Reply With QuoteOutdated, backward attitude, speaks before thinking, makes comments without any real evidence to back them up, perfect for Prime Minister.
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Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Electrek quoted one of Musk’s emails. “This is less than we ask of factory workers
Outdated, backward attitude, speaks before thinking, makes comments without any real evidence to back them up, perfect for Prime Minister.
Proper cnut Elon Musk
40 hours is excessive but I would look for three days at least depending on the role
Serious question - how does it harm you if people have changed their working patterns and work from home?Originally Posted by life on mars
I can't get this horrible picture out of my head of Boris Johnson's torso in a fragrance ad.
Teams do not always work as effectively when people are based in different locations. Its not a hard and fast rule but I certainly prefer being in the office as we get more done when we are together.
Appreciate this was directed elsewhere but for me;
1 - It makes doing my work harder. Things take longer. Simple conversations turn into emails. Harder to 'ask the room' at once. Feeling of invading someones home life. Generally, things take significantly longer and that impacts my work. This all depends on the nature of peoples work, but for me things are far less efficient now.
2 - I miss them as people and colleagues. This has a significantly detrimental impact on my mental wellbeing and on the long term potentially theirs too as people need to be able to engage with eachother. Without question friendships have been weakened and a once vibrant team spirit is now practically zero.
3 - Notwithstanding point 1, there is now far less collaboration, sharing ideas and learning from eachother. I think even if short term there are no differences, in the long term it's significant. I have personally developed far less in the last two years than any other period of my career because we are not having anything like as many conversations (formal and informal), sharing ideas, overhearing conversations etc etc etc.
Flexibility is good, but having people at home 100% of the time is very bad in my opinion, for all concerned. But for those three reasons above, even others choosing to WFH all the time has a significantly detrimental impact on my job and wellbeing. In short, I've gone from generally liking my job to at best tolerating it at worst hating it.
I sympathise with your view and the effect things had on your mental health.
I would say that during my working life I was much more comfortable working in the office than from home. Except when I had a discrete piece of work to complete that did not need a great input from others.
As you say it has its challenges as well though. You can easily become more fixated and driven by your work than is healthy for your wider life. Particularly when I was working on major time driven Programmes and Projects I got wrapped up in the energy of it. Typically lots of the people I worked with would be staying in hotels away from their homes. It was easy to drift into a couple of beers after work and sometimes longer.
When I got home, my partner's issues with her day and our kid's schooling seemed trivial compared with the "important" issues I was wrestling with and keeping me awake and motivated and became a source of friction.
I look back on those days with some pride from a work perspective but lots of regrets that my priorities were warped. If in that period I was working remotely I do wonder whether the balance of my life would have been different or if I would have ended up with a similar perspective to you on being denied access to a more energising work environment.
I’ve WFH for over 20 years , after previously being office based and I love it. It offers a great work life balance and flexibility for childcare ( as in pick ups from school etc)
I’ve never had a days sick in my working life either, and I think WFH (in general) helps with sickness absence.
There are downsides as in your work social life is almost non existent and collaborative interaction is not quite the same, however, for me I’ve got a fairly large circle of friends outside of the workplace.
I think if you have a separate office within your home it also helps as you can “close the door” at the end of the working day. That being said if you don’t have the room , I have been told by colleagues it can become lonely.
Great point, I WFH all the way through the pandemic, we were asked to come back a few days a week (which I don't mind to be honest) but was sick for the first time in about two and a half years within two days of coming back and had to take a couple of days off sick.
I think this issue should be purely down to personal preference. If you prefer to work in the office fine, if you prefer to work from home also fine. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. People should simply live and let live.
Interesting posts above. It really is different for all people, and I respect that. My issue is with 100% home working, not a mix, which vastly reduces the issues I talk about.
That said, within Cyril and TWGL1's posts, I think we see two more hidden issues:
Firstly the issue of working away. What I have found is that I am coming into work to more and more emails sent on a weekend. More and more people complaining of the blurring of home and work and being unable to, or pressurised to never switch off. When office based, sure you may stay til 6pm or something, but when you are home your time is typically yours.
TWGL1 rightly talks about flexibility and childcare. I have two kids, so this is critical. Flexible working is absolutely a positive. The idea of having to work from 8.45 to 5pm is very archaic, but you don’t need to work from home 100% of the time to benefit from that. People with kids coming in at 9.30 is great. The wider issue this raises is that many job, generally lower paid, do require being on site, and so with a more middle class office based workforce at home, they are left with declining transport services, fewer childcare facilities etc, and so a new inequality opens up in society. Again, this is emphasised by the luxury of having a home office – but that is a luxury to those who can afford. A shared office is a democratic space – everyone has access to the same environment irrespective of income. You send people home and you make some people live and work in vastly inferior spaces to those with more money.
Secondly, again, TWGL1 says he was office based, presumably earlier in his career – again, this is a concern of mine. A great worry is my kids leave uni and suddenly they are told to WFH in their small shared flat. It’s a radical change in socialisation and work environment that we all benefitted from and are now closing off to future generations.
Like I said, balance is good. The ability to work from home is good, but I genuinely believe that mass working from home will prove to be the single most damaging thing to the nations mental health we could do in the long term.
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This to me appears to be the way WFH is heading.
What I have long suspected. WFH a vehicle for widening inequalities
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...concludes.html
It's intresting to read the comments of those who have been fortunate to have a job where they can chose to work from home or go into ones office perhaps we should consider not everyone gets that luxury and many manual workers apply a wonderful attitude to working day In and out in factories, hospitals, vehicles etc , wonder if there's any analysis to see which part of our workforce has the better lifestyle and mental strength and better work performances ???
Should the fact that some can’t work from home mean that those who can should be stopped from doing so? As for the question you ask at the end, it’d be very hard to come up with “base” values which would satisfy everyone that such comparisons were valid.
This matter is quite straightforward to me, the desire to cut back on or cease home working is driven very much by the Tory party and their media lackeys and at the heart of it seems to be mistrust of those who work from home based on their opinion that they won’t work as hard. I must admit that there will be some cases where they’d be right as well, but I’ve mentioned a few times on here that one of the trade offs for working from home I had to make was I had to accept a ten per cent increase in my annual targets and I think they’d be surprised at how many in target related jobs would be able to attain that if given the opportunity of home working.
I don't think anyone should be actively prevented, more discouraged. I've said all along, it's not a few days at home thats the issue (in my opinion), but the scenario of people wholly working from home and never engaging, developing personal interactions etc. I think long term that is very bad for people, particularly earlier on in their career - indeed, I'd say it's actually completely unfair on those entering the workforce to be denied the access to more senior members of staff. There definitely are examples of some people doing very little too, which they wouldnt have gotten away with before - only a minority but still. In fact, I think some are working harder to compensate.
Nonetheless, as with most things, we have our individual responsibilities and our collective ones. If WFH does drive up inequalities, then thats a bad thing, right? It's easy to see how it does. In our office we would have people from all backgrounds, some from salubrious homes in Llandaff, some from shared student houses - all were treated equally in the office. Now the generally wealthier, generally more senior staff are less often in (if at all in some cases) in their nicer homes and spending money in their local area - less mixing, less engagement, less cross-fertilisation of different sections of society.
It's bad news, and sowing the seeds for a hell of a lot of future problems I'm telling ya!
Anyway Bob, even if you personally like it, does it not cause you some concerns if that action does help to drive up inequalities within society?
Others have remarked on your habit of thinking that just because you say something you believe it to be an absolute truth that trumps what anyone else may think - it’s not like that in real life you know, no one is right all of the time and you’re making a lot of assumptions there.
You only have to look at who is coming out against working from home to see it’s become politicised as the usual subjects try to start another of their culture wars. Working from home, shouldn’t be seen as a political matter when it can often be something that can benefit employer and employee alike. It doesn’t work for everybody, but in my case, it was mutually beneficial and I know that the vast majority of staff at my old office work more from home now than in the office with management and employees both happy for the situation to continue (or they were a year or so ago at least before the likes of Rees-Mogg started making it an issue). In my case, I think I had the best of both worlds because I was required to come into the office for one and a half days a week and I found my time in work to be more enjoyable than when I was there full time.
A good morning to you too! I do think thats a somewhat unfair ad-hominem at the start there, and somewhat ironic for you to accuse others of politicising it, when it's you thats doing that.
No, my point is to try and find that balance - I don't think 5 days in an office for all iss necessary, but I think 5 days in isolation is also damaging, particularly in the long term.
My question wasn't unfair, I was just asking that whilst it may suit you, do you recognise there is a point when we have to make sacrifices for the common good? ie, even if it works for you, but some damaging outcomes do emerge, should you make a sacrifice to improve that scenario? I mean in terms of training up and socialising younger staff, making sure there is an outlet for conversations to aid mental health, ensuring staff are not lonely, protecting those who may have less appropriate home lives than you. Surely there are things when society is better for people mixing and sharing experiences as opposed to all sitting alone at home?
I have a friend I am currently extremely worried about (he has no interest in CCFC so wont be on here) and his office recently shut. He is very lonely and it's a major contributory factor to a very severe mental health decline.
This stuff is really important.
Well, I mentioned that I came into work one and a half days a week. This was in pre Zoom days, so I suppose it’s possible to never go into your workplace at all these days, but I wouldn’t have wanted that because I agree that you need something more in terms of human interaction. I don’t agree with how you you appear to conclude that it’s not for “the common good” to work from home though because what must be a relatively small number of people surely of those who do it may suffer mental health problems.
If I was in charge of a company that incorporated working from home, I’d insist that all of those who did so should come into work one day a week and I’d try and make it so that everyone was in on the same day - that should help on the social side of things although I’d be expecting a bit more from staff when they were at home to cover for the fact that not much would get done on the day when everyone was in!
As is often the case, but is lost in this form of communication (another reason I am very fond of face-to-face communication), we are probably more in agreement than it first appears.
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