Working From Home Megathread

Only if your employer pays it, if they dont then you wont get it:

If your employer pays you a working from home allowance towards these expenses, you can get up to €3.20 per day without paying any tax

You get one or the other, the allowance from your employer whuch is 3.20 per day or you can claim 10% of your light and heat and 30% of your electricity.

Say your electricity and gas is 2k per year and your BB is 600 per year, thats 380 you can claim, and its a tax credit.

If you are a higher rate tax payer you get 40% of it back.

so 40c a day. Assuming you work from home full time.

My workplace is insisting on a 50/50 split. Already people leaving due to it. Not the poor performers though its the better employees starting to go already as finding jobs that suit their needs much easier. I think employers are in a for a bit of a surprise this year with turnover.

Hard to do as most contracts signed pre covid did not have WFH wrote into it hence place of employment is on site for most.

I know exactly how the tax credit works having claimed it for the last two years. You need to record each utility bill and claim a % of the cost. It is a painful process, to get about €100 in tax credit.

And yes, furniture for me and for those at secondary level who were WFH full time in the early days. Not a huge cost on its own, but on top of all the other costs, it really didn't help.

And yes, I'm largely back at the office now, though the issues I've flagged with WFH are not unique to me.

Very hard to compare light and heat bills, given the various increases and switching of providers since then (with no access to history at the old provider).

For broadband, it certainly prevented me from disconnecting from broadband, given that most in the house can work off 4G connections these days.

Dinosaur organizations are losing out on their greatest asset which is their people. Their best people are leaving and moving to their competitors who place a greater value on employee welfare and work life balance by allowing the employee to work wherever suits them, be it at home, the office or a combination, but the employee can choose. As long as the work is being done that's the main thing.

Those companies failing to adapt to modern times and employee preferences will be left with a company with a poor standard of employee and the knock on effect will be a lower standard of work leading to less efficiency, costly errors and customer churn.

Can those in power in these companies really not see this?

Sure - but there's a bit of a difference between, say, a couple of the consultant companies' pre-COVID weird-ass policies ("You must wear a white dress shirt and we have no casual Friday! This will cost you around €500 a year in shirts but hey, look at your bonus!") and life now ("You must always come to the office, even though we know you can work as well at home, and yes, that does mean you need to live in commuting distance of Dublin, which will cost you an extra €500/month in rent! But on the other hand... sure you're getting out of the house!")

With respect I think your missing the full point.

Yes no one is irreplaceable but losing a talented worker who has high value add over someone who just does the job is costly. Knowledge and skill drain is underrated in many companies e.g. losing someone who just does the job is much easier to replace than someone who has high value add that will take longer and hence cost more to replace in both time and monetary terms.

I think organisations don't value experienced people correctly. As a result they are not even aware of what they losing. Many places don't even measure productivity. Hence they have no way of measuring the value or not of wfh.

It’s a running theme of the thread, an unshakeable belief that wfh is better than an office environment (because it suits the poster rather than anything else) and a naive view on how replaceable most staff are oh and add a complete disregard for management.

That's not what is being said.

It's that losing someone with domain knowledge and experience had a cost as does bringing someone new in and getting them up to speed in the same organisation.

The advantages and disadvantages of both are measurable metrics. Suggesting there are none undermines your credibility entirely.

Do you think people always need to meet in person. Have you ever used a phone, email sent a letter?