Remote working – increasing pushback from employers?

The company can refuse but it has to be one of a defined set of reasons

The benefit of those defined reasons is that HR already have water tight responses to them when ” the manager doesn’t want you to”

Really interesting thread – which in some ways illustrates the demographic on here.

I work in manufacturing – so we actually ‘make stuff’. Where we can we do allow flexible working but its principally site based (in fairness I also travel a fair bit on my job – its challenging to fit stuff remotely :)).

One of the posters above made the point about early careers and certainly from my perspective I think this is very true – being around people and even just being able to pick up on body language during a conversation is really important.

Full disclosure – I don’t like working from home – I enjoy the ‘craic’ of being in a factory/office environment.

I think maccruiskeen nailed it – you need to work in a sector that wants home-based employees for whatever reason.

Or do what my wife does and be self-employed. She loves it but you just need to be aware if you don’t work, you don’t gate paid…

Face to face working is absolutely vital. Face to screen in a cubicle miles from home isn’t.

Proximity and cost to the office is often the underlying reason behind different attitudes. Everyone I’ve spoken to who likes being in the office is always local, without exception. Which is fair enough, they’ve chosen to live nearby. But if you were hired during covid on a remote arrangement, I’m not sure what employers expect – which is where I agree with the ‘stealth’ downsizing theories.

Are there any guidelines of what constitutes a ‘reasonable’ commute time?

My employer (130 year old business) doesn’t have enough office space to go back to all in the office. I’m also very very unproductive in the office. Its pretty much a given that office days wont see any work completed.

Our company’s just stipulated a second mandatory day in the office, with a requirement for a third day of your choice. I can understand why it’s beneficial for teams that can work face to face, but I’m a trainer and ALL of our training is done online (a mistake, IMO – classroom-based face to face is SO much better quality, but online is cheaper so…), so it’s a bit pointless for me, really. Still, it’s nice to get out of the house. 🙂

(“more than 50% in the office”)

There’s another consideration here.

Your “regular place of work” is defined as where you spend the most time. So if you WFH two days a week and are in the office for three then the journey is simply your commute. If on the other hand you WFH three days a week and are in the office for two then they should be covering travel expenses when you go in.

This was a loophole HMRC stood on several years ago. We had engineers who would travel to a site visit “from home” or “from the office” depending which was further away. Neither here nor there if you live five minutes away, but gets lucrative fast if your nearest office is an hour in the opposite direction.

You can’t learn by osmosis, you can only absorb water, stop miss using words and get your own ones.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/osmosis

Not according to the dictionaries

Why? Nobody is forced to do a particular job. You know full well when you enter those roles that you need to be there in person.

You really need me to explain why we might still need Surgeons, teachers etc?

Face to face working is absolutely vital. Face to screen in a cubicle miles from home isn’t.

As many others have said, “it depends.”

When I was in support I was in the office maybe half the time, for no good reason other than that was expected. The other half I was on the road or on site with customers.

When I was working as a developer, I absolutely had to be left alone. I was in an open-plan office and it was genuinely starting to affect my mental health. People would come to my desk, “have you got a minute?” and sure, because you’ve shattered my train of thought and I’ve just lost half an hour. I wound up moving the contents of two store cupboards into one, putting a desk in the other and closing the door behind me. WFH would have been a godsend.

When I was a manager, I had apprentices under me and physical work to do. I had to be in the office to babysit, mentor and take stuff apart. There were days where I’d work from home but it wasn’t the norm, usually when the minions had their college day and I had a bunch of admin to catch up on.

When I moved to security the job was fully remote. I was in Accrington, my last remaining apprentice was in Burnley, my colleague was in Sheffield and my boss was in Lincolnshire somewhere I think. I’d met them all face-to-face but in the few years we worked together it was never all at once. There was absolutely no point in me going to an office other than for social reasons, I used to drop in on quiet days occasionally just to say hello to people, maybe on a MacMillan cake & coffee day or Comic Relief or some such. So long as I had an Internet connection and a mobile phone, I could be on the moon for the difference it made to my workday. It also meant I could work antisocial hours without needing to creep around an industrial estate on my own in the dark.

stop miss using words

“misusing.”

Thanks couger.

Not according to the dictionaries

Funny isn’t it the example they give even shows that the would doesn’t mean that ?

As if by osmosis, the facts became clear over a period of time.

You really need me to explain why we might still need Surgeons, teachers etc?

Im not sure I understand this post in the context of what it was replying to. I think the post you responded was highlighting that anyone that takes a job that requires being there in person accepts the requirement.

Funny isn’t it the example they give even shows that the would doesn’t mean that ?

I didn’t find that funny. I did find it funny that your partial quote selectively missed the part of the entry that did cover the situation thought

​the process of gradually learning or being influenced by something, as a result of being in close contact with it

The part time work that I do now is from home. I am much more productive at home than I was in the office before Covid. This is  because the people in that office just won’t stop talking and the noise level ( and the inanity of the conversations) distracted me from what I needed to do which is concentrate on reading and understanding documents.

I didn’t find that funny

https://images.app.goo.gl/Mav16USmJwMUSaHj8

the process of gradually learning or being influenced by something, as a result of being in close contact with it

Is not what osmosis is, sure you can use it as an analogy but it’s not what osmosis is. It’s just been taken up by people to explain something they can’t explain whilst wanting to sound clever. Happens all the time.

We now have door keycards being used to track how often individuals are in.

the cleaner gets to spend all day walking around while I’m chained to me desk

Change jobs and become a cleaner then

My place stipulated a maximum of 2 days per week, and quickly rented out 60% of the office space. I took that as indicating no minimum, so in the past six months I have been in three times, each time for an hour or so, just to drop stuff off. Nobody seems to care as long as the work is done.

explain something they can’t explain whilst wanting to sound clever

Ah now I get where your coming from.

Bit of a hot topic in the civil service – new government has repeated they expect 60% attendance in the office.

This coincided with a lot of centralisation and consolidation of locations. Several departments/locations don’t have the space to achieve that, many people work in geographically split teams so have no one to work with in their local office, so why go in?

It would have been easy win in this year’s pay negotiations to drop attendance to 40%, to make the money go further, but never mind.

I’m one of the weirdos who prefers working in the office, even though it costs me £20-25 a day. And we never hear from those who have no choice to go into the office due to space or other domestic situations.

You really need me to explain why we might still need Surgeons, teachers etc?

Of course not, but I can’t see what that has to do with anything.

Sorry, started thread then went out with family!

I do sympathise with the junior workers in the office, both why they might want to be there, and the benefits of them being there.

I guess the point has also been made above that a bit of good management could ensure that people still get to work from home whilst also using anchor days or similar to guarantee overlap with the junior employees.

I also argued (although it fell on deaf ears) that when I was a graduate engineer, I was often to worried about asking ‘stupid’ questions in the middle of the office, but WFH makes it easier for someone to call a sympathetic senior (worryingly I think I was always the guy that graduates called with ‘stupid’ questions as I think they felt safe asking me them!). Also much easier to ping a busy senior a message asking for a five minute call ‘when they’re free’ tgan trying to judge when someone isn’t busy and going up to bother them in office.

I guess from a tin-foil-hat perspective I wondered if there was some sort of national level economic/capitalist agenda that wants people back in the cities, Appa TFL still reporting lower ‘ridership’ and I wonder how much budgeting or otherwise had been carried out on the basis of continually increasing ridership.

Change jobs and become a cleaner then

Absolutely a viable option and if I felt strongly enough about it I could make it happen. Likewise for those who don’t currently WFH but would like to. We’re all free to make our own career choices.

Your “regular place of work” is defined as where you spend the most time. So if you WFH two days a week and are in the office for three then the journey is simply your commute. If on the other hand you WFH three days a week and are in the office for two then they should be covering travel expenses when you go in.

Got a link for that Cougar?

I guess from a tin-foil-hat perspective I wondered if there was some sort of national level economic/capitalist agenda that wants people back in the cities,

Investment companies own building space so they want to see that used, there is a significant amount of economic activity associated with servicing office users which drops away if they have lower occupancy rates.

Bit of a hot topic in the civil service – new government has repeated they expect 60% attendance in the office.

We’re at 40% at present, largely due to moving to buildings without enough desks!

It seems much harder to get things done than pre- covid, teams are never about and it’s a lot more difficult to find out who you need to speak to when the office / team area is completely empty.

We also have a large number of roles that can’t be done from home and some which can’t be done effectively / for best practice should not be done from home. This has seen a lot of urgent work being dumped on whoever happens to be in the office and a degree of discontent has arisen from this.

I’m a software engineer and I think I’m quicker to turn to colleagues to talk something over if we’re in the same room than I am to get on a call with them for instance.

I’m a software engineer, and even if I’m sitting next to someone, I’d stick the question on slack first, before interrupting someone else’s train of thought.

My employer (130 year old business) doesn’t have enough office space to go back to all in the office

Same with ours, we went from a building that holds 500 staff to one floor that fits 70.
Huge savings were made in doing this

The seemingly desperate need to drag everyone back into offices just smacks of insecure management and presenteeism. My employer gets far more out of me WFH than they do if I waste 75 minutes minimum a day travelling to and from. But I am pretty secure in my own role and don’t need hand-holding.

As my employer is multi-site and very disparate in terms of where my likely contacts are based, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve travelled to a site for Meeting A, only to have to do Meetings B and C via Teams anyway – because I can’t get from site to site quick enough.

My employer is also committed charter-wise to carbon reduction. A fact I will bring up if they insist on presenteeism.

WFH, I can work longer each day, save money on fuel, reduce my emissions and do more of the running around after kids in the evenings. Commuting time is an utter waste.

From the points above, though. I agree – I think I would have struggled earlier on in my career without physical attendance/presence. So, if 2-3 days in the office was badged as team-time with an emphasis on new/younger employees, I would go in more.

Oh yes – and my employer is pledged to make savings by shrinking our estate footprint by 20% – much of which will come from office space.

So they can’t expect to make savings of this nature whilst requiring presenteeism of everyone.

I find it ironic that Amazon, with its cloud remote computing product, its online remote shopping portal, it’s portal “Amazon Turk” (used to tender for remote work) and it’s space program to, er,  leave Earth, demands that the members of the cult of Bezos workers are “on prem” for 5 days a week.

In the cult of Bezos, that’s probably seen as the divine leader being generous as he is gifting you the chance to work from home for TWO WHOLE DAYS before returning to the temple.

That’s because Amazon wants to reduce its payroll but doesn’t want to pay redundancy.

The Amazon one is rooted in the culture – one of mistrust and adversarial.

The company knows, by and large it is exploitative – therefore it regards its workforce more as a necessary evil and one that will take a mile if given an inch. Mutual distrust. And that the big boss is a tinpot dictator.

Got a link for that Cougar?

A good question. It’s how it was explained to us at work a few years ago so not directly. However, this seems to be the (wordy) explanation from HMRC:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ordinary-commuting-and-private-travel-490-chapter-3

The seemingly desperate need to drag everyone back into offices just smacks of insecure management and presenteeism.

This is my primary objection to it and is what I’m saying to recruiters. I have no issues with going into an office if there is a valid reason for me to do so. I am absolutely damned if I’m spending north of two hours in rush hour traffic five days a week just so that someone can visibly see that I’m working. It’s madness. If I’m not working then you’ll find out soon enough when the work hasn’t been done.

I’m very heavily in Camp Cougar; me not doing my job is very obvious and very quickly seen (in the worst cases) and even the day-to-day grind jobs would not be improved by me physically being at an office. People are going to hate me no matter if I am talking to them in person or over Teams/Slack/whatever. I have no desk or office at my official place of work anyway, so rely on one of the other groups loaning me a desk when I am in.

If I was job hunting, ability to work remotely or, more realistically, not from Kista, Solna or central Stockholm is an early question now for me.

me not doing my job is very obvious and very quickly seen

I’m maybe pretty awkward, but the more I’m monitored, the less likely I am to actually do useful work.

find it ironic that Amazon, with its cloud remote computing product, its online remote shopping portal, it’s portal “Amazon Turk” (used to tender for remote work) and it’s space program to, er,  leave Earth, demands that the members of the cult of Bezosworkers are “on prem” for 5 days a week.

There is a funny skit about the zoom version of this

Premise is …. We are a company that develops remote working software for collaborative thinking  and we want you to continue to use it….but oh no we need our employees in for the self same collaborative thinking.

That link is what I’m looking at as well Cougar. It seems clear that 40% defines a difference between a permanent workplace and a temporary one, if the timeframe is under 24 months. When I say clear, obviously that’s within the context of it being a gov website!

I would agree though, that if an employer has allowed full remote for a decent amount of time then I don’t see they have the regular pattern which would allow them to define the office as permanent?

Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Surely the reduction in overall commuting has a societal benefit. And over time, businesses that get the balance right will be more likely to succeed.