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In-person collaboration offers a multi-sensory, human experience that deepens employees’ connection to and perception of your employer brand. Enhance this impact with shared, immersive experiences that reinforce your vision, values and what you have to offer as an employer.
I think this means providing free coffee, snacks, cake and beer to your staff. I'll bring this up with my boss.
Solution: provide an office, and pay expenses for people to get there, but don't force people. That way, people will be more likely to come when there's a reason to because it'll be much less onerous; but those who really don't want or need to don't have to.
pay expenses for people to get there
That's ridiculous. When you start a job you know where you live and the commute to the office. If that changes then a discussion with HR will set out the new arrangement.
Expecting your company to pay for your commute is a nonsense.
Expecting your company to pay for your commute is a nonsense.
I'm not expecting it. I'm saying it would be a good way around the problem whereby people don't want to be forced to travel when there's no point. If you pay expenses, that should prevent people staying home to save money.
Regardless of what people 'signed up for' when they took the job, the world changes, people and companies should change with it.
Regardless of what people ‘signed up for’ when they took the job, the world changes, people and companies should change with it.
Exactly. When the subject came up at my place I said the world had changed and they weren't going to get the genie back in the bottle no matter how militant they became about it. For every employer like mine who spends massive amount of money on fancy offices there will be many smaller, leaner companies who have figured out remote working who will have massively lower overheads and be more competitive whilst paying higher salaries. Companies like mine won't be able to compete for staff or projects. Going back to full-time office working is no more feasible or likely than going back to working 6 days per week with no holidays or sick pay.
I'm OK with going back to the office but part of that bargain is providing facilities. It's annoying that my employer has withdrawn stationery and printers "because you didn't need them when WFH" and halved the size of the canteen so I can't get a seat at lunchtime. It's a bit of a one way street.
Crunch time will be when the next major office refurb is needed - will they spend the millions required on the existing office, pick up a newer cheaper office or just give up on the office?
Housing is the bit that gets missed out. People would be much happier to go to the office if the commute was 30 mins door to door. For london, thats only possible if you are earning millions
The offices are only half the story. Millions of jobs service commuters and offices. Trains, shops, coffee, lunch, taxis, cleaners. What happens to those jobs?
People would be much happier to go to the office if the commute was 30 mins door to door
Would they indeed. My commute is around 20 minutes and I would rather work at home so I can do other things in between working and also not have to put up with annoying people sat around me.
There are no positives with me going into office and I only do so to keep off the disciplinary list. Things have changed, people have changed, a lot of companies don't want to accept it.
All the offices in the building I ran my business from are now flats, which are worth more than the business property was before. In an economy with a residential property shortage such as London and much of the UK many will see it as an opportunity rather than a crisis.
I'll go against the concensus here and say I much prefer working in the office. I manage quite a big team and I find it far easier to do that in the office than at home. My employer has a rule of a minimum two days per week in the office which feels like a reasonable balance. I usually do four days.
That’s ridiculous.
No it's not. Employers needs to understand the cost of commuting is key for their staff. By all means mandate 5 day a week 9-5 presenteeism presentism, but expect your staff to be poached by employers who have working out the economics of all that obligatory peak time travelling.
I manage quite a big team and I find it far easier to do that in the office than at home.
Undoubtedly it's easier to manage a large team if everyone's in one place. One of my directors said he spent £350 per week commuting so if he was taking the hit everyone else should. Obviously he wasn't too happy when some of the younger staff pointed out that he could afford it on his 200k salary as opposed to the 30-40k they were on. Home-working makes it much harder to be a manager, but that's not a reason to get rid of it.
We're getting a new office after 3+ years of not having one and being 100% remote (bar a small lab for storing some equipment).
I'll probably cycle in a couple of days a week. After three years of being 100% remote I've reorganised my life around this eg I have a French lesson mid morning Tuesday and a PT session mid morning Thursday, which makes going back to an office on those days a PITA as rearranging those slots won't be possible.
3) In-person collaboration offers a multi-sensory, human experience that deepens employees’ connection to and perception of your employer brand. Enhance this impact with shared, immersive experiences that reinforce your vision, values and what you have to offer as an employer.
I don’t understand point 3 so have just pasted it in complete
Sounds like HR gibberish to me...
If you remove the need to go to the office then you remove the need to live near the office so you remove the price premium of accomodation near the office…
…and we all work out of the back of a van in the car park of your favourite Bike Park
Again - that's great if you never need to go into the office and can buy a £40k day van and buy a big place in Devon. It's not so great if you're 23 yo and can barely pay rent on the single room and would actually like a social life in a large city. This is a change (like everything else) favours the older and richer.
I’d hate to be starting my career now, either sat in a nearly empty office or locked away in my own home.
our new guys prefer to be in the office than sat at home on their own. they all hated it through covid - why would you want to continue it if there is an alternative? We all live local rather than commuting hours though.
That’s true, bur understandable considering that osmosis takes a long time to pay off, has a high proportion of time-wasting, and is a pain in the arse to deliver. So in the short term understandable why people like me would rather sit at home…
i can imagine some old guard hate teaching people stuff, and sometimes its annoying, but for teh most part i actually like it and find it rewarding when someone i trained does something decent.
it does depend on what you are doing i suppose. we are engineers so it really helps to be able to talk it through and explain stuff and wotnot. yes we can do it over teams (we did it through covid) but its not the same.
I want to buy an office soon so my business can rent it off my pension. so much cheapness appeals!
I manage a big team and I find it far easier to do that from home than in the office.
It’s amazing what you can afford when you don’t need an office that fits everyone in:
We have a small managed office for the folk that live nearby and want to get out of their houses/flats.
We provide a stipend for folk that want to use a managed office/wework and don’t live near HQ.
Decent allowance for home working kit.
Decent hardware and software for remote collaboration and constant reviewing of it.
Expenses paid when teams want to arrange to meet up for work or fun.
Regular pretty much mandatory away days for whole company F2F time. All expenses paid, and done in an extremely inclusive way.
There are some real benefits to having offices but a lot of the benefits are only real benefits when the assumption is that you 'should' be in the office or if you don't look at it from the employees side.
Imagine if everyone had always worked from home. Now explain to me why the business should take on the cost of renting / buying an office.
1) It will bring all our people into one place. How is that a benefit and to whom?
2) We will have a central location. Central locations require costly travel, buying more expensive food & drinks etc so why is this a benefit?
3) ...
Other than, it is nice to meet people and handy to bounce ideas off them face to face and occasionally you will get some random cross fertilisation of ideas I don't see any real benefits on the list of 18 I listed from Forbes on the last page.
I’m not expecting it. I’m saying it would be a good way around the problem whereby people don’t want to be forced to travel when there’s no point. If you pay expenses, that should prevent people staying home to save money.
We're moving offices this year, back of an envelope calc implies that the concessions made to people commuting by car amount to £0.4-0.8million per year, and that doesn't include the parking already included as part of the building (about 350spaces per ~900 desks).
And yet it's a seemingly impossible argument to get a drying room added to the plans to at least make cycling viable year round. It's an office of ~900 people, no one will want the smelly kit and towels on the hat stands.
And it's the same everywhere, car driving commuters already generally get massive subsidies compared to anyone on public transport or walking/cycling.
Again – that’s great if you never need to go into the office and can buy a £40k day van and buy a big place in Devon. It’s not so great if you’re 23 yo and can barely pay rent on the single room and would actually like a social life in a large city. This is a change (like everything else) favours the older and richer.
This in other words.
Commute lengths are proportional to wages for all sorts of reasons, but it's not a desirable thing to encourage.
Housing is the bit that gets missed out. People would be much happier to go to the office if the commute was 30 mins door to door. For london, thats only possible if you are earning millions
Depends on the commute though.
I've done both train (+Boris bike) commutes into Westminster via Paddington and car commutes to Staines barely into the M25. They took about the same time, but if you can get on a train it's 'productive' time, whether that's work or just enjoying a book/podcast. Car commutes are just lost time though, I hated it.
Paying for your commute is nonsense. Am I right in thinking companies did not cut peoples salaries when they worked from home so people had more money? If they want you back in the office why should they reimburse you for it now? Loads of people working in other sectors(health, service, retail etc etc) don't get their commute paid for.
Why should colleagues who commute, possibly have cheaper accommodation outside the city, get more than those in the office who live in the city, maybe pay more for their accommodation, and walk to work.
There are offices around here that were built over 10 years ago and have never been occupied.
I'm guessing this area isn't even special in any way?
Expecting your company to pay for your commute is a nonsense.
And yet many/most office-based employers pay for:
Sick pay
Annual Leave
Private medical care
Free tea and coffee
Life insurance
Pensions
Social events
Why not travel?
In the pre-covid world the onus was on workers to decide whether commuting was worth the cost, now it's the other way round. Employers need to decide if limiting themselves to employees who live locally is a disadvantage they can endure in the marketplace. If you can't recruit good staff, then your business will suffer, that's the bottom line.
paying for your commute is possibly nonsense, but if you wfh the majority of the time it'd be reasonable for the company to only pay you wages that are competitive for anywhere that job can be done (ie, anywhere in the uk), rather than the expensive area you may live in - if they want you in the office they have to pay a rate comparible with the local area. In some places there's no difference, but in a lot of the south east, paying north east wages would be a very significant drop
If they want you back in the office why should they reimburse you for it now?
Because they want to keep you, not lose you to a competitor company that effectively pays better. Mandating expensive commuting every day will increasingly be taken into account when employees are considering their pay package. Somewhere else offering slighting more money AND either less frequent commuting or pays for commuting? That's a big draw. "Sucking up" the cost of travelling peak time five days a week is no longer acceptable to many people (or simply isn't affordable anymore for some).
No it’s not. Employers needs to understand the cost of commuting is key for their staff.
Absolutely. I'd have taken a significant pay cut simply due to some distant exec's whim, for no benefit. Two of my team mates are facing 3hrs per day extra travel for no benefit because they are not co-located with anyone they work with.
There are offices around here that were built over 10 years ago and have never been occupied.
I’m guessing this area isn’t even special in any way?
Same round here, but there was a bit of a boom for a few years pre-covid where occupancy increased.
Apparently the reason is it's often cheaper to be paying the loans on a decent loan to value ratio, than it is to cut the rent, reduce the value and pay higher rate loans. Cynically I think it was just easier to get planning for office space, then convert to apartments at a later date.
Office and other commercial property rental prices aren't coming down though. My wife is trying to expand her business by taking on a small office/warehouse space and there just aren't any decent ones locally and anything even remotely suitable is vastly overpriced. Plenty of shared offices where you rent a desk but who's using this stuff?
Working from home would do my nut it - I don't want work anywhere near my home life. I can fully understand why people with long commutes love it though.
Plenty of shared offices where you rent a desk but who’s using this stuff?
Those who work from home but are bored and want some company! 🙂
Meh. Landlords/Property investors thought they would be above the risk of becoming redundant.
Just the same as any other industry lost to progress. MS teams is the steam powered loom, they are the luddites.
I like going into the office a few days a week, and at home a few days. My company has gone for this model, its working well for all involved. People are happier, people have better work life balance. Theyve off hired half the office to save the cash, so we couldnt all go in at the same time if we wanted to
Landlord continues to do the bare minuimum of maintenance on the building, as they always did.
I totally agree companies will lose colleagues if they don't offer a good package but that's all about the Ts and Cs you sign up for and a different matter.
A company has 2 people working in an office pre covid, one lives in the city and one lives in the countryside. The colleague in the city pays more rent for the pleasure but balances it by not having yo pay to commute. The colleague in the countryside pays less rent but balances it by paying more to commute. WFH now saves the second colleague money but not the first. Now you are to work in the office again and the second colleague gets their commute paid for saving money again but the colleague in the city has gained nothing. This doesn't feel right to me.
Coming back sort of to the original point, some areas are still trying to build office capacity. Leicester city council are desperate to increase the city's office capacity as their information is that businesses are moving elsewhere due to lack of good office space.
This could've linked to the earlier comment about the environmental performance of existing UK office stock.
This doesn’t feel right to me.
The solution is fairly obvious, give those who work in the office every day more money. Just like most big companies have a london weighting (worth about 10% of salary at my place), change that to an office-working weighting. That way city workers paying higher rents get more, commuters are helped with their travel costs, and those working from home can carry on doing that if they wish or go and work somewhere else which fully supports home-working.
In some places there’s no difference, but in a lot of the south east, paying north east wages would be a very significant drop
Just off-shore the jobs completely and save a fortune. Remote working can cut both ways
Because they want to keep you, not lose you to a competitor company that effectively pays better. Mandating expensive commuting every day will increasingly be taken into account when employees are considering their pay package. Somewhere else offering slighting more money AND either less frequent commuting or pays for commuting? That’s a big draw. “Sucking up” the cost of travelling peak time five days a week is no longer acceptable to many people (or simply isn’t affordable anymore).
I agree entirely.
But you also have to consider that they will have access to a talent pool that includes people local to the office who'll be prepared to do the job for less than you and turn up to the office.
But 2.0, employers are not going to retroactively start paying for commuting. If they paid you or your role previously based on you coming in, then allowed/were forced into some flexibility, then want to go back to being office based, they're not always going to pay more for that.
But 3.0, as 5lab points out, wages up north are often a lot lower. In my industry it's about a 20% uplift to be in London Vs anywhere else south of the Midlands, and a 20% drop from that to anywhere north of the Tees. So you need to balance the costs (or the job market will for you). Roles that only need someone in the office once a week/month might get taken by people prepared to balance the mortgage + commuting costs differently to you.
It'll all come down to the job market at the end of the day, if your sector's doing so well that you can afford to name your terms and price, then good for you. But that won't always be the case. And when the boots on the other foot you can't really complain it's unfair?
That way city workers paying higher rents get more, commuters are helped with their travel costs, and those working from home can carry on doing that if they wish or go and work somewhere else which fully supports home-working.
Isn't this sort of what already happens? Companies have different weightings for different cities, and for remote workers they'll use whatever city/locality that's in the system as the weighting. That's how it works where I am now and in places I've interviewed previously.
Just off-shore the jobs completely and save a fortune. Remote working can cut both ways
We already did that.
But 2.0, employers are not going to retroactively start paying for commuting.
Yes but my point is they could. And it would be a good tactic to help achieve their aims without pissing people off. People are always talking about 'thinking outside the box' - well, let's give it a try.
Just off-shore the jobs completely and save a fortune. Remote working can cut both ways
That's been happening for my whole working life. I've worked with and managed teams in the USA and India which leads me to believe I don't need to be in an office when the team is on 3 continents.
Yes but my point is they could. And it would be a good tactic to help achieve their aims without pissing people off. People are always talking about ‘thinking outside the box’ – well, let’s give it a try.
But put yourself in a hiring managers shoes.
Two equally capable candidates, one lives just up the road, ones lives an hour away. Would you pay the 2nd one 2hours more a day and costs? Or would you take the other one? If they need two new staff the market will dictate they'll pay them both the same higher rate (or someone else will, that's how supply and demand curves work) and the local one will be quids in.
Same applies with exiting employees if you engineer in a pay discrepancy. When it comes to redundancy evaluations you could end up pooled in and scored against a much higher pay grade.
Or if your office isd located in an expensive town do you start paying people in proportion to their mortgages as well? I live near my office, my mortgage is probably a few hundred quid a month higher for the privilege, but I don't need to own a car. Should my boss entertain a request to change to home working and a payrise if I move further away?
I'm not saying being in the office is better, or preferable, or necessary in a lot of cases. I just think a lot of people are overvaluing their hand.
How many of your local councils have started to sell off their office stock?
Ours has, with no intention to replace (or cannot afford to).
Perhaps linked to economic collapse.
Same applies with exiting employees if you engineer in a pay discrepancy.
This is whataboutery - you could say the same about all sorts of things when it comes to hiring. At least in your scenario I get to choose between the two candidates - the distant one might be much better.
Should my boss entertain a request to change to home working and a payrise if I move further away?
Depends if you're actually needed in the office all the time. Presenteeism is pointless and potentially damaging, which is my point. Employers get far more from their staff if they give them what they need and aren't seen to be imposing stupid decisions with significant negative consequences that employees have to pick up, just to please those higher up the chain.
I don't mind having to go into the office. I really mind having to spend my own time and money to go in for no good reason.
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I am important, yes. As is everyone who works to produce something. I'm obviously talking about office workers here, because this only applies to them. People who work at the Co-Op clearly can't WFH, why are you bringing them up? It sounds as if you think that people who do have a choice should shut up and deal with it, because Co-Op staff have to deal with it. On the other hand, they probably don't have to commute 90 mins a day and pay hundreds of quid to get to work.
@sam3000 - some local councils are selling off assets as the UK Govt is underfunding them and not allowing them to raise council tax very much. They are selling the assets to pay for day-to-day operational expenditure - 14 years of austerity
How many of your local councils have started to sell off their office stock?
Ours is...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-67875605
...not sure who they think is going to buy it with a £56m maintenance backlog. It'll be given away for £1.