.

Goes to show there are still massively different interpretations of the guidance both at local and national level.

@Phlewf

What do you do? Sounds horrendous. I am part of a management team and resist other managers trying to instigate key logging to monitor work performance.

I think the issue with confidentiality is hard copy data and home networks. Companies have a duty to risk assess and if someone works with large volumes of consumer data (perhaps with credit card info) there could be a risk as home networks are less secure than penetration tested office networks. Given some roles never have WFH then companies will not have put in place processes to protect data, the last thing they need is a data breach during these times.

My work is the same, work from the head office of a large food retailer and could easily do my whole job from home but they won't let us. They are even pressuring us to 'help out' in the shops. I already have a long standing mucus cough I really don't want to stack it right now!

I work for a call centre for a bank. I'm not on the phones but still expected to come in. There are people wfh who do time critical work so they have the ability to have people wfh but as plenty of others say there's simply not enough laptops. I cant risk my job but saying im not coming in. Especially as my partner will no doubt lose his job due to COVID.