Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home Three-quarters of remote workers based in the UK's capital city would demand an inflation-busting pay increase – or quit altogether – if asked to give up their right to flexible working. The cost of the journey to work was mentioned by over two-thirds of respondents to the Bloomberg Intelligence survey of British workers as a …
This has reminded me that when I started work (in the 80s) I sat in a large room in which almost everyone else smoked. The hard line about WFH may actually turn out not to be that important if the alternative is no salary, but I absolutely *would* *not* work in an office where people were allowed to smoke.
(1) I appreciate that this is at least part of the OPs point - that they can smoke while working without affecting others.
My recently deceased 64-year old Father-in-Law might not be quite so stoic (what with him being dead and all that). Miserable downhill slide from poor circulation in his legs ten years ago to racking cough and then lung cancer. Could barely walk due to atrophied leg muscle. A big dose of radiotherapy to get through Christmas and then coughing up blood in the corridor of A&E like something from a bad horror film. Yes, you have the absolute right to smoke that crap, but it has consequences.
I'm sure everyone involved is unique and irreplaceable and so is totally immune to the rather large rash of layoffs that have been hitting companies in the last couple of months.
I have never figured out how hammering away at a keyboard -- especially a laptop keyboard -- in a vacuum is somehow productive. Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- I have to test my productivity and that often requires me to be not at home.
And yes, I've been remote working for decades. Anyone who interacts with Linux / Unix systems will know that they're essentially distributed, so I could (for example) interact with systems simultaneously between the Bay Area and France from my home in Los Angeles. But when something goes wrong you need people on site......sorry......
Yeah, this. People are talking the talk at the moment, but would they walk the walk if every employer demanded at least some time in the office, I very much doubt it. All this talk of 'oh, I'm way more productive in the office' is a red herring. Individuals may be more productive, but teams as a whole won't be. Imagine starting a new job as a graduate at the moment, with a steep learning curve, and no-one in the office to ask those 'off the cuff' questions from which so much can be learnt. As a profession, if we work from home all the time we are conning the younger folk out of their career progression, and it's our failure, not theirs.
Except that there's no need to imagine it, because many graduates *did* take their first tentative steps into the big old world of work during various phases of the pandemic, including the bits where everyone was being encouraged to WFH where possible. Like, for example, the grads who started in the R&D team here, all of whom appear to have managed to make the transition from academia to workplace about as smoothly as I remember any fresh faced grad ever doing so in the bad old days where WFH wasn't a thing.
The trick is to be aware that it's not going to be quite the same sort of process to get grads up to speed these days as it was in the past, and adjust not only your formal induction process but also your day to way working practices, so that you give them as much of a chance to learn the stuff you know they need to learn, without the need for you and them to be cooped up in an office somewhere 5 days a week just on the off chance they learn something earth-shattering from you at some point that week.
And the point here isn't that you *have* to do it all remotely - the point is that you allow the team/department to work out for itself what the answer is and tailor how they work accordingly. So you might find that, during the initial induction process with a new employee, you need to have both them and some of your more experienced staff in the office at the same time in order to kickstart thei transfer of knowledge process, but you don't need that to occur indefinitely - i.e. you give that team the flexibility to decide for themselves that, at *this* point in time, *these* people do need to spend more time together in the office, without mandating that *everyone* in the team *must* spend x days a week in the office regardless of what they're involved in at the time.
Great idea, but why stick at the "team/department" level surely that's just as as bad as letting the company decide let everyone decide how best they should work - total independence. Also why pay an hourly rate companies should just put out a contract for a project and pay for the finished product. Brilliant - no staff!
no-one in the office to ask those 'off the cuff' questions
My team of 9 is split across 4 offices and in my particular office there are 3 of us. Today one of my colleagues is off sick and the other is working from home, but I can ask off-the-cuff questions to any of my other team members over text chat or a quick call, possibly involving a screenshare of some code. In which case it's the same whether I'm at home or here. We still learn stuff via these random chats or side-chats during calls. Although obviously it's not perfect 100% of the time, it's pretty straightforward and our team has been working like this for about 5 years now. We work as one team regardless of location and most of the time I have no idea whether my colleagues in other offices are at home or not.
The real motivation behind the push for office return policies in jobs that are perfectly fine for WFH roles isn't "synergy" or "collaboration", it's real estate investments and micromanagement. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is heavily invested in either the former or the latter.
If everyone is working from home, there will be less demand for home in the “expensive” places. Also with WFH there has been a migration of high street economic activity out of the “expensive” business districts into local high streets.
In my village, the coffee shop is now a viable business as is the community business hub (shared office space, meeting rooms, copiers etc.).
Seaside towns and country villages with good internet have seen price rises and an even greater shortage of property for the locals to buy than it was before ( and that apparently was already bad enough, with the second home middle classes buying up half the homes and the holiday rentals businesses buying up the rest).
This.....
I live in West Sussex, with decent train links to Victoria. The cost of houses in my area (not Brighton, that's always been a bubble of expensive housing) is rocketing as city slickers who are going to town a couple of days a week realize a slightly longer train journey (not all that bad in reality, as they are faster and stop less frequently anyway) is a small price to pay for a garden, driveway and spare bedroom / home office.
No one stops you from going into the office if you want to. Speerate issue about whether here is anyone else there, but Teams, Slack etc do have casual chat facilities that can support the kind of off the cuff stuff. One tip I would give is leave a Zoom/Teams call permanently open with you team mates, inc video, then it feels much more like you are in the same office and does trigger those spontaneous questions and shared experiences.
"Some will leave though,"
Specifically, those who believe they can walk into another job. That might correlate with those you'd least like to lose.
It might not though. You might lose the arrogant fuckwit who thinks they are God's gift...
" so it's a gamble."
"how are they going to pay the bills with no job?"
The simple answer is that the market will sort it out.
Companies offering WFH will be able to attract better talent and/or to pay them less compared to other companies requiring office work. The latter also have higher expenses for office overheads, while the former will have less expenses even if they pay to equip their employees' home offices (which at this point are mostly already well-equipped anyway). I also suspect that companies offering more WFH can also cut down on a bunch of middle-managerial positions and streamline their business. Unless companies requiring office work are at least 10-20% more productive than companies offering WFH, they're going to slowly decline over the next few years or simply crash and burn.
Absolutely there will be people who, in the transition period, might find themselves forced to accept a suboptimal (office work) job because the WFH companies are going after the best and brightest first, but generally speaking that will be a relatively short period as these people will be on the lookout for WFH job from the moment they start their office job.
The simple answer is that the market will sort it out.Companies offering WFH will be able to attract better talent and/or to pay them less compared to other companies requiring office work.
That is true if we actually had a free market and government that is not corrupt.
It's not hard to imagine a lobby of landlords and bigger employers missing out on talent, stuffing brown envelopes to ensure there is some sort of regulation that requires people to be in the office.
It's what happened with IR35 - too much talent was starting their own consultancy business offering better price and quality than big consultancies.
> That is true if we actually had a free market and government that is not corrupt.
Does not need to be corrupt, just needs to be overly obsessed with every increasing “economic activity” and GDP.
WFH, typically means people will spend less on commuting for example. To you and me commuting represents time and expenses, to governments it represents productive economic activity (fuel, ticket sales etc.) and increased tax revenues.
Aside: the laugh is the likes of truss et al don’t see this as being the same as tax cuts = I fill my car up once a month through WFH, previously when I was office based it was 4~6 times a month, so I have increased my net disposable income which is exactly the same intended effect as a cut in income tax etc.
That's the problem with measuring economic activity using GDP as a proxy.
With WFH the same work is being done, but from home i.e output is the same. Reduced spending on transport and office rental will show up on GDP count as a negative, but in reality the economic *output* is the same but with less expense. Similairly, people on WFH still eat and drink, but they buy their food from the local snack shop or supermarket at much less expense. Same amount of food consumed at much lesser expense, ie higher productivity.
Of course people invested in and working in transport, office space, fast foods next to offices and hubs etc will lose out, but there will be more opportunities in delivery, real estate out from city centres, telecoms etc. Opportunity never dies, just shifts. GDP total can dip while economic and social well-being of the country increases
> I also suspect that companies offering more WFH can also cut down on a bunch of middle-managerial positions and streamline their business.
I suspected (hoped for) that very thing early on in pandemic times, but alas we never saw it happen at $company. If anything, management meddling and micro-management got worse, with even more meetings of all kinds -- presumably the aforementioned managers trying to "be visible" and justify their slot in the org chart and so on.
I continue to hope the CEO types will eventually figure it out and cull from management ranks instead of workers in the trenches, but that hasn't seemed to be the prevalent trend. No great surprise: management typically protects their own.
They are walking - into new jobs. Several of my neighbours worked for employers who insisted on a full return to office, no convincing reasons why and despite how well things had worked. They have all voted with their feet and are now in jobs that require little (one, no) attendance in the office - the companies they used to work for have been unable to recruit replacements and those colleagues left are actively looking to go as well. As soon as the agency tells the candidate it's full time office, they aren't interested. The few days a month I do have in the office are by far the least productive and I do not enjoy one little bit engaging with the smelly cesspit that is London public transport.
"few days a month I do have in the office are by far the least productive"
I did a quick straw poll in the office ( alright, down the pub one lunchtime while we were all in! ) and everyone said the same thing, the only reason to go in was to catch up on gossip, have a few jars and then go home happy, everyone said they got next sod all done on the days they were in!
Echo this. Our crew has some hands-on responsibilities in datacenter, so the nature of the job dictates we spend a few days or afternoons onsite sometimes. I like that type of work now and then, so it's fine.
But aside from that very specific duty, we go in, do the jobs, and get out. By and large there is little or no hanging about the office to spend time in the cube at the keyboard. Nicer setup at home for that kind of work and more productive wfh in any case.
I have jobs outside of London that can be fully remote (or a trip to Brighton for the occasional FTF meeting) and I currently struggle to recruit to them. Pay is a less than London because local costs are less but being only 50 miles from London that's an issue as local tech talent can commute to London in an hour or so or have some kind of flexible working in London. If there are tech staff who want to leave their London "get in to the office" job for a "come to the seaside when you fancy it" job, but for slightly lower pay but better pensions (public sector), then look outside of London for your next job, there are lots of them.
I honestly agree. Infrastructure architect here, currently living in zone 3 SE London. My company is never going to do that, as we had flexible working even before the pandemic and it was actually a start-up until not long ago... but when considering new job offers, max 2 days from the office. There is no reason anyways to have rigid rules, work where, when and how needed - not necessarily in an office chair (yes, I know it doesn't apply to all jobs, but here we're about tech jobs).
I am also considering moving further out now, because it's becoming quickly ridiculous with landlords pushing up rents by the hundreds more a month "because inflation".
> Infrastructure architect here
Your value is in what you deliver, I was told very early in my career, it doesn’t matter what you need to do to deliver, you are being paid a lot to deliver.
So I spent many years working out of hotel rooms, airport lounges, client offices and home, with the occasional visit to my employer’s offices.
As for living in “outer London”, I very early in my career traded in the millstone of a London mortgage etc. for quality of life for myself and family.
and it was actually a start-up until not long ago.
I'm hearing this phrase "start-up" a lot.
Theres even a tv series about one.
What is a start up ?
Is there some specific definition?
What I'm getting at is: why did we suddenly need the term , and is it any different to "Company that hasnt been around for very long"
Just fyi and because I want to give a little context (trying not to name the company...) but up until 2015 my company was pretty much a small insignificant company with maybe 20-30 employees, then it launched a software platform for automation that made it become today a 4k+ employees in the world, public at NYSE company.
Home - 3 screens - a load of local VMs for testing, lots of local storage. Fast internet. No noise. No interruptions. Good chair. Good desk. Good coffee.. Great food. Great music !! Cat!!!
Office - Book a desk (hot desking). 1.5 hr commute. Find random desk sitting with nobody you know on random floor. No screen / maybe screen (1), shared wifi (no ethernet). Very noisy / busy. Barely any mobile reception inside the faraday cage office. Strange looks cos I don't wear as suit (cos I don't have to). Average coffee.. expensive food.. and settle into Google meets / Slack calls with people who are... remote.. no cat..
Big bother.. cos you know why them manglers what you in the office.. and its nothing to do with productivity...
Where is the option to upvote multiple times?
This 150%:.If the org is over multiple locations you're not meeting face to face anyway. So the one possible benefit of being in the office is lost,
(Since first lock down, now averaging well under 1 day per year in office and I continue to completely not miss it.)
I spent 14 years working from home before retirement, and it is the best thing. I too had multiple PC/servers running so i could replicate any testing, with multiple monitors etc. Saved 3 hours at least commuting, and absolutely no noise - ultra quiet. Every one was dispersed around the UK and meetings via conference calls etc.
It was then stipulated that we had to attend 1 day per week, in an office where i had to use other peoples desks - attended when they weren't there. No benefit at all, in fact the company lost out as i had to stop exactly on the time required to work, so as to get home and cook etc. A lot of wasted time travelling, especially when there was a delay on the trains.
The company gains a lot from people working from home - reduced office costs, extra hours worked dealing with US people via e-mail to respond with hour etc. which went completely when attending the office. But then, as others have said, a senior manager likes to have people around them so they feel important.
> Cat!!!
Yeah, the thing I miss most from my old office was the dogs. (As the resident office dog-sitter.)
The open-concept multinat offices ban pets outright because allergies, which I understand fully, but I still miss hugging-scratching them daily. (Yes, I could get one... butI don't trust myself with a cactus, much less an animal.)
The hot desking shows how pointless a lot of the insistence that we work in the office is. My team may not be in the same days as each other, and will be scattered over three floors. The office monitors, keyboards and chairs are awful. The non-developer staff hold noisy standup meetings all over the open plan office space. I rely on a lot of reference books and documents - they can't be stored in the office even if I was based there all week as there's no storage and a "clean desk" policy.
Unless we could benefit from a long, face to face meeting for brainstorming it's a total waste of time to be in the office. Yet we now have an order that arrived with no prior consultation that says we all must be in the office two days a week minimum. Ignoring the fact that some staff are now super remote - even in a foreign country in some cases - as was agreed during the pandemic. Is the company going to give us a pay rise (the first since 2019) to cover the increased costs of travel? Of course not.
Unless we could benefit from a long, face to face meeting for brainstorming
Not everyone can do brainstorming face to face. Some people actually thrive doing brainstorming remotely as they don't feel the stares and the pressure to come up with something there and then.
Also given that brainstorming is rather a creative task, confining it to a certain time and place sets it for failure from the start.
It's like telling an artist to paint something good at 11am for an hour. Most likely their painting will be a bit sh*t.
"Unless we could benefit from a long, face to face meeting for brainstorming."
Well... You've just excluded all the introverts. You know, the ones who just quietly get on with their jobs and don't get involved in the shitty office politics and backstabbing.
But, then, we're used to being ignored, neglected, forgotten, called weird, and treated as the pet project of somebody who thinks they are entitled to try to "fix" us.
I just wish my job was a work from home one.
Everybody is different.
I'm lucky in a lot of ways. Plentiful screens at the office, 40 minute commute at worst, usually 20 and it's a nice office to be in but everybody is still different.
I do feel that it's best to be in person for those meetings where you need to bash your head against a brick wall until the wall starts crumbling, but again everybody is different, and workflows are different for different departments.
And that's the point.... Flexibility. This is not a binary decision: I'm in the office today, amongst colleagues I love, and have already solved a couple of problems face to face.
However, the work I do from home is different and has different requirements. I can go for a run through unmanaged forest, instead of the 40 minute bike ride from Chelsea and Westminister (Thankfully the ankle biters are at home this week, so things are a little quiet).
Flexibility is king. And that's the message a company needs to message.
Footnote: When I work from home, my pesos are more likely to go into local businesses rather than the megacorps that frequent london and pay no tax
It's not. Not everyone lives near the tube or train and the bus service is slow and unreliable.
Some towns took anti car measures so roads are narrow and congested. So the bus trip takes half an hour and if you walk it is about the same.
Then you have always late train, often not coming at all or too full to get on board.
Anti-car measures? Then buy a pushbike or an electric bike, an electric Brompton is near perfect for multi-modal commutes.
I have sympathy for anyone forced into the office. I prefer it over WFH but acknowledge that I am in the minority. I have a sneaking suspicion that the real enthusiasm for dragging people into the office is to try to stop people from working multiple jobs simultaneously.
The key there is "on the train". Now add the time taken to get from your front door to the station, add on a bit of safety margin to make sure you get onto the platform in time to catch the train you were expecting to catch even if it's running slightly early, or if there's a problem getting your ticket read by the barriers etc., and then don't forget the time taken to get from the station to your workplace at the other end of the journey...
Your door to door journey time can easily end up being double or triple the headline "on the train" journey time, so in reality a 20 minute commute via train into central London probably means you're starting out somewhere a bit closer (thus more expensive) to your endpoint than Z3/4, unless you're living right next to a station (and can afford to pay the rent/morgage premium for having a home so conveniently located) and your workplace is right next to whichever station in Z1 you're heading to.
My office is on Oxford St, and I live in Stratford, super-close to the station. The commute is ideal, new Elizabeth Line trains, quiet and fast. It's still 35-40 minutes door-to-door, and longer in the evenings, or if you have to wait for the right branch train to come to the station, or you're just tired after a long day and are walking slightly slower.
FWIW I went from a "fully remote" role (nominal 1 day a week in, I went to the office about 5 times since covid started) to a nominal 2 days a week in for a hefty pay rise. They're actually being quite cool about using the office - it was described to me as "we don't care how many days a week you are in, you've got to work effectively with your team and be able to help them, and they're mostly in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, work it out yourself". Plus the office is bonkers off the wall good, free food, great equipment and breakout/quiet spaces etc, so I think its going to be OK.
"I get why so many people are chained to London and I feel sorry for all of them"
Absolutely... talking to fellow "Thatcher refugees" down here in the antipodes, one thing we don't miss is the commute in to London. Along with the weather, of course.
I don't mind as I live about 30 mins from our main HQ in the City of London ( "Square Mile" ), most days the office is relatively quiet so can actually get some work done. However most people in our company moved south of London, into the sticks and they're seriously pee'd off when the mandatory 2-3 times a month is demanded as it costs them 4 hours journey times and some have to pay £75 for a day trip in to get sod all done.
Just glad I didn't sell up and move out to the sticks, I stayed just on the edge of zone 5, not exactly cheap but at least I can be flexible without my pocket taking a huge hit. I still prefer WFH over the office but no real hardship having to trudge in once in a while.
I'm happier, and the company gets more out of me.
The remainder of my team are either in a separate country or hemisphere. A commute is (at best) an hour each way on average and at worst over two and a half hours a day (trains..).
Working from home means less expense, up to two hours(!) extra sleep every day, exercise or housework at lunchtime, and as I've shifted my day's timings, it's easier to sort and communicate some things at the end of the day.
The office isn't so bad - hot desks but fancy height adjustable standing/sitting ones, up to dual monitors etc. However home has three high resolution monitors specifically for work (ebay is cheap), high speed fibre.
Skype/Teams etc work well for remote collaboration and VPNs are solid.
I can understand that for some people, particularly those who don't have a comfortable home working environment, the office might appeal but for everyone else WFH is great.
I don't get why all the thumbs down on this one? Why should they force you to be vaccinated, to go into the office? And if it's such a great idea in the USA, why aren't we screaming out for such measures here in the UK where almost no one is doing that (apart from Pimlico Plumbers). It makes no sense, and it should be a personal choice.
"I don't get why all the thumbs down on this one?"
This. If theres one way to legitimise the anti vax loonies and piss off even the majority who do want to get vaccinated, its to force people to do something they don't want to do.
In some ways that's just like forcing people into the office. Even those that want to be in the office realise they'd lose some of their freedom and may choose to leave because of it. Of course that may also be a sign the company just wants obedient drones and not the best skilled staff.
(Removes tin foil hat). :-)
Please define "anti vax loonies"? Do you mean the roughly 75% of people in the UK who have chosen not to take the most recent booster? (from memory, that could be completely wrong by now- 30s of search could not find the latest figures)
Although it's now been withdrawn for anyone under 50 here, so presumably "fully vaccinated" over here means 2 original doses, but in the USA it means boosted?
I don't understand how something is a "must have" for babies in one country, but it's not offered to 49 year olds in this country?
Also, are you an "anti vax loonie" if you have chosen to get all the other vaccines (which give lifelong immunity with very few side effects) but declined this one (which gives a few months with much higher side effects)?
> which give lifelong immunity with very few side effects
No.
Fed up with going over this, but no vaccine gives you "lifelong immunity", that just isn't how it works.
Try "a decent amount of resistance, enough to give you a pretty go of it whilst living in a community, the bulk of whom have had the same jabs as you" and tack onto that "especially against old diseases that we, as a species, have lived with for a long time" as opposed to against novel viruses that are still finding their own way to being infectious enough to propagate their genetic material efficiently from within their exciting new home.
"decent amount of resistance, enough to give you a pretty go of it whilst living in a community, the bulk of whom have had the same jabs as you" and "against old diseases that we, as a species, have lived with for a long time"
The above are a good description of, for example, the measles vaccine, not covid ones.
With respect to the covid vaccines, forget what we were told about it by the makers and see the actual results - Primarily that vaccinated people could still act as carriers at pretty much similair rates to non-vaccinated people, and thus 'herd immunity' is impossible (also meaning that people who choose not to get vaccinated are not affecting anyone else). Covid vaccination gives you a few months window where if you catch covid you will be less affected. You can still catch and/or transmit it. Absolutely makes sense for older and high-risk people. Absolutely no sense to give it to everyone, even less so to force it on anyone.
BTW, I'll take the protection from even a "short-term" vaccine - and top-ups - or other preventative every time. Even the prophylaxis against malaria, which wasn't what I'd call fun but was a heck of a lot better than the possible alternative!
And even though I've had my normal anti-tetanus, I'll gladly accept another if they ever need to pull a length of rusty rebar out of me (but really, really hoping it isn't needed!)
I'm in the NHS. While it is no longer a mandatory, job endangering thing, not being vaccinated is still generally antisocial and uncaring.
If someone does not believe in modern medical science, WTF are they doing working in the NHS?
Ok, I'll bite on this one....because they have a functioning immune system. I haven't had a single COVID jab, haven't had a single symptom either. Why? Because I have a good immune system, new it before this nonsense, and confirmed it during and after. Most people dying from COVID were old and/or had co-morbidities. You can kid yourself otherwise if you want, but perhaps you shouldn't be working in the NHS. Or are you one of the many middle-managers?
I also have a functioning immune system. That's why I get the vaccine. If I did not have one, that jab would be at best meaningless.
What do you think it does? It provides information to my (functioning) immune system so that it can deal with things it hasn't dealt with before.
I haven't had a single symptom either. I have had covid twice that I know of. Once showed up when we were offered the antibody test. It showed that, at some time in the past, but not now. The second was when I had early symptoms of something else. I took a test and it showed I had covid as well. Happily for me, I got over that before my other condition showed up.
No. I am not any sort of manager. Just a band 5 who listens to people who know more than them!
We call the days when we're herded back into the office our "low productivity days", mostly because our Kanban task tracker indicates that's true. As we're mostly working with virtual machines that might be upstairs in the office building, in a data centre down the road or on the other side of the planet, being in the office doesn't really confer any work advantages over being anywhere else with a stable network connection.
Luckily our immediate line managers are mostly pretty cool about the number of days we do in the office - as long as we show up for a day every couple of weeks to tick the box they're fine. I'm actually in the office right now: the only person sitting in a 50-60 person open plan space. This does mean its nice and quiet and I've not been disturbed for once, but you've got to wonder if the energy costs for heating/lighting this place just for me to sit here to tick off a "came into the office" quota are worth it.
It's really hard for a manager to casually show keys to his new Porsche on a Teams call.
When meeting in person, he can do that with ease - put phone, keys etc on the table while sitting down and everyone around the table can see, nice and clear. He's got a new Porsche!
He can then start the meeting with what everyone has been up to and then without listening cut everyone off and complain how he got stuck in traffic for almost an hour, but still managed to be on time, although he expects to get a speeding ticket, because he is not used to how fast his new car is.
IME the good managers are approximately as rare as the bad. Fortunately the "utter shite" ones have been rarer still.
That leaves the majority in the middle, most of those have been ... passable. But it's not like you'd seek them out for real help, nor follow them to the next company if they left. Typically they sign your paperwork stuff without too much hassle, and generally don't get in the way. It's a low bar, and this lot generally manages to just get over it.
This is the type that many people settle for, because they've worked for enough of the bad sort to want to avoid risking it ever again.
I'm lucky in that when everyone was told they had to return to offices we were given the option of "do whatever suits you".
For my workplace of about 80 people, some people work exclusively from home, others are hybrid, and a few are almost always in. Everyone is different and there's no one size fits all approach. Having flexibility is nice.
My main reasons for coming in:
1. I have a very pleasant 30-40 min drive either way. I really enjoy driving to the point where the cost (1 litre turbo, very efficient modern car) isn't a consideration for me. I enjoy this so I'm happy to pay to do it. It's pleasurable, not a ball ache.
2. Psychologically driving "away" from work at the end of the day is nice. Same if I'm going on holiday. Fifth gear down the motorway and leave that behind for a week or so.
3. But the main reason - My home is my home. I don't want work to be part of where I live. It's my family's space and having complete separation of work/life suits us all very well. It's nice to have the option to work from home on some days. But I'll be damned if I'm converting any of my living space to an office just so I can do that permanently.
The last point seems a real clincher though. For my partner and I, we'd need to create 2 separate spaces and simply don't have - or want to convert - any of our living space for that purpose.
We live in the North of England too so it's nothing to do with "expensive" (as per London) property or small living spaces. It's just that you know, my home is my home, not my employers space.
That's entirely fair, however computing is also one of my hobbies in addition to work. Two of the four monitors on my desk are pretty much exclusively for work (my choice), but the remainder of the kit is for my other computers. At the end of the day my company laptop is hibernated and later on in the evening I work on more interesting IT tasks and games that are fun but unlikely to ever generate money.
One of my bedrooms is extremely small, so was an ideal candidate for shoe horning all the computers into and keeping them mostly away from the other rooms.
I built a shed in the garden that is my "home office" to keep that separation.
Yeah, see that's something else I really don't want.
I agree that it keeps it "out" of the house but it's still ultimately on my property and therefore part of my home. That was the point of my post - I don't want that. My home and work are separate things in my view.
Not sure why the downvotes to this. I love WFH and would hate/refuse to ever move to a job that demands it again.
But I get this. Not least the fact that work won't, and shouldn't, pay for this conversion.
So what is there to disagree with of the opinion someone that doesn't want to put their land aside for their employer, and spend 5-20k in the process?!
It's not my own opinion that a work area encroaches on my personal life. But it's sure as hell a perfectly valid and logical one.
London, Zone 3/4 boundary. 25 minutes on tube (when it isn't broken) to office in Z1.
Door to door time ~50 minutes.
20 minutes pleasant walk to the station. 25 minutes on the tube reading a book, 5 minutes to the office. Reversed going home.
Nice clear distinction between 'work time' and 'my time'. Get's me out of the house to get a bit of exercise. Forces me to overcome introverted nature and not just hide from the world. Gives me the 'me time' to read because I can't do much else on the journey.
So for me, office working works.
I understand that for others, perhaps not, so yup, flexibility to office work or WfH is good.
I think equation variables include home circumstances and time of life.
There was a period when I also had a strong separation between home and work and like you enjoyed the commute/decompression time.
Now I tend to chose work location based on need, which is probably the big benefit of the current debate, it isn’t so much office v. WFH, but at this moment in time, what best serves the work demands and my well-being.
I went hybrid after 3 years of working from home in order to get more visibility on projects with my employer, but after 6 months I'm done with people again. 3 days chauffering a laptop to an office that does Teams calls to people on the same desk is banal. I'm leaving for a job that's optional 2 days office-based, which provides a better balance between maintaining actual team cohesion vs management-enforced delusions of team cohesion.
In all seriousness, this is one of the aspects of WFH that doesn't seem to have been considered as fully as it really ought to have been - there's been plenty written about the *negative* aspects of WFH from the perspective of people who need social interaction. yet barely anything about the *positives* from the perspective of those of us who genuinely struggle to deal with excess levels of social interaction.
Until the pandemic forced the hands of employers, it was just a given that you'd troop dutifully into your workplace every day, mingle with your colleagues whilst trying to get your work done, then go home again. And whilst that sort of working environment suits a lot of people to a tee, for the rest of us it was something we just had to tolerate because there was no alternative.
When WFH came in, the tables were turned, and for the first time ever, those people in the former group suddenly got a small taste of how those of us in the latter felt every day we were at work pre-WFH - whilst we were able to thrive in our blissful isolation, able to just get on with what were actually being paid to do without having to expend any of our time and energy on dealing with unwanted social interactions, they were now the ones struggling to adapt, having to expend their precious mental energy on coping with an uncomfortable environment, wanting desperately to get back to what they considered normal - and the question over what ought to be considered normal in the first place is a whole other debate...
So given how many centuries those types of people have had things their own way when it comes to working environments, I'm entirely happy that the present WFH/hybrid approach offered by most employers continues for as long as possible in order to redress the balance and give something back to my type of people. If they want to continue heading into the office as often as possible, good for them, that's something most employers policies will still allow them to do. Just don't expect everyone else to feel the same or be quite so eager to follow suit.
from the perspective of people who need social interaction.
People who use work as a source of their social interactions, to fuel their needs come off as creeps, as they don't realise that all people around them are somewhat forced to be there and socialise.
So from that perspective, office is a place where people with all kind of personality disorders can thrive and abuse other workers. Those people wouldn't dream of having social interaction outside of work, because outside of work, apart from close family, nobody is forced to interact with them. You can just tell them to sod off, but if that person is your manager, that is unlikely going to work and if manager is manipulative enough, they can get you fired and filing for constructive dismissal is expensive (you need a good solicitor) and stresful.
WFH cuts all toxic people out of your sight.
A lot of people like the casual camaraderie of the workplace. Maybe even most. This despite the strawman argument of people using social interaction to "fuel their needs". We're not talking about people's friendship group here ( though sometimes friendships can start in the office).But "work friends" - most people prefer to work in a mildly sociable environment and tend to find a group of people they find congenial. One daughter co-ordinates her office based days with a couple of other colleagues. The other seems to really get on with the people she meets most often in her office-based days. When I was working, out and about and not often in our office base, I quite looked forward to getting in a couple of half days a week to catch up with colleagues without it being a formal meeting day.
(AC simply because I never give my name when I'm referring to my kids' work in case I say something indiscrete, just in case it's enough of a clue to identify me relative to them).
One daughter co-ordinates her office based days with a couple of other colleagues.
That brings some red flags, as there may be one or two colleagues left out and feel discriminated or excluded.
Something like this is a no go from HR point of view as it may give someone grounds for constructive dismissal and other grievances.
Great example of toxic, but for you it's nothing.
You can coordinate office days with certain colleagues only if they belong to the same team and you cannot leave anyone out. It must be their own decision to not come.
Thank you.
I've been forced into offices for nearly a couple decades now. Never once have there been massive company wide calls or support on how to emotionally deal with being forced to interact like this even though nothing in my nature supports it.
Within weeks of working from home the support groups and meetings sprung up on coping and basically ran continuously.
I'm not even that sure I'm in the minority, certainly not as disproportionately the minority as the available support indicated.
Think it really highlights how workplaces in general (not just office life) are set up exclusively for extroverts. I found it very, very hard to sympathise after noticing that.
The company I work for is just in the process of dumping its London office, they don't want to pay for the space, but if people are WFH, they don't have to pay for it, so that's a win/win for them.
They are going to rent a small managed office as a "collaboration space" for the things where occasionally you do have to do some face to face stuff.
As most of my communication is with people in different offices in the UK, europe, asia & the US, it doesn't really matter where I am to work, the added benefit is that I'm on call so waiting for 90 minutes for me to get to the office or get home to look at things becomes a few minutes so the company wins on quicker support.
The company I work for is just in the process of dumping its London office.
We now see why the, landlord friendly, Government is not fully at ease with WFH.
Getting rid of a London office not only hurts the owners of big, high value, architectural monstrosities. Due to the real "trickle down effect", it also lowers the price of everything right down to slums.
How are the poor things going to fund that fifth week in the Caribbean this summer if that happens? They may have to put off buying that additional superyacht!
I've been WFH full time for three years now and mostly I'm still very productive although I say that as someone with 20 years experience in my field. Some things are more painful though. What I really miss is the social cohesion you get from sitting together as a team occasionally. Also, training up new people is quite painful remotely - for some reason I find a day of zoom calls way more draining than sitting next to someone and pairing all day.
I've decided to move role to a company that asks for two days a week in the office (but isn't strict about it) and I'm looking forward to the variety and improvement to my social life (as long as my new team aren't <censored>s lol). I will definitely never go back to full time in the office though, commuting full time is exhausting and expensive.
One factor never mentioned is the saving in Sick pay. In the old office days, if you felt you were coming down with a cold, you had two choices. Come in, feel lousy, probably infect your colleagues or stay at home and then get chastised because you had used too many sick days
Now you can work from home, still be productive and only really be off sick for really bad doses of flu or worse
Yup. When I finally joined the "I've had Covid" club about this time last year, it was a relatively mild case which only left me genuinely unable to work (or do much else beyond being aware of just how utterly crap I felt) for a day, yet had I not then been able to WFH on all the other days where I did feel OK but still had to stay away from the office pending the all-clear, I would've had to claim almost 2 weeks of sick days, which wouldn't have benefitted anyone.
Similarly for other life events that require you to be away from the workplace during working hours - e.g. emergency repairs at home, car won't start, kids are ill etc. - yet which don't require your full attention the whole day and where you can therefore be almost as productive WFH that day as you would have been in the absence of the event occurring, whilst being infinitely more productive than you would have been had WFH not been an option at all...
I think the next few years are going to be quite telling in terms of seeing which employers truly get WFH and thrive by embracing it, and which merely pay lip service to it, not really understanding all the benefits it offers them (because it really is benefical overall for both employee and employer, it's not just about employees having an easier life), and struggling to recruit top talent as a result of them becoming an increasingly unattractive looking place to work.
> Three-quarters of remote workers based in the UK's capital city would demand an inflation-busting pay increase – or quit altogether – if asked to give up their right to flexible working.
A least they say they would. But experience tells us that most of them wouldn't.
One place I was working (as "hired help" not as a permie) continually held meetings to discuss the lack of morale in their workplace. The hot topic was always the questionnaires their HR dept kept putting out and the results that said over 50% of their IT staff were thinking of leaving. However, hardly any of them ever did.
It turned out this was just grumbling, blowing off steam and that the only people who did leave (hence the need for bringing in outsiders) were the few talented individuals with initiative who easily found jobs elsewhere.
Leaving takes a long time, usually.
Very few people leave without having a new job offer already accepted.
Most people don't look for a new job until pushed. They might not find something for years, or they might get a job offer within a few weeks.
Then they'll weigh up the known annoyance with the unknown.
The worse their current situation, the more willing they will be to take that leap.
If they don't trust their current manager and HR, they've effectively already decided to leave as soon as an offer arrives.
One thing to consider here is that the last 3 years have proven to many of us that WFH can and does work, both for us as individuals, and for our employers, and we're now seeing a growing divide between those employers who see WFH/hybrid as the future, and those who are desperate to get back to the way things used to be.
So when people are *now* saying things like "take away my hybrid/WFH and you'll be looking for my replacement", it's less obvious that they are "just saying it" - what they may really be saying without actually using all the words is "You and I both know full well there's no need to force me to go back to the bad old days, and I know there are enough decent employers out there that aren't run by complete dinosaurs who I could go work for instead, so if you want to keep me then you need to make me an offer I can't refuse"...
Been working from home since 2012, changed jobs once.
If someone forced me to go to the office I'd quit. All the money I've saved means I can afford retiring if I'd wish.
In a way I guess this is what scares many employers, their employees cannot be controlled if they're financially able to do whatever they want.
Some of the people I work with need to be at the office (production for example) and some prefer the office for practical reasons.
Young grads / apprentices who are either flat sharing or living with family come to mind.
One particular team I work with have a relatively limited space (it is a repair facility for electronics) and the WFH / collaboration space solution that $EMPLOYER has put in place means fewer people traverse their limited space which is a win for them.
I do go in occasionally for those times I really need to but the rest of the time I am working in my home office (which was designated as such when we moved here).
Right now I am in the middle of detailing the principles of operation of a piece of electronics I am designing; the process of writing that down typing that up without any interruptions or extraneous noise lets me concentrate better (especially when I discover a flaw that only appears once I type it up but I can fix it right away). The other piece (currently) is the actual layout which can really require multiple sessions of several hours uninterrupted work (typically 4 to 6 hours at a time) which is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in an office (especially open plan).
I have a meeting with one of the electronics distributors FAE tomorrow for lunch so we are meeting at a nice little cafe about 10 minutes from here; that will probably be far more productive than sitting in the office.
I also do a lot of microcontroller development and the first parts of all those uses a development kit attached via USB; I can (again) get that done far more effectively here. Once I am ready to commit to a PCB I will go in to commission it, then bring one or two home (I have a nice little lab setup) to do much of the rest of the work. Final integration is at the office.
The flexibility is the key and employers who refuse to see that as an advantage (or perhaps are worried about their 'stature' as viewed by senior management) are already losing out.
I might go in 3 days or more in a row and then not see the office for 2 or 3 months. We have no problem with collaboration online (Teams, for all its faults, works quite well for that sort of thing). I just did a team call yesterday to explain the process of designing electronics (for a particular piece of kit) to 8 junior engineers / grads and that went extremely well.
Arbitrary 'you must be in the office coz reasons' is a good way to demotivate people when they get a lot more out of the job when they can just get on with it without a detailed plan for the day and just when they are mentally up to it.
I keep hearing the tired old "What about the new starters? How will they learn anything if I'm not about?" If you haven't figured this out after 3 years of your staff working from home, then perhaps you should be thinking of a new job, maybe one a bit less demanding? Where I am we have implemented a formal/informal mentoring scheme where you have a weekly meeting with your assigned mentee and they are encouraged to contact you at other times to ask any questions they may have. I've been mentoring like this pretty much since the first lockdown and it's been quite effective. Coupled with a decent recruitment and training regime we are getting a better calibre of support techs and are keeping them for longer. About the only thing I miss from not being in the office is the long distracting chats I used to have with a few individuals, but they were counter productive and sometimes we have them over Teams anyways <LOL>. The list of things I don't miss is extensively described by others above and by me in previous threads.
The way I see it is if your job allows you to WFH and you are productive when WFH and you want to WFH, then why on earth would your company want to force you to come into the office? At best they are going to have an unwilling, unmotivated, unhappy employee in the office. At worst they are going to be recruiting to fill the vacancy.
I wish I could work from home although I hated it during the fucking incarceration.
I share an office with a selfish cunt who speaks loudly to his wife on the 'phone almost every 30 minutes, and eats crisps with his mouth open.
Another eats stinky food at his desk, snorts phlegm and then coughs without covering his face and slurps every fucking drink.
I bought noise cancelling ear buds for work and enjoy Groove Salad but need stink cancelling nose buds.
I might have to retire early even though I'm only 60 and I won't get my state pension until 2029 . . . : (
BTW I am very aware of my own failings but I do buy coffee, biscuits and doughnuts for my colleagues because I can and hope that it somehow, maybe ameliorates my grumpiness.
I'll get my coat, the production of which produced absolutely 0% CO₂ of course.
Get to see the sunrise over misty valleys, looking into the valley with its sheep, cows and horse, but having to dodge to occasional deer, pheasant or suicidal rabbit that's wandered into the road can keep you on your toes.
Sure the tractors and combines sometimes slow you down a little (although plenty of modern tractors will happily go as fast as you), but its no big deal.
Hell I even get to run along a steam train from time to time, although rarely being eye level with the pilot of a Chinook can freak you out.
Yeah I'm on shit pay, but would I swap for £150k a year to live in London? Not a chance in hell.
> Yeah I'm on shit pay, but would I swap for £150k a year to live in London?
You do know you can have a £150k “London” job and only actually visit the London office a couple of times a year…
I had colleagues who live in the wilds of Fife and Flintshire and rural Lincolnshire, over circa 10 years, we met a couple of times in the office, but more frequently it was on customer sites, residential training courses, airports etc.
However, I suspect the stress levels will be higher than you currently experience.
My wife began WFH with Covid and never went back. Three hours a day for commuting removed. Plus make-up, dress-up, high heels and sharing a cramped office. Yesterday she was complaining had to make-up and customer did not switch the camera on. Reminded her the relative cost of stepping in to the next room, prepping for a minute and back. I guess habits are easy to acquire and then you are looking forward to the next improvement.
Myself could not do it. I deeply dislike working from home. If had to commute for more than an hour would consider options though.
I'm in a good position where I can work from home if I want. Officially, I am expected to be in the office for some of the time, but as acting team leader,it's up to me to decide how much.
I quite like working from home, but actually miss the commute when I do. Why? For me, I use the commute as a time to think about things with no one interrupting me. I've also got used to having a hard barrier between work and home. The commute is that barrier. It enables me to prepare myself for "work mode" on the way in to work, and come out of "work mode" when I go home. I think that is important psychologically.
I am fortunate in that I currently have an office to myself, with what remains of my team based on the floor below.
That said, as I said, I like WFH as well. I can stop work, go make a cup of tea, go for a walk etc. I can also get up late as I don't need to commute, and assuming I have no meetings, lay around in my pajamas. I usually get loads of tea or coffee from my housemates as well, although I have to make it as well.
The downside for WFH is that I felt I never entirely escaped work while WFH. I have a decent PC that I used for WFH (the laptops we were given were OK for basic stuff like Office, but nowhere near powerful enough for me, as a lot of my job involves mucking with VMs,sometimes having multiple machines running at once).
One thing that used to irritate my boss when I worked from home is that I don't have a webcam. The PC is in my bedroom, and I don't particularly want my private space visible to all. There is nothing wrong with the room, apart from being a little messy. I just don't want it visible to all and sundry. And no, Teams blur background option is not an acceptable solution, IMO. He offered me one several times, but I made clear it's my PC. Even if he forced me to take a webcam, I would not use it,. He eventually gave up, and gave the webcam to someone who wanted it.
Anyhow, the downside is that if I was working on a problem, my PC is there. I can use it, and often did. This meant that that I was sometimes working a full day, then carrying on working after 5pm, sometimes until midnight. This is bad, from a mental health POV..
I love working from home, for all the positive reasons people have stated above.
I'd actually been working from home for years before Covid struck, working with multinational teams spread across multiple time zones, where you got to meet in person once a year at best. However, my job subtly changed, together with my then employer requiring people to be in the office. I got permission to continue working from home, but ended up needing to go into the office more often than once a year.
The office was open-plan, spread over several floors, with hot-desking. The car parking was not big enough to accommodate all the cars for all the people assigned to that location, and public transport was challenging - infrequent and overcrowded. Not an ideal environment - plenty of people have described the disadvantages, so I don't need to repeat them here. I must admit, struggling into an open-plan, hot-desk office to have an audio-conference where all the other participants are in other offices in other parts of the country (or other countries) strikes me as particularly pointless. I've had to do that more than once.
What I learned was that when I was the only one on a team not forced to be in the office, I was easily not included, and often deliberately ignored - unanswered phone calls, instant messages and video calls, meetings cancelled at short notice, or not attended without explanation, emails not replied to.
When Covid struck, I noticed how many people (at a different employer) had no idea how to work effectively remotely - audio conference etiquette, video conference etiquette, how to communicate across a team and so on. Some obviously struggled, and got no support/coaching from management, who seemed to have a vested interest in making sure remote working didn't 'work'.
When remote working works well, it is great, and it can work well enough to deal with successful multi-million pound international projects running over many years. Been there, done that.
When it works badly, even the simplest things become difficult and projects stall. Dealing with that is hard, and requires good management, and not just a knee-jerk reaction of getting everyone back in the office. Been there, done that too. To be honest, though, sometimes there's no substitute for going around to somebody's desk and having an impromptu chat. That's difficult to do when people are in home offices and always 'too busy'.
A whole additional area of difficulty is hybrid working with some people working as a group in an office, with some working remotely. I think that requires some pretty good professional discipline to make sure the remote workers are included, and not isolated, either by accident or design. Been there, and not seen it work well, yet. Being a remote worker in a project where most of the team are working together in a single office can be pretty isolating for the remote team members, and needs good people and superlative and sensitive management. If I knew the recipe for success there, I'd share it, as I've not seen it yet, and I'd love to. Otherwise, you tend to get an office clique, and 'the rest'. I've both been in 'the clique' and outside, in different places.
Some people have to go into their place of work. Shop assistants can't work from home. Tradesmen can't sit at home and plaster, plumb, carpent or electric. Being able to do office work remotely is a privilege, but it would be nice if employers were better at making an effort to make it work. Because it can. But it requires working at to get the best results, and not just saying "It's all too difficult, just get everyone back in the office.".
certainly in the UK.
The whole disappearance of over 0s from the labour market may not be directly proportional to RTO policies, but they are intimately linked. The other factor being someone who is around 55 who did it "old style" and now lives mortgage free is generally quite well insulated from a lot of the pressures around salary.
Certainly in my circle there are people not yet 60 who won't go into any office, for any amount of money.
(This is of course exactly the labour situation that Brexit was intended to enable. Which is why it is instructive that it's the nutjob Brexiteers who are pushing RTO so hard).
You really can't game the market. Has no one learned ?
For decades the why live in London question has floated around. Because the price premium for living in the capital was so high. Of course some people were tied to jobs that required them to live here. That's where WFH has made a difference.
But many more didn't need to even then. You can be a teacher in London, Liverpool or Leicester and frankly it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference. Ditto for almost all other jobs.So why did they stay here? No one ever seemed to resolve that conundrum. Of course for some it was to get away from their parents' home town- flying the nest. But for the rest? Answers to surveys at the time always said things like "For the theatres", but said by people who seldom went to the theatres, and so on. Some of it was a degree of snobbery about "Up North" etc.
I work for a small telco and barring the occasional router setup for a new customer and kit returned from testing, there is no need for me to be in the office. The people I work with are alright and I think it's better for my mental health in some ways but it still seems pointless being here some days.
Just done my first two days of my workplaces new "must be in office 3 days a week minimum" edict after 3 years at home. New boss is a micromanaging bell-end who "loves data & reports on what you are doing". Small screens (2x 32 at home, 2x 22 at work) crap PC and awful chair, bad coffee and noisy open plan office full of mouth breathers. Less productive, less conducive and a 2.5 hour commute from rural life to center of a big city (way up North, over the border). About the only positive is I am saving a few pennies on electricity.
Finding it very difficult not to just hand in my notice.
Wife says I should just retire..58 seems a tad early, although cash wise its simple as Public Sector £21k pension already & wife continues to work and earns more than me (oooohh I can be a kept man!).
>Wife says I should just retire..58 seems a tad early
Perhaps, what you need is a change of pace, so if you are financially stable perhaps the solution is to "retire" from the fast lane and take a job that enables you to work until you are 68~70 and thus maximise your pension payout.
If you are reasonably financially secure Self-employment might be useful; you can relatively easily rack up a few years of "losses" which can be offset against the tax hit you'll take on your initial pension payouts...
The paradox of paying people barely enough to afford living in London is that you can't threaten them with anything because they don't have mortage payments to keep up with, because you neve paid them a salary that qualifies them for a 500k house. Bring them back into the office but pay them the average house price / 4 and subsidise their season ticket. Still want to bring them into the office?
I must be a bit of an outlier here.
I live in London (well SW14...) and I like it. I also like going into London - I like the buzz of the city, but I've never worked in central London and probably would not enjoy working in an open plan office or at a hotdesk - I avoided that in my career.
I no longer commute as I was made redundant a couple of times since 2017 but in the 25 or so years before that I used to (mostly) cycle to and from work. I liked going in and seeing people. People I would not choose as my friends but interesting, quirky, weird, annoying, nice, varied people. I was lucky in my job in that I think I knew a few hundred people by first name. The interactions I had with them ranged from friendships, bantering, hellos, nods or just work related talk. I think this 'forced' interaction was one of the best things in my life. It taught me patience and tolerance of all sorts of people and to realise that you have to work with people to get things done and not just shut people off when they annoy you. I'm not sure that WFH would have done that for me.
Having said all that - in my last role my team all WFH and I loved doing nights from home, I never enjoyed the commute home in the morning when I had been in the office overnight.
Just had a "it's not mandatory" but "it's really important" that we increase our attendance email.
Now this is for the team (line management) which is not the same as any of the project teams anyone is involved in, but one of the justifications is sitting around discussing drawings. I have not printed out a drawing for over five years now, our company is entirely set up for digital delivery, and none of the people in my work team are involved in any of my project teams so there's no reason for us to look at each others work.
I'd just be using Teams in the office rather than at home, but adding journey time to do it, having to book a hot desk (so we probably won't even be sitting close to each other) plus all the other minor things that add up to wasted time and effort.
My reply was, well if it's not mandatory, it's not happening.
Managers just don't know what to do when there's no one to manage sitting in front of them.
My guvnor has said to me that our firm is expecting to mandate 2 or 3 days in the office very soon, that they EXPECT attrition as a result and are still full steam ahead.
"if these people don't want to come to the office we don't want them working for us" was the line.
I personally think the minority of slackers who have taken the absolute piss for years of WFH have ruined it for the rest of us but if they want to lose 6 hours of my working time each week as I sit in the car then that's what will have to happen.
London based?
I assume that means having an office in London? I can see why remote workers who live outside London don't want to commute. However, some of us bought or are renting expensive property near the centre in order not to have a long commute.
Being forced into working remotely (read: in a small apartment with no control over noise levels), whilst an office remains closed like in my case is laughable. And then we haven't talked about proper social interactions around the coffee machine or pints after work.
FYI: I've never had a mandate to go into the office, I went in when my job benefited from it. Other days, when I needed to work on something, I also considered working from home to avoid colleagues interrupting me.
Working entirely from home isn't popular with management, it's a good way to tell them that you're not particularly dedicated to your job. So I don't think it's a good idea if you're looking to get promoted or retain your job in the coming recession. Remote workers are just one step off outsourced contractors on the hierarchy of who gets downsized first.
But then again, getting downsized can be good for your career if you find a better position in the process. I have some friends who are actively angling to be downsized for the severance pay.
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