Property companies 'research' says everyone wants to return to office

Even after 5 years of way more WFH than was the norm before I still don't think there is enough independent research to make any judgement on which is more productive.

There are so many variables and way to many vested interests.

Age, stage in career, time in the job, household situation.

You have the alleged hidden agendas like getting people back to fill offices that are still under lease agreement, or forcing people back to push for headcount reduction.

Not every commute is pointless by the way, mine pre COVID was less than 10 minutes, and most in a company of over 1,000 were well below 30mins.

There's a tonne of research. We've had 5 yrs of global data on it. Still getting these fake narratives being posted on it.

In my experience everyone I talk to underestimates their commute time and rarely give door to door times. They usually give best case scenarios so it's doesn't look that bad.

CSO gives "...The average commute to work has been increasing over time, rising from 26.6 minutes in 2011 to 29.1 minutes in 2022..."

That's an hour a day. 20 hours a month, basically a full day a month just commuting.

Mine has always been been between 30-90 mins. Usually 45-60 min each way. Never had a 10 mins commute.

Very little real evidence that it does produce an increase in productivity.If that was the case then surely there would be evidence of massive lack of productivity over the past 5 years and companies would be going out of business left right and centre, but this isn't happening.

Whilst I agree that developing other counties by using WFH is a great idea in principle, and I’d love to see it happen, the practicalities are challenging.
You would need proper legislation to protect employees which in some respects would be impossible or it would simply be bypassed in other ways- you can’t legislate for what an employer might do in the future- so today you buy your little house in Mayo, settle down with your partner and have little mayoettes all the while WFH- then in 2 years time your employer calls everyone back to office which is Dublin based- what do you do then?

I’d prefer to see new industries decamping to other counties and smaller towns instead - you wouldn’t need WFH per se, as commuting unlikely to be an issue for most. We have broadband, we have motorways throughout most of Ireland - why the focus on Dublin all the time? I’d really like to see the Irish civil service lead the way here - if you established new satellite hubs with either fulltime only or small blended 4/5 days in office, because the workers would be local, WFH would be less of an issue- towns would thrive and bring more investment in.
Obviously holes can be punched in the above suggestion - I’m aware of that - but continuing to have Dublin as the only option for many companies to base themselves, is strangling Dublin and killing small towns .

100% remote since 2017. Best thing that ever happened to me. I will never work in an office again.

Here we go again. Someone holding down 17 full time jobs and running 3 creches from their kitchen and not one of them noticed.

The good people or high performers stay because they can work from home. The dead weight underperformers, passive workers, unmotivated, direction dependent and lacking initiative empoyees are dragged back to the office in the hope they'll quit. I'm seeing this and I've been in meetings where this is discussed, it's not a secret.

35% is a minority. Look, I'm fully supportive of remote and hybrid working, but the reality is that most Irish business owners and Irish managers in companies will 100% remain reluctant. The idea of "once the work is done" sounds ideal but in practice, if there’s any spare capacity, many will look to fill it. That old-school "eyes on" mindset, rooted in the factory floor culture is still deeply ingrained and far from disappearing.

The party is over.

They are right in fairness, if they can get away with that, then it is their manager who deserves to be sacked

haha!

Are start ups as numerous as they were in the low interest days?

I’ve recruited 70-100 people this year. The fact the company is 100% remote certainly hasn’t made it more difficult to recruit people, I’d say very much the opposite in fact.

I’d be very dubious that many potential employees want in-office work.

Probably always better to be slightly over staffed than slightly under staffed for everybody's sake, companies, employees and customers.

For a couple of years in my job we were understaffed. Being understaffed meant mistakes were made regularly as work always had to be rushed, which resulted in customer complaints which resulted in more work having to be done as you had to fix the mistakes and then deal with the complaints (which takes time), which resulted in staff being more stressed and missed more days due to illness , and staff left and new staff had to be trained.By being slightly under staffed everything snowballed and made things a nightmare and caused reputational damage to the company.

We now have the correct number of staff and it means people can do their work at a decent but not frantic and rushed pace, mistakes are few because there is time to check work, complaints are reduced and staff morale is good which results in a smooth operation all round and benefits everyone .

In most jobs, if an employee does sleep while at work, it can lead to disciplinary action.

Of course, some people in some jobs are unsackable.

All these contracts have generic get out clauses for the company or organisation.

You cant have different rules for different performers who do the same job - you cant have Billy who lives in Drogheda wfh and demand that Jack (who also lives in Drogheda) come into the office. My experience is that the crap work performers use every excuse not be in the office as much as they should - illness, sick child, childcare issues, car broken down, lost car keys, injuries, road blocked by car crash, neighbour died, heating broke needs to be fixed - Ive heard all these excuses. There was one employee who used excuses 3 days in a row when he was due in the office for an urgent meeting - this guy is a dead weight employee as you put it and we knew his excuses were not genuine ( some even had bets on what his excuse would be the next day). The HR/Legal advice on this was that we couldnt get rid of him as he did perform his job from home on those days. So you can poke and prod these employees to try to get them to return to the office in order to try and force them to leave but they wont. My experience is that lack of wfh options forces the good to leave not the bad.