Reply With QuoteYour having a mare.Originally Posted by JamesWales
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You are missing my point. The point is to try and continue with our lives in a safer manner. It is demonstrably safer to have a meeting in an office than be in a large nightclub.
Meetings can be held online. Socialising can also be done online. He offers a route to nightclubs (via vaccinations etc) yet keeps the door shut on offices, which is perhaps more important to the wider economy, wellbeing, secondary businesses etc.
I don't see what's controversial here. We probably agree about most of it, you're just upset cos I'm not sucking off Mark Serwotka or something.
Your having a mare.
It would, because for many months I've been reading reports about companies whose staff are mostly or entirely working from home, and how they'll never go back to working the way they used to as it was costly and counter-productive.
I'm certainly not seeing much evidence of all of the private sector offices being full again when I walk through Cardiff city centre each day, that's for sure.
I'm not upset in the slightest. I'm merely amused by your ignorance.
I work in the private sector and almost everyone in my company, and the previous company I worked for are still working from home most of the time.
I didnt say full, and no one is talking about all companies going back to how they were before the pandemic. A shift, unquestionably has occured
I said that I believe private sector offices are generally more full than public sector. And that is my experince.
Are you really saying that you think that is wrong?
I don't think explaining myself again for those that don't understand my point is having a mare, but thanks for the concern.
I don't have a firm opinion either way as the evidence is unclear.
One thing I will say, though - at the behest of the Tory government, the work of the entire civil service has become increasingly digitalised in recent years and a far greater percentage of civil servants are now working at home either mostly or entirely. There was a very clear drive towards this situation long before Covid-19 reared its ugly head, and in some respects the pandemic has actually slowed the move towards remote working for various departments, including the one I work for.
There is no issue working from home on sensitive data when using the correct IT equipment. I used to work for Capita doing PIP assessments. I did my assessments at peoples homes and wrote my reports at home. I used a laptop with IL3 security, security dongles and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for secure HDD encryption. Computer users trying to upgrade to Windows 11 will be hearing quite a bit about TPM’s as they will be are a requirement for the upgrade.
IL3 standard allows for restricted data to be moved over public networks securely. This allowed me to access DWP databases at home. I doubt that the DVLA data has a higher security level that the DWP data.
What annoys me TLG is that you label me ignorant when it's basically your personal experience vs. mine. I would never call you (or anyone else) ignorant for expressing their experiences as they see it.
Here is at least one article that does back up my experience by the way.
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-cities-m...easing-1239719
It's dated from last week, it uses data compiled by Google and it actually cites Cardiff specifically stating:
"Cardiff had the greatest drop in people in the workplace, with a 47 per cent fall. Edinburgh came second with a 44 per cent cut, followed by London, at 40 per cent."
And, in respect of why this may be:
"Ben Bolton, director of Cooke & Arkwright, the largest firm of independent commercial property advisers in Wales, was not surprised that Cardiff had suffered the highest decline.
He said the city had a high proportion of public-sector workers, who were more likely to work from home due to budget constraints making it more difficult for the workplace to be made Covid-secure."
I'll be honest, I couldn't care less what annoys you.
Have a good evening. I'm off to a gig, Covid passport in hand. I don't need it for the office, though.
I went in on Monday to return my IT equipment and I was surprised to see a very tiny proportion of the staff in the office (and there are about 900 on the books). We were blessed with portable laptops and we were used to hot desking before Covid hit, which helped.
No, you don't seem the kind of person who would care.I'll be honest, I couldn't care less what annoys you.
Have a good evening. I'm off to a gig, Covid passport in hand. I don't need it for the office, though.
Have a nice evening
I think this is a cracker!
At the end of the day there are only two groups of people who constantly worry about the increasing number of people working from home.
1) Supervisors and Middle Managers whose only purpose in life is to regard themselves as superior to the Hoi polloi. They make limited money out of it but more than the people who accomplish real work. They are the unquestioning slaves of the money men who drive their performance. Their object in life is to accede and command and WFH has seriously eroded their significance. They feel emasculated and have to find other methods to snoop remotely; not easy.
2) Old Fashioned business owners who believe in old fashioned concepts of work effort and time constraints rather than having the nous to evaluate data.
Fortunately both groups are likely to wither in time.
Completely disagree. There are potentially very serious long term consequences of permanent home working, the loss of sharing of information, mental wellbeing impacts, new staff training, business cultures, isolation, the impact on younger staff, the impact on poorer staff, establishing contacts with new clients, ensuring work is understood properly etc. It definitely has the potential to lead to greater isolation and impacts on some much worse than others, and it's typically those who are younger or with less happy home lives
Not to mention the impact on business, sustainable transport and the like.
I know people who have been to a very very dark place through WFH so I have to speak up when you try to charactise it as something simple or wholly positive which it absolutely isn't. It's a very complex topic
I agree (to a degree), but perhaps you should attempt to express your concerns to the Tory twats you vote for. In my experience, they are extremely keen on digitalization, remote-working, downscaling, cost-cutting, etc. Give it another five years under this shower of shit and I reckon you'll be lucky to speak directly to a civil servant anywhere about anything. Ever.
Yes, I don't agree with 'digital first' strategies in many cases as we are losing a lot of contact and communication, empathy, and the finer grain understanding of issues. It's not helpful for a cohesive society.
I don't see any difference from Labour or other parties however (if I did I would applaud it) and as stated earlier, if anything they seem keener on it all. I would like more organisations to stand up for and recognise the value of human interaction. The loss of it can be devastating.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed your gig.
Perhaps if you worked in the public sector, you would.
I've worked in the same department for almost 30 years. The reductions in resources and staff numbers that have occurred within the last four or five years have dwarfed anything that has gone before. Many of our long-standing customers can't understand why our services have deteriorated so rapidly in recent times. Many think we're joking when we tell them about our staffing levels.
Brexit has resulted in an approximate 40% increase in the workload of the team that I'm currently overseeing. Nevertheless, during the pandemic our staffing levels have been slashed by 60%. I work in transport. Like the DVLA, we have large backlogs of work, and that's despite 100% of our staff being onsite for almost all of this year (despite the fact that a large percentage would have been equally productive if they'd been at home). This is life in the civil service under the Tories.
Part of the trade off for the Patent Office allowing me to become a working from home “Guinea Pig” back in 2000 was that my annual target of cases was increased by, I seem to remember, fifteen per cent - there were better, more efficient, Trade Mark Examiners working there than me, but I was able to achieve that target for nine years before I took up an offer of early retirement.
In those pre Covid days, I’d say home working was not for everyone, but it was fine for me because I went into work for one and a half days a week and would not have liked the idea of permanent home working, so I can understand the desire to cut back on it somewhat to a small degree.
However, as so often these days with the what’s in it for me party in power, money seems to be behind efforts to reduce home working - it certainly was this time last year when pressure from places like sandwich bars and other food outlets prompted a short lived change of policy where civil servants especially were told they had to reduce home working and this, along with Sunak’s barmy “eat out to help out” scheme played a part in creating the autumn second wave which eventually led to another lockdown.
The OP’s motives for starting this thread became clear from the first sentence of his first message , while James Wales, who tries to come over as all reasonable and even handed and yet, without fail in my experience, comes down on the what’s in it for me party side of the argument. Frankly, the arguments against home working in this thread would have been more convincing if they had come from people with less of an agenda than the OP and James Wales.
I do work in the public sector and have done for many years
That's an extremely unfair thing to say, and you saying the "what's in it for me party" does somewhat undermine your position to be even handed on it. I've not mentioned party politics whatsoever other than to say that I don't see other parties as being any better and perhaps worse on WFH issues from my perspective. (And I only mentioned that cos TLG decided the conversation couldn't continue without some sectarian element coming in..."I hear what your saying but are you saying it with the right colour rosette on!?"
WFH disproportionately impacts upon those with difficult home lives. There has been some very dark moments in the last 18 months and I can think of at least a dozen people who have felt really very low as a result. If it suits you, fine, but you're lucky. Howerver, when you isolate people you can isolate their problems too.
It's a serious topic. We spend 40 hours a week surrounded by other humans and then suddenly sat on your own for the rest of your career? The changes are stark and I don't think you help by politicising it tbh
Driving examiners striking next week I believe.
With the bufoon and co waffling on about a high pay economy but with many public service workers having their pay frozen , rising fuel prices , rising cost of living , you wonder who will be next to strike.
Still Jeremy Corbyn , Diane Abbot , Captain Hindsight etc etc etc.
It's death by a thousand cuts (pun intended), one of the teams where I work has reached the death bit after years of enforced cuts and workload increases, 95% of the team left within 2 months. Anybody they recruit now will leave once they see what is going on.
No, although I haven’t been entirely critical of this Government, I freely admit I’m not even handed in my judgement of them. You’re not even handed though either because, despite attempting to make out that you are, you always end up arriving at the same conclusion and come down on the side of the UK Government.
When I read the OP, I thought of two or three posters who could well reply broadly agreeing with it, you were one of them and here you are. Why did I do that I wonder?
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