Working From Home Megathread

You wrote a long post purporting to disagree with me yet appear to agree that there should be some office attendance on a regular basis.

As for your 99% of bosses stat ill give that the consideration it deserves.

Back in the office full time from next Monday with a bang. Will be interested to see how requests are rejected where I work once we are "allowed" request WFH.

This is going to be a great big game of musical chairs. People will resign if employers are inflexible and take wfh or jobs closer to where they live. Others will fill the jobs they leave because they can’t get a wfh job/they want to work in an office/the job is close to where they live. Those that want to wfh will hopefully find enough jobs, employers will most likely find people will to work in the offices and everyone will be happy, until they aren’t. Let’s see what affect wfh v office attendance has on promotion, or redundancies. Allowances have been made for any short comings in training and productivity, when demand/businesses ramp up, I doubt those allowances will be viewed so benignly. So, it’s happy days as long as the music is playing, let’s see who is left standing when it stops.

If it's an unhappy environment, it won't be made any happier by dragging people back into the office against their will. My working morale has never been happier than during the past 2 years, and the same is true for the entire team. Nobody is in a hurry to go back. We have a Teams meeting once a week to talk about what's going on and make plans and chat, with ad-hoc meetings/phone calls scattered throughout the week.

I’ve also regularly seen the very opposite of “team morale” in probably any office I’ve worked in- there are personality clashes and dislikes in practically all offices of any size. Just human nature. I’ve no doubt most people here have too.

Very often pretty far from the Waltons mountain “everyone collaborating” vision some like to paint it as.

It's important for the employer to manage this process either way, given their legal responsibility. They can't bum the responsibility of providing a safe workplace off onto their employees.

As you've noted yourself, decent employers will indeed do this.

So that leaves the indecent employers - are their employees just collateral damage for you?

There are indeed possible solutions here, and many employers will address these. A relative got their standing desk delivered, along with an electric drill to assemble the desk, which seems remarkably generous.

But not all employers are doing this, leaving employees exposed to injuries in the future.

Usually it’s WRC rulings rather than lawyers/H&S types which dictate how complex this is. I’m not sure that ignorance would be a defence, or in your case, the assumption that self certification was fine.

I didn’t say THEY were ignorant. HR are paid to know what way the wind is blowing in relation to employee legislation and WRC rulings. Woody you could well be one of the few people in this country who doesn’t understand that there has been a seismic shift in work practices as a result of Covid, which in turn will inevitably lead to focus on employee H&S considerations whilst working from home. New legislation has been introduced in recently on GDPR, and is being introduced on wfh. What was once an occasional working relationship may soon become the norm and with that will follow the claims against employers. The “ah sure this is the way we have been doing it for years” defence will be about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Lest you feel I am being overly harsh, go ask HR if they are having to update their policies in relation to wfh.

Probably because people 'had to' WFH for the last two years - the companies didn't mind then so long as the work continued.

And it did continue. And in that time, many people discovered that they were just as productive if not more so. They also discovered that they had much more time back as they no longer needed to commute. They had more time to spend with family or friends or see their kids. They could get out for a walk at lunchtime, they could make a nice lunch and when 5pm rolled around they were able to shut the laptop down and go live their life, immediately and didn't have to think about work until the next day. They no longer had to spend their free time in the evening preparing a lunch & clothes for the next day.

Now companies are asking their workforce to come back into the office, do the exact same thing that many have been successfully doing at home for the past two years and say goodbye to all of the benefits I listed above and for what - teamwork? Colloboration?

If there has been no teamwork or colloboration in the past two years then that says more about your team/company than it does about WFH.

Where is “the productivity is down” statement coming from? Evidence and figures please

The list of advantages for those working from home is endless, I know that. But the reason people were at home was due to government recommendations and to slow the spread of covid.

Do you think companies want employees to come back to the office for some team collaboration and to just piss people off.

I doubt it. I'm sure they will have their homework done and have valid reasons which they should be well entitled to do!