The right to work from home

Aet290204 said:
I think the worry I have is that because people have been forced to work from home five days a week, it’ll become the default. I work in an office with 30 plus others and am in a specialist team of three. Very often as I’m Not the first port of call for queries the only contact I have is with the other two team members. Not good for communicating, wider team building and for a sense of belonging.
There are colleagues I haven’t spoken too since last February

I also think organisations have made some hasty decisions around closing offices and parts of their operation that will probably bite them on the **** in a few years time.

like I’ve already said though - horses for courses….
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Hopefully your employer will understand your concerns and ensure your need for face to face and wider interactions are taken on board mate.
 
Wiseman_Vaughn said:
What about the affect this will have on public transport (less demand) and the City Centre retail trade? I would have thought that the government would have been desperate to get us back there.
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They are desperate, yeah - look at last summer's 'everyone back to the office' campaign along with eat out to help out.

There's some interesting data though that very local businesses have boomed (along with online, obviously). So the ten sandwich shops outside the biggest office in the middle of the city have fallen over, but the family cafe at the end of your street has doubled in trade, because everyone's staying in their neighbourhood now. So if office workers are more spread out and spending more time in their local area, hyper-local businesses will thrive and more interesting ones will pop up as more cash flows around near your home, which is nice.

I know it's not as simple as this and there's sad stories about much-loved institutions in cities going under because centres are so empty, but it's a free market, and we don't go to work just to give money to someone else.

You'd also have to look at who donates to the party in charge of the government to see why they might be more keen on supporting massive commercial landlords and Pret rather than giving individual workers a bit more freedom, happiness and rights.
 
Absolutely, there is no "one size fits all" solution for work/life balance. One of the things that has jumped up in "lockdown" is pet ownership. I am a big believer that pet ownership is very good for mental health. Dogs and cats (and may other pets) form strong symbiotic relationships with their owners and give us far more than we take from them. Even if it is just taking your dog for a walk in early morning rain that you wouldn't feel as you rushed to get the bus for the commute to work or stroking the fluffy cat whilst plotting world domination, pets are good for you. WFH means that we can have and care properly for our pets.
 
I've been WFH since early March 2020 and I have to say I absolutely love it.

I was never one who spent most of their time in the office chatting idly to others, and to be honest, it would irk me to see management and those who lick @rse getting away with doing more of that than actual work. So I'm glad I've gotten away from that type of workplace and can just enjoy the peace and quiet from home.

Luckily my work is quite relaxed and creative so I don't ever feel bored or like I'm going insane from not having to speak in person to other members of the team. I have my partner and dog which is more than enough company, although I think I've adopted Jim White, Hawkesby and Jacobs and the rest of TalkSport as family members 😅

I couldn't really care less about retail trade tbh apart from the staff who could potentially be out of work. I feel much better cooking my own dinner rather than spending £5+ on a crap sandwich and coffee every day.
 
Wiseman_Vaughn said:
What about the affect this will have on public transport (less demand) and the City Centre retail trade? I would have thought that the government would have been desperate to get us back there.
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Is that the governments job?

Surely that is just capitalist supply and demand?

Lots of town centres are dying, but out of town supermarkets and retail parks have boomed and there has been precious little resource thrown at changing that.

If a few Pret-a-Manger and Costa's close their doors they'll open up other ones near where are people are working and socialisng nearer to their homes surely?
 
Caesium137 said:
Hopefully your employer will understand your concerns and ensure your need for face to face and wider interactions are taken on board mate.
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To be fair to them they have carried out a fairly lengthy consultation about what they are terming “office reboot”. Guess it’s wait and see. I’m just a bit surprised at some of the things I’ve heard from my colleagues.
 
As much as i am in favour of this, for me the bigger picture would be to gradually work towards reducing the working week to 4 days. The government should set a target date for this in the same way it has for carbon emissions. That would enhance the life/work balance immensely.

Another positive effect of work from home is on the housing market, commuter towns in the SE will become less desirable and housing prices should equalise to some extent across the whole of the country. Its quite absurd in the 21st century people have to travel in awful conditions on the tube to work to sit at a desk to do the same thing they can do at home. WFH will also increase job opportunities in poorer regions like the north east. I am all for anything even small things which decentralises the economic stranglehold the south east and London has on the rest of the country.
 
I’ve worked at home with varying degrees for the past 5 years from 1-2 day a week (big corp) to full time (first couple of years running a startup with no office) to 2-3 days (second couple of years after we opened an office).

I think a hybrid model works best and I would immediately drop out of interview process that didn’t have home working on the table.

There’s too much life quality to be gained from lunchtime walks round my village, nipping to the local market / shops to give it up.
 
Aet290204 said:
As has the cost of buying a dog!

As someone who lives on my own I would love to own a dog but I’m priced out of it now.
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I've known a few people who have spent waaay over the top for dogs in the last 6 months, it almost became a fashion trend in the early part of the year, was quite sad to see.

Don't know where I would be without mine, hopefully people stop with the ridiculous prices soon for you.
 
Aet290204 said:
As has the cost of buying a dog!

As someone who lives on my own I would love to own a dog but I’m priced out of it now.
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If you know what kind of dog you want, try to make contact directly with a breeder instead of looking for a puppy for sale. Any reputable breeder is still charging the same price and wont be advertising in the usual places as people will just buy the puppy then sell it on for a higher price, plus you know these people will actually look after the puppy and not be doing it only for the money.
 
It’s not something that affects me job wise but common sense says surely it can only be a win win for employers. People are far more productive because they’re far better rested as (especially in the south east) they’re not getting up at some ungodly hour to fight the commute having arrived home the night before with enough time to crawl back into bed!
 
As with anything some companies will still work from the office, others will migrate to a working from home model. Not everybody wants to go back to the office and not everybody wants to work in their 1 bedroom flat hunched over the kitchen table. Everything will work out.
 
I'm quite fortunate in that my commute is 3.7 miles in the car which takes about 12 minutes so most days I'm home before 4.30 having left in the morning about 7.30 and that includes chauffeuring my wife on the 2 days she goes into the office. Now the weather has picked up i sometimes walk the 3.2 mile route and have a beer with colleagues after work. We currently have the to option to work 1 day a week from home, though I usually only WFH a couple of times a month as I prefer the atmosphere for working in the office. Such is the nature of what we do, a lot of it happens very quickly and being able to grab people together quickly for a discussion in person and to respond rapidly to an ever changing environment works better than on Teams for us. That said, on the days when all I have scheduled is teams meetings, that's when I do WFH. Most of us in our team work like this, but some always WFH home 1 day and would more if they could. They tend to be the quiter, less busy ones

I'm very happy with the arrangement we have and the only change for us in the foreseeable will be a bigger property in the same area to accommodate my wife's more permanent office and hobby space and somewhere separate to that for me to use on the odd occasion I do WFH. We live in a relatively small house currently which works OK, but as this is going to be our working pattern/format going forward, it makes sense to accommodate that slightly better than we are currently able to

I can totally see why those with long commutes favour more WFH, but as I say, I'm very lucky in that regard and I have the option to WFH when required for the most part
 
During the second lockdown I went to Osmotherley for a walk round during my "hours exercise". I bumped into a local councillor who was out doing the same and mentioned that I would love to own a house in Osmotherley. He mentioned that over 50% of the house owners in Osmotherley were already working from home prior to the Pandemic. It could be that their offices are local in Northallerton, York, Middlesbrough etc but the new digital transformation also means people from London and the South have already stolen a march and living in North Yorkshire.
It also means the new WFH has already increased the prices of houses in Osmotherley that were already pretty high anyway.
 
Caesium137 said:
Is that the governments job?

Surely that is just capitalist supply and demand?

Lots of town centres are dying, but out of town supermarkets and retail parks have boomed and there has been precious little resource thrown at changing that.

If a few Pret-a-Manger and Costa's close their doors they'll open up other ones near where are people are working and socialisng nearer to their homes surely?
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This goverment undoubtedly sacrificed lives for the economy so I guess they have made it their job
 
Ayresome said:
During the second lockdown I went to Osmotherley for a walk round during my "hours exercise". I bumped into a local councillor who was out doing the same and mentioned that I would love to own a house in Osmotherley. He mentioned that over 50% of the house owners in Osmotherley were already working from home prior to the Pandemic. It could be that their offices are local in Northallerton, York, Middlesbrough etc but the new digital transformation also means people from London and the South have already stolen a march and living in North Yorkshire.
It also means the new WFH has already increased the prices of houses in Osmotherley that were already pretty high anyway.
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It also means the new treasury jobs in Darlington don't need to be from the local area.

My wife is working from home but her team are still getting together fairly regularly and it helps with communication and has the social dimension. It's working for them and she doesn't want the commute she had, so much wasted life.
 
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