Remote working – increasing pushback from employers?

I know plenty of folk who just do their hours but are plain better at their jobs than those ‘putting the hours in’ and have been rewarded accordingly.

I didn’t say you needed to do more hours I said you needed to do more than base expectations, that can be through being more skilled, more efficient or willing to do more. But if you’re only going to work to contract then why expect the company to do any more than pay to contract?

Where I work the 500 widget months would be planned for and we would bring in agency staff for the duration

It takes about 2-3 years to learn how to make a widget to the required standard with minimal supervision as it’s a super niche and complicated widget. Unfortunately our widget making competitors are spread around the country so we can’t poach any experienced widget makers and there’s certainly no pool of agency widget makers out there with the experience necessary

You need to employ somebody who’s got some planning skills then because whoever is in charge of that element is a bit shit.

My contract will say 9-5 and sometimes more. The market rate for my job reflects it’s not really 9-5. I’m not working for free.

I’m ok with that, the industry is completely transparent about it. If it wasn’t like that I’d undoubtedly get a lower salary.

Very much this.

I was offered a job earlier this year, 25% pay rise and an annual bonus scheme of ~15% of my salary so potentially 40% salary increase. But whilst the responsibility level was a little higher, what I was being paid for was the increased draw and demand on my time outside of “normal” working hours, either through working away or meeting critical deadlines and the lack of control I would have over those due to external demands.

In the end I turned it down, as for me it wasn’t the right balance. It would have needed me to give up evenings and weekends doing things with my family. If I had taken it, it would not have been reasonable for me to then have complained that they were expecting me to do more than my contracted hours.

I said you needed to do more than base expectations

In which case, that’s a nonsense.

If you’re expecting someone to exceed your expectations then, well, you’re lying about what your expectations are.

If I had taken it, it would not have been reasonable for me to then have complained that they were expecting me to do more than my contracted hours.

Eh? If you have contacted hours then that’s what you work for the remuneration offered. That’s why there is a contract, with hours. Have you people been brainwashed or something? If more hours are expected then this should form part of said contract. Of course it would be reasonable to complain as one party would be breaking the terms of a contract.

You need to employ somebody who’s got some planning skills then because whoever is in charge of that element is a bit shit

Unfortunately we only seem to get applications from workshy introverts. Simply not good enough!

Where is the laughing emoji when you need it. Seriously though, do you not have supply agreements in place, MOQ’s, forward orders, forecasts? Basically anything that means you could spread out production through the year without the need to quadruple workload or have bugger all workload. Seems a bit mad.

If you’re expecting someone to exceed your expectations then, well, you’re lying about what your expectations are.

No I set realistic targets so that doing what is expected is what you’re contracted to do, for that you get paid what you’re contracted to be paid and it gets uplifted (normally by inflation). Do better, bring something additional to the company and you get rewarded by above inflation pay increases, promotion or bonuses.

Where is the laughing emoji when you need it. Seriously though, do you not have supply agreements in place, MOQ’s, forward orders, forecasts? Basically anything that means you could spread out production through the year without the need to quadruple workload or have bugger all workload. Seems a bit mad.

I did try to make this simple but to clarify

We’re not really making widgets

The numbers I used were made up as a simplified illustration

However, the “widgets” can only start to be made 3 months before the date they’ll be used by the client. It takes 9 months to get enough material to make the widget. If you make it earlier then it won’t be an accurate widget, and you’ll have to remake it again once you have 9 months worth of widget material

Oh, and every single widget is bespoke. No 2 widgets are the same. Every single one is unique.

As a result the price of every widget is different. Cheapest widget could be around £25,000. Most expensive could be over £100 million

If you have contacted hours then that’s what you work for the remuneration offered. That’s why there is a contract, with hours. Have you people been brainwashed or something? If more hours are expected then this should form part of said contract.

More hours were required, it would have formed part of the contract but it would have been written as 37.5h standard with additional hours as required to meet business needs. It wasn’t going to be written in as additional weekly hours as it’s only needed to meet tender requirements set by external organisations occasionally but being away would have been normal. Being away may not impact on contracted hours but does have impacts, even if they can be managed.

No-one is paying me 40% more to do effectively, the same job for the same contracted hours, they were proposing to pay for the additional potential demand it would place on my time to meet “business needs”. If I’m good at my job and deliver efficiently then I reduce that demand and I leave myself in a better position, but when public sector bids are due you have to hit deadlines, can’t just go **** it and submit late as you’re out.

So there would be a clause in the contract stating the need for extra hours as required. Therefore it would be accounted for and you wouldn’t be going outside of the contracted hours. This is just getting weird now

How can you steal toilet rolls if you’re not in the office?

FWIW even when we have to crunch, like losing millions a day as we were at the start of the year, there was no question of mandatory overtime. It was requested and rewarded but never forced. And yet we still managed to fix it.

Remotely.

Because you can’t shift an entire engineering team to a power station.

You can’t plan for that, sometimes everything just goes to shit and someone has to weild the mop. But you can plan for regular work and Bob, your business planners suck. You know what man hours you have and you know what work you can take on. If you’re taking in more work than man hours then someone has made an arse of it. It sounds very much like you’re in the sort of industry that has very little competition so why not charge a bit more and just work with the resource you have? Either that create more resources.

And tea spoons. Someone at our place has a spoon fetish that’s got way out of hand. Needs bringing up in their next PDR.

Toilet Rolls, just get ’em when picking up new IT hardware, training days, occasional in person meeting, you just need to take a really big bag.

As a result the price of every widget is different. Cheapest widget could be around £25,000. Most expensive could be over £100 million

What the actual ****, you absolute p*ss takers. GTF. I can get 10 from John Smith’s for a tenner down at Tesco Express.

But you can plan for regular work and Bob, your business planners suck.

Has Bob stated how much overtime is actually being talked about? (Its too early for me to reliably not miss stuff)

Even if you know the extra work is coming, theres going to be a point where the amount of additional hours required is low enough that it’s no longer worth planning any further than hist simply, doing a some overtime two months of a year. Or, as in a past job is doesnt matter how much business planning you do, you have 50 hours of physical work, and only 4 days access to a physical site, so buckle up and get on with it. Still loads of business planning in that, but theres only so far planning goes if the site owner says “you have 4 days, take it or leave it, the previous users of the site aren’t able to vacate the site any sooner”.

We work from home. When we go out on site we get paid door to door. I planned a day’s work that enabled me to get a bike ride in on the way home.  One of my guys ended up with a 2 hour drive home on the end of his 8 hour shift. He just puts 10 on his timesheet.

We are also expected to work away and nights (better rates for nights) and minimum number of weekend shifts. If we work more than 40 hours we can take time off, most folk opt for the extra cash

So there would be a clause in the contract stating the need for extra hours as required. Therefore it would be accounted for and you wouldn’t be going outside of the contracted hours.

Hooray, you’ve finally got there! That has been the point of this tangent to the conversation which started with Bob pointing out he declined to offer a job to someone that wouldn’t accept that requirement. Lots of people saying it needed compensation through over time payment or TiL or whatever otherwise it’s “abusive”. The point I’m making is that companies that have to respond to this kind of stuff may already be recognising that in the baseline remuneration package, be that enhanced pay or bonus schemes or leave or whatever.

Every contract (both public private and 3rd sector) that I have had in nearly 30 years of employment has had an additional hours as may be required according to business need clause except for the summer job I had working in a factory on a production line. But everyone seems to have got excited at arguing that then doing that is some form of horrific rapacious mandatory overtime thing that should be definitely absolutely paid or compensated for in some way. The point is, and it’s been made by a few people, is that the expectation on flexibility is baked into to contract but also your remuneration package. You have the protection of defined contract hours and as long as everything is normal you’re not going to be expected to do anything other than that.

I reckon the candidate BoardinBob turned down recently was Funkmasterp and I claim my £5.

I wouldn’t even look at his Butlins inspired working model. Also, we didn’t finally get there as that quote two posts up wasn’t even responding to Bob. MrHoppy, you did a terrible job at getting your point across and this will form part of your next PDR, which we will all ignore the outcome of until next year.

It is no wonder some of you struggle to hit deadlines and need to work with others. I’m beginning to think they are your carers! Insert wink or laughter emoji here.

was offered a job earlier this year, 25% pay rise and an annual bonus scheme of ~15% of my salary so potentially 44%  increase.

FTFY

Yup, bob’s post about contract clauses, performance reviews, promotions, pay rises and bonuses is how it’s worked in every job I’ve had.

It’s been an interesting thread of the public and private sector workers each thinking the other is mad 😀

It’s been an interesting thread of the public and private sector workers each thinking the other is mad ?

Nah, it’s just Tj 😉

I’ve always been public sector and unpaid ot, extra work at short notice, urgent demands have been fairly normal

On a different point, my understanding about HMRC expense rules is that travel from home to the office isn’t generally an allowable expense, even if you have a work from home contact and only visit the office sometimes.

A person can have more than once permanent place of work, so travel from home to the office, even say just once a fortnight, is classed as normal commuting. The grey area seems to be more about the purpose of the travel than how frequent or infrequent it is.

Any accountants here that know more?

[in the private sector] those that deliver more tend to get more be it compensation, development opportunities, promotions etc.

I’ve been in the private sector for more than two decades and have rarely seen that to be the case. I wish it was true, but more often those who work the hardest just get given more work. Pay rises and promotions are mainly a result of switching jobs, favourable power dynamics and/or some good old fashioned brown nosing.

On a different point, my understanding about HMRC expense rules is that travel from home to the office isn’t generally an allowable expense, even if you have a work from home contact and only visit the office sometimes.

That’s not the view of my HR department.

To be clear about what I meant, an employer can pay for anything it wants to, and I was only talking about whether an employer must pay those expenses, and whether they’re tax deductible or would have to be declared on a P11D as a benefit.

I just found this on the HMRC forum about someone on a 100% WFH contract who travels to the office once a month for a team meeting. It’s still classed as ordinary commuting:
https://community.hmrc.gov.uk/customerforums/pt/414cdb01-fcf0-ee11-a81c-000d3a87235a

It’s also about the purpose of the trip though, eg temporary purpose:

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

Look at “ Example 9 — attendance for a temporary purpose”

There’s a difference between working there every so often and going there for a specific purpose.

There are grey areas for sure though, eg if I WFH in the uk and have to travel to a company office for a meeting in the US, no-one’s thinking I should cover that.

And tea spoons. Someone at our place has a spoon fetish that’s got way out of hand.

It’s a bit like a fuel crisis. Someone comes up with the notion that there’s never any spoons. Everyone then thinks “I’ll keep one in my desk drawer just in case.” Net result: there’s never any spoons.

Chain a spoon to the wall, worked for us.

The opposite sometimes applies though. There are either none or there are 5,692

While we’re talking about such things, a place I used to work had a sign up in the kitchen saying

Please do not leave kitchen appliances unattended when using*

* this excludes the fridge

Has anyone found BoardingBobs Etsy page yet?

You make your place of work sound like a motivational camp.

We had that when the Muricans bought one of my previous places of work. All these engagement activities at the start of the day/shift. Then all these keen young men (usually) in sharp suits making sure we were doing the “right thing”. Motivational speeches and cheering for targets met, you know the sort of thing.

The wheels came right off when one of the incredibly grumpy foremen at one of our Birmingham plants ejected a particularly keen young man from the break room, horizontally, at chest height at 6:05 on a monday morning. Thankfully the door was open. Though i suspect it wouldn’t have made a whole lot of difference to the ejection. Except for splinters.

Nothing was ever said about it, ever again, and the engagement activities stopped by the following shift. And many of the keen young men moved back to the US to complete their MBAs.

some good old fashioned brown nosing.

Sometimes that does take the form of “look at all these extra hours I’m doing!”

But yeah, I find it’s rarely about people who actually get things done.

And we genuinely finally get there! Those that come to work, knuckle down, crack on and actually do the **** job they’re paid to do within the proscribed hours are the ones that are overlooked. Play pool, go to all the functions, (pretend) to like the same sports as your boss and hang about before and after shift “working” and you’ll go further.

I should know as I spent a good 25 years doing the former and have spent around 12 mixing in parts of the latter.

Quite.

“Here’s a job to do.”

Does the job

“How long did it take?”

The hell difference does that make so long as you’re hitting sensible deadlines? It took me half as long as you estimated so I’m going to the pub to play darts for the afternoon, any further questions? You’re planning on rewarding skill and efficiency with more work? Yeah, no.

To be clear about what I meant, an employer can pay for anything it wants to, and I was only talking about whether an employer must pay those expenses, and whether they’re tax deductible or would have to be declared on a P11D as a benefit.

Yep, the change we made was so travel expenses wouldn’t be tax deductible. Every job will have its own circumstances, and we did take advice for ours.

Has anyone found BoardingBobs Etsy page yet

More likely to find my OnlyFans page