Mums forced into office by big UK company?

[MM90]

I work for a big, well-known company. The bosses are considering plans to force all colleagues to come to the office 3 days a week. They are thinking about checking our turnstile data individually and disciplining anyone who doesn’t come in for 3 days every week, whether they need to be there or not. I thought this was the 21st century where working women have the chance to create a sensible work / life balance so long as they perform in their job. My line manager gave me a great performance rating during Covid. I have two children under 5 and no family nearby. Any thoughts on this?

What a depressing attitude you have. I'm sorry that you have been beaten down to this extent.

I'm under no illusions that I'm going to fix things single handedly, but change has to start somewhere. So I am starting where I can.

What a pointless post.

I am very disabled but thank you for the lecture. I still feel the gains of even occasional in person working are huge. Lots of our team are neurodiverse too due to the nature of the job. They too find benefits to coming in to the office some of the time.

@mandarindreams it's because some parents - note I said parents - did not think about their commutes and the location of their nursery/childminder when they decided to have children.

There are random threads on here all the time about whether a commute that is over an hour for both parents is feasible after maternity/parental leave.

(Single parents strangely don't start these threads. )

None of which means there aren't other disabled and ND people, some of whom have posted in this thread, who have more access to work now that remote working is more common.

As I said, you're talking about a self selecting group. That's just plain fact. They're not representative of the entire population.

The issue is that in the UK most jobs are in London or other big cities. I am in a fairly privileged position of having options which are not in London, but I would still have to travel 30 minutes or so by train or car to get to most of them. It isn't realistic for people to live close to their workplaces in many cases.

That isn't a lack of planning or foresight, it's where jobs are.

It's actually another good reason for remote working - employers can choose from a bigger talent pool, and employees don't have to live within daily commuting distance of their workplaces. If you only need to go in once a week or once a month, you can live further away.

Also, when I first went back to work after having my son, I only lived a 10 minute drive from my office. That office has long closed down, even if I had stayed working for that organisation!

Yep!

That's how some of the positions that were made to go remote during lockdown have stayed remote. If you need niche/shortage skills, and you can do something to widen your geographical recruitment area, it makes sense to do it.

I don't see the issue. I was in the office 5 days a week before COVID, including when my kids were young. We paid for childcare. These days I'm hybrid, normally 2 days but flex around the needs of the organisation in terms of F2F meetings - this is the NHS. My kids are grown up but I have cats. It's fine. While there are benefits to WFH, there are also benefits to being in the office - I had an all WFH job before this one and it was lonely.

What do you plan to do exactly? Tell men to pull their weight? How are you intending on doing this and what impact on inequality in the Uk workplace do you expect it to have?

It benefits a lot of people. E.g. the disabled. I think the title was badly worded and a little self-absorbed but I understand the principle that women could be pushed out the workforce. You can genuinely put in a flexible working request that legally has to be considered if you have good reason - that doesn't just cover reduced hours but also wfh.

Pretty much nobody can afford to live in London these days, so employers restricting themselves to London talent will have a very limited pool. The same is true of many of the big cities. The commute is also insanely expensive, even from relatively close (I live 20 miles from London and an annual season ticket on the train is over £5K, plus you'd need to pay for parking) and driving is just too unpredictable and also hard with Congestion Zone charging etc. The problem is, if you go in for three days a week, it's no cheaper to pay for individual tickets rather than getting an annual pass. Salaries are not generally high enough to make commuting financially worthwhile. Employers can mandate the RTO all they like, but it's just not going to work in reality.

@Reugny Again, I can't comment on OP's situation, but I know a lot of people who had children just before or during COVID who had to make decisions about childcare arrangements based on the information they had available to them at the time about what their working arrangements and location would look like, in a system that (certainly where we are) doesn't permit a great deal of flexibility to make changes down the line. If your employer was saying 100% WFH for the foreseeable future, then it would be difficult to second-guess what that might actually mean.

This cuts in both directions - I know people whose children attended nursery near their workplaces whose employers shut their offices and moved to fully remote jobs and who now need to do a 1 hour return trip twice a day to drop off and collect from a location that no longer has any relevance to them.

A big contributor to the challenge for me has been the decline in public transport services in my area since the pandemic, but that's probably a whole other thread.

If you are part of an organisation's culture, I'd like to WFH please.

I agree that there will be some ND people who find it easier to wfh. Equally, there will be some ND people who function better in an office environment.

If there are industries where wfh is effective from an employer perspective and it suits the employees, then there isn't an issue.

If some employers reach the conclusion that, for whatever reason, the organisation will perform better if employees attend the office full time or on a hybrid basis or whatever, then that is a perfectly reasonable position. They are doing what they consider to be in the best interests of the company.

If some employees will find the office based requirement difficult because of disability or neurodivergence etc, then they can request reasonable adjustments which might include wfh some or all of the time. It is for the employer to consider whether this can be accommodated while continuing to meet business needs. If they can, great. If they can't, the employee can vote with their feet and choose to work elsewhere.

Likewise, people with caring responsibilities have the right to put in flexible working requests and employers have a duty to consider these. If they decide that there are valid reasons why the request can't be accommodated, then it isn't unreasonable for them to say no, but they do need to be able to evidence why it wouldn't work.

Each time there is equality on a household level it benefits people outside of that. I felt huge relief when I moved jobs and my male (and v senior) boss said he worked flexibly around school runs. It doesn't just benefit his wife (who is similarly senior i understand) it benefits his team and colleagues too

Sorry, but we wouldn't have a job for you.

Some do. If nobody did, the offices would have been sold two years ago.

Good point.

This is what a lot of the what did you do pre covid comments are missing. Even for those whose DC were born before March 2020, the structural support needed to get into a physical workplace isn't the same as it was 5 years ago. Childcare is part of that, but so too is public transport. I live in an area where the trains are much worse than they were in 2019, for example. These things have an impact on ability to access in person work.

Well I earn 6 figures and work in my pyjamas 5 days a week so I am ok for now anyway.

Agree. My old boss told me that he had been kicked into shape by his wife. He was very senior and it was very positive to see him taking on an equal share of childcare duties.

The policy seems reasonable maybe you Dan work something out with the dad to cover the three days you are in work. What is their contract like?

Cool. I'm glad that you've found something that works for you.

Important to point out that people who need these adjustments benefit hugely from them being used across the wider population. In the same way as man taking paternity leave, dropping hours etc is good for women.

If you've eg a chronic condition that means you need remote work, you're in a better position now than you were in 2019. Because it's harder to distinguish you from other colleagues or applicants who don't have a chronic condition but may be just as likely to request remote working because they like it.

Whether businesses like it not, it's been proved that WFH is very effective for many roles.

Therefore forcing staff into the office needlessly (not where there is a genuine business need) has become a women's rights, parental rights and disability rights issue, as well as significant to work-life balance.