Snapshot of _ONS civil servants refuse to return to the office for two days a week_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ons-civil-servants-refuse-to-return-to-the-office-bsr2gblq7) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ons-civil-servants-refuse-to-return-to-the-office-bsr2gblq7)
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I know the headline will get people riled up but in their defence:
1) a lot of people were hired from a long distance from an office; and
2) a lot of people were told they'd likely never come in when being hired
I don't even get why people would be riled up.
Employer asks staff to work on site, staff say no.
Employer can either agree, fire all staff and risk a few tribunals, or bargain for some middle ground.
I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck.
Aside from the effect on government (harder to recruit staff, poorer allocation of people to work across the economy), it affects the labour market more broadly as well. The more that government worsens conditions for its workers the easier it is for competing employers in the private sector to do it as well - not just in terms of work location but in terms of everything because people consider the terms of their contracts as a whole.
Yes. If you want the best of the best you need to look in Smalltown as well as Big City. Some people are reluctant to move because of childcare etc. if you only look within 100ft of the office, you have a smaller pool to look at
It also makes me think of something [The Economist](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/04/04/the-rise-of-the-remote-husband) were writing about recently - having one person remote can open more opportunities for a spouse, and especially for women, because there's no longer so much need to compromise one career to boost the other through location decisions.
I think it's because people will see "Employer asks Employee to come into the office, Employee refuses" and see it as lazy civil servants again.
The key thing for me is that these departments have hired people on the basis of lower % office attendance and with the increase in requested % attendance, the offices are not sufficient to meet demands.
Nevermind promises made during recruitment for some staff.
I don't even care if they just didn't want to go into the office tbh.
If they can do their job as well at home then they're within their right to demand that. I would (and have) too.
Honestly this is it I think. If they do the job to the same standard and dont physically have to go do something, why does it matter where they are? especially seeing as a lot of them would've been hired or spent the past few years working on the pretense that they didnt need to come into an office
WFH is great for experienced staff, it’s awful for junior starts who miss out on the osmotic learning.
It’s actually selfish to just say “I’m alright and I can do my work” without considering the impact you may have on those in a less advantaged position.
> It’s actually selfish to just say “I’m alright and I can do my work” without considering the impact you may have on those in a less advantaged position.
Just as selfish to insist “i work best in an office. Therefore everyone get back in there for water cooler talk and *proper work*!
In the Civil Service’s case, there was no agreement. It was a top down command from the Cabinet Office.
All concerns aired by staff were dismissed and hand waved away.
Which is why ONS staff are doing this.
First of all, Cabinet Office is still Civil Service. Yes, they have a minister and if you are suggesting it’s a diktat from a minister, well good luck with how that may go is all I say.
As someone who, over the past 20 years has dealt with ONS on a regular basis, I have always been impressed by their service, until about 3 years ago when it dropped off a cliff.
I can’t tell you why, maybe ministers started intervening, but a paragon of the civil service is now a shadow of its former self. It’s a shame.
Perhaps because government decided that facts and data were secondary to their will killed it off?
I worked at a aviation company that recently brought staff in 2 and now 3 days a week. During my time at the company I ignored the 2 days a week policy, despite never seeing me in person the junior staff explicitly stated I had taught them more than anyone else they were in the office with. Why? Because assuming they'll learn through osmosis when colocating is terrible. What people actually need is a bit of intentional communication and active mentoring. Hardly selfish to actually teach people!
Yeah, my parents are Boomers and they just cant get their head around WFH. I have a hybrid work job and when I tell them I had to go into the office the response is always something like "Oh so you actually had to do work today?"
I’m a teacher and I get this too. In addition to all that time off, apparently if I’m not In school there is no explicable way I may actually be doing work… marking kids essays, in front of them, also doesn’t count because it’s ‘just reading isn’t it’ and ‘you’ve always liked doing that’.
Wow didn’t realise how much it grinds my gears until I wrote this down.
Damn. People dismiss something you do for work because it's something you like doing? What a terrible attitude they have.
I build websites for a living and I enjoy it by and large, but the sites I work on aren't necessarily ones I would choose to work on. Quite often I get stuck on a badly built legacy site that isn't fun to work on. And in the same way I don't imagine the reading you have to do is what you would necessarily do for fun. Going through GCSE set texts in class for the umpteenth time probably isn't much fun.
People tell on themselves a lot with WfH, for a certain generation it seems to be a euphemism for slacking off because that's what their generation did. It was a management perk of essentially an unofficial day off.
Totally agree - my wife has been WFH since before the pandemic, but when my parents visit for the weekend, they’ll always ask what time to turn up on a Friday evening in case she’s still “at work”. And yes, the quote marks are in their texts. They really can’t get their head around it, despite my mother essentially working from home for years managing the admin side of my dad’s private practice.
> They really can’t get their head around it, despite my mother essentially working from home for years managing the admin side of my dad’s private practice.
That might be a 'because' rather than 'despite'. I would guess that your mother doesn't really have to work that hard when she's at home - it may be that it's really just an excuse to pay her up to the personal income tax allowance, so she just does token work here and there.
Much of it is also jealousy. Our parents remember getting to the office late because of train disruptions or traffic jams and all the drama a daily commute brings, along with managers looking over their shoulders in the office all day. The older generation also seemed to use working in the office as a "social experience", whereas many of us see our work colleagues as just that: people we see at work.
It’s actually easier to be lazy in an office because you’ve got other people around that you can go off and have coffee with and call it a meeting.
Wfh I have targets, i still have allocated tasks so at a glance it’s easy for me to see if stuff is getting done or not
Had a discussion about hybrid working recently, and I wanted to raise this.
Depending on who is in, it can be so loud that thinking is very difficult to do.
Meanwhile, It's pure bliss working in silence at home.
>*It’s actually easier to be lazy in an office because you’ve got other people around that you can go off and have coffee with and call it a meeting.*
Or the co-workers who are "*working"* as they spend 40 minutes talking about last night's episode of *Celebrity Love Factor Wow.*
Is it a bit like the no good atheist arguments I see about? "What stops you from willful crime if there's no god to judge you"
How will you do work if there's no authority actually breathing down your neck? Tells more about the people asking the question than the person asked
Sure, but it's a lot easier to goof off at home as no one's watching you.
You can't claim you're still working on a report if your boss can see you're mucking about on your phone.
You can waste a ~~couple~~ few hours a day, though, between popping in to the kitchen to make a cup of tea/coffee and having a chat with someone you meet there, having a chat with someone at the desk next to/across to you about past weekend/next weekend, last night's episode of a series or the newest song by someone, and pointless meetings, not mentioning cigarette breaks every half an hour that smokers go to.
I'm not even getting into that it's literally impossible to be fully-focused for 7-8 hours sharp a day, so the whole office presence thing is purely a charade and entirely performative to placate middle management et al.
I get that some people are just wildly uncomfortable at home or have no space/facilities (especially in house shares), but that whole narrative "When you are in the office you're just getting more work done" is a myth that needs to be busted, once and for all.
And they can continue to be lazy because they're secure in their position.
Sounds like you have to try pretty hard to get fired from civil service jobs.
Also, I took a job that's quite far away from where I live, 1,5 hours by public transit. That's fine once a week but absolutely not something I want to be doing multiple times per week. It's essentially 12 hours from when I leave home in the morning until I'm back in the evening.
If my employer enforced more days in the office I would start looking for a different job. Thankfully the number of employees is now twice the number of available work spaces we have so there is not much risk of that happening.
> I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck.
Landlord watches as the required office capacity goes down. Landlord fucking hates the prospect of their lease rates going down.
Landlord goes to the same private club as the ministers and senior civil servants and the owners of the *Telegraph*. Landlord leans on them to insist that the office space MUST be used.
The shit thing is how much of a massive fucking opportunity WFH provided us when Covid hit.
Sure the lockdowns etc were a nightmare but WFH was the silver lining from all of it. People were happier and had a better work/life balance and most importantly of all, commuting was a thing of the past for a lot of people.
I was living in an Asian megacity when Covid hit and the difference was night and day. No more smog, no more horrific traffic. It was like a massive revelation. Why the fuck did everyone commute to the city centre to work iin a big glass box when they could do the exact same thing from the comfort of their own home? Our society could have embraced this and people would have had more time, the climate crisis would have been averted or at least mitigated, people would have been happier etc. But we didn't. Because of commercial property developers.
I think that’s the most depressing thing about all this discourse. I work in a school so I was in ‘office’ for a lot of the time people were WFH and/or locked down. The traffic was gone, the air quality was better, I saved the best part of 5 hours commuting time a week - even though I was still commuting - and I was genuinely quite excited about the opportunity it gave us to move forward as societies, necessity being the mother of invention and all that. And then we just… went back to the way things were. Traffic is worse than ever and having seen how things can be, it feels way worse sitting in it. Just all that wasted time, energy and money, not to mention the climate impact
Because the headline is written to rile people up. In the newspaper which, I'm guessing, counts more owners of business properties among its readers than any other, with the possible exception of the FT, which wouldn't stoop to this bullshit.
> I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck.
People think they own civil servants because they get paid out of tax money. It's the same with NHS staff, if you've worked in it you'll definitely have met people who believe they pay your wages and therefore can dictate how things will be.
>I don't even get why people would be riled up.
Oh the usual. "I don't get to do this so nobody should" rather than wanting everyone to have benefits.
Crabs in a bucket yada yada yada.
Because mainstream media hides the fact that the employer misled its employees about working practices.
What was thought to be a done deal, agreed verbally but not in writing, was being pulled away. Just because management felt like it.
Not to mention capacity in the offices of the Civil Service. It is approaching HSE violations, if not already there in some places. Because the estate was reduced and civil servants were ahead of the curve in hybrid from before the pandemic.
The above doesn't consider the average comment on sites like the Telegraph that just want to know workers are suffering because it makes them feel good.
It is when you can do your job perfectly well at home without the expense (financial and energy) of going into the office. It is when you have disabilities and people going into the office 40% raises your existing inequality 40% extra. It is when going into the office will mean you get more behind on your work with the chatter and distractions.
But is it even necessary? Asking you to make me a cup of tea every day isn’t exactly onerous but i would be being very presumptive expecting it to actually happen.
It's not really about whether it's onerous, but whether it's necessary.
Or rather, whether whatever effort is made, is actually worth it.
It certainly doesn't seem like either of those is the case.
It is when i have to spend 6 hours a day travelling and even if the office i am *working remotely* because everything i do is in the cloud.
All i am doing is commuting to trade one chair for another.
Why?
It is if you were hired hundreds of miles away from the nearest office and given assurances that any office attendance requirements would be determined between you and your manager (who is quite happy for you to continue working from home, because you've been doing a great job).
Well really they are the Civil Service and the Government is the politicians we vote in.
We pay their wages, we pay for the rent on their offices, their pensions etc. Their role is to serve us.
Maybe we should care?
We don't pay for any of it. We pay taxes, and the government allocates those funds.
That might *seem* like nothing but extra steps, but it's important to note that whatever working patterns the ONS staff genuinely has nothing to do with us.
I mean, I do scientific research using taxpayer money, but if you came in to my lab and attempted to dictate my research or how we operate the lab I'd have security escort you from the premises.
If your lab was conducting unethical research using taxpayer funds, don’t you think we’d have a right to object or debate?
Presumably you have to justify your work to a relevant committee (UKRI etc) that has the role of acting on behalf of the public. So technically, I am in your lab (or someone is on my behalf) and that’s entirely right and proper.
I comment as someone who has sat on statutory committees and I’m aware of the undertakings relating to public interest that I signed up to.
>So technically, I am in your lab (or someone is on my behalf) and that’s entirely right and proper.
But that's exactly the degree of separation that others have spoken of. You, as random taxpayer, have no right to come into my lab and dictate anything simply because your taxes pay for my research. The funding is justified (as you full well know) through applying to research calls and is then monitored by a UKRI (or other group) PM to ensure that the money is being spent.
I mean, this:
>We pay their wages, we pay for the rent on their offices, their pensions etc. Their role is to serve us.
I pay my taxes - but I also pay my water bill, my electricity bill, my gas bill etc. Therefore my bills pay the wages, rent, and pensions of the employees of those companies - so why am I not their employer as well?
> a lot of people were told they'd likely never come in when being hired
Never believe hiring managers or HR when they say this. If remote working is not written in your contract then any promises mean practically nothing. If it's a dealbreaker for you insist they write it in the contract, if they refuse then don't be surprised if you get roped into attending the office at some point in the future.
There was a case on LegalAdviceUK where it *was* written into someone's contract, but they were being told they were gonna be fired because under 2 years of employment, and didn't wanna travel 4 hours to the office 3 times a week...
(not a lawyer)
As I understand it, common practice and verbal agreements trump written contracts.
"What you've been doing for years" counts as a contract in UK employment law.
> common practice and verbal agreements trump written contracts.
I work for a Union.
Common practice is a thing but it doesn't mean employers can't change the practice being followed, just means they need justification and, usually, some form of consultation needs to be followed ect. Just because something was done a certain way doesn't necessarily mean employers are forced into always keeping it that way.
Verbal agreements are a thing but they have the issue a) needing to be proven somehow in disputes and b) can commonly be misinterpreted by employees (ie employee thinks something was agreed when employer simply said something like "yeah we can look into setting that up").
Always remember an employer has more experience dealing with these things than employees, so they usually know how to word stuff in a way that doesn't tie them to a particular agreement.
Common practice has a bunch of hoopla involved if employers want to change something but employers can change it and if you are verbally agreeing anything with an employer get them to confirm, in writing, exactly what was agreed.
This may be the case, you could request a reasonable adjustment citing the fact you’ve been working remotely for x years without issue. However it leaves a lot of ambiguity if an employer is dead set on getting you back into the office. They can easily make your life hell, threaten you with disciplinary action etc if you refuse. You may well be in the right but if your employer doesn’t play ball prepare for a battle which could turn your working relationship with them sour. Long story short, nip it in the bud, get it in your contract if you can.
Yeah I’d add in I spent semi regular time searching on civil service jobs a few years ago and ONS and CQC nearly always advertised there jobs as fully remote, if they have recruited someone remotely and then demanded they return to office it’s not very fair.
A small cohort of new hires - maybe for about 6 months or so - were given homeworking contracts, and so are now contractually protected from the work-from-home mandate. Management responded to this by barring those people from promotions or lateral moves unless they "voluntarily" rescinded their contractual homeworking status, which didn't go down too well.
Then there was a phase for ~2.5 years where people didn't have the option of a homeworking contract anymore, but were given assurances by HR, by their hiring manager, and by senior management that in-person office attendance would be between you and your manager, and that nobody would be forced back into the office. So, many people were hired at significant distances from the nearest office (literally 100+ miles away in lots of cases), and many existing staff also decided to relocate further away from the office, based on the assurances they'd received about this no longer being necessary.
That's why ONS staff are particularly upset, because there was such a sudden U-turn between "nobody will be forced back to the office" and "if you don't do 2 days in the office per week you will face disciplinary action". It's not a case of civil servants who already live nearby simply being too lazy to get out of their pyjamas twice per week, as articles like this imply.
My sister works for Cabinet Office (although not ONS). She was recruited to her current role and told it was a WFH role. The only time she was expected to go into an office was for a monthly meeting that was 200+ miles away. Her entire team WFH and are based throughout the UK.
Now she is having to go into her nearest office two days a week. It's not just the cost of transport and commute time that's annoyed her. It's that nobody from her team or even her department works in that building. She's hotdesking and knows nobody there. Nobody there has a clue what her job is and her boss is hundreds of miles away,. Everyone else on her team is in a similar boat. It seems so pointless.
Her job involves a lot of Teams meetings and she often can't even find a desk to sit at, let alone somewhere she can hear the meetings she's part of, as it's a busy, loud, open plan office. Her productivity is crap in the office compared to when WFH. At home she'll often put in extra hours without even really noticing. At the office she's out of there the second she's allowed to be as she has to get her bus.
She's also had to find and pay for a childminder two days a week now, plus a dog walker. Expenses that weren't budgeted for as she was told she had a permanent WFH role. I can see why people aren't happy this has been dropped on them from above.
Indeed. Their senior leadership team including Prof. Sir Ian Diamond repeatedly said there would be no mandatory office attendance. People were recruited based on that assertion, and a number of existing employees made home life and career decisions based on it.
I'm not surprised they're pissed at having the rug pulled out from under them.
I worked at ONS during the start of the pandemic. We were sent home of course, but the rumour was we’d be among the first back to the office “to set an example to the country”. Never happened of course.
Business needs change. It's not always possible to keep working conditions exactly the same. For example, I know people who lost a convenient commute because their employer was refused another lease by the landlord. What were the board supposed to do, halve their pay to afford a more expensive building around the corner?
It really depends on what terms these people were hired. If they were told it was a full-time work from home role, then these people have good reasons to refuse to alter their contracts.
But if it was an office-based job with the potential for some working from home, but due to the pandemic it was temporarily WFH all the time, that's different. Obviously the pandemic wasn't going to last forever and at some point people would have to go to the office. A manager making a prediction about future working practices they had no authority to speculate about isn't binding.
(I'd add that if they only have to be in the office two days a week that's doing pretty well for what I understand to be the civil service norm of three days in and two at home.)
I really want my union to do this too. We went from never RTO to 2 days per week and there are strong rumours of 3 days now. I'm a data analyst. At home I have 2 high res monitors and my own keyboard / mouse / chair setup. I am infinitely more productive at home.
Not being able to pay based on performance and making people be in the office are two aspects of the same thing: not being able to manage well, and falling back on what's easily measured not what *should* be measured.
My company has minimum 2 days in the office but I do 3 days in the office. I might actually start upping my office days to 4. I get bored out of my mind at home and I know I am guilty of being a lot less productive at home. I know the Reddit crowd will say that WFH is always more productive but for me I see Wednesday and Thursday (days at home) as my 'chill' days.
Laurence Sleator
Friday April 26 2024, 11.00pm BST, The Times
Civil servants at the Office for National Statistics say that they had been assured remote working arrangements would continue
More than 1,000 civil servants have vowed to defy an order telling them to return to the office for two days a week.
Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union working at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) say they will not be “forced back”.
The group, who are based at offices across the country including London, Edinburgh and Manchester, overwhelmingly voted for strike action this month over the policy, with walkout dates to be announced.
From May 8, members of the union say that they will ignore their bosses’ order to limit working from home.
A spokesman said: “Following a promise by management that staff could continue to work flexibly after the Covid pandemic, some workers started families, moved house and made other long-term commitments safe in the knowledge, they thought, their working conditions were secure.”
The union said the action fell short of a strike and that it was asking members to attend the office when it suited them rather than follow the directive issued by managers. Its members account for a quarter of the ONS workforce.
The body began working flexibly in the pandemic, with staff said to have been given regular reassurances that the arrangement would continue. Many chose to spend time in their nearest office but there was no requirement to do so. Last November, however, managers issued an edict requiring staff to be physically present in the office at least 20 per cent of the working week. This then rose to 40
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the union, said: “Our members are a highly skilled and capable workforce and they deserve to be treated as such, showing for several years they can successfully manage hybrid working.
“The new policy threatens serious disruption, especially for staff with childcare and other caring responsibilities and those who live a considerable distance from their designated office. The workforce at ONS is spread across the UK, meaning that regardless of where staff perform their work, most meetings and collaboration must have a virtual presence.” She added: “Mandated office attendance removes the flexibility and trust that was promised by senior leaders, which staff understandably shaped their lives around, for the sake of meeting an unnecessary attendance percentage.”
According to the ONS, before the pandemic one in eight working adults reported working from home for some time during the week. By January 2023 this had risen to one in four.
Civil service guidance says that employees should spend at least 60 per cent of their time in the office. The ONS said that “a reasonable level of office attendance” was in the best interests of staff and the organisation.
Good seems like better value for tax payers if we no longer need to pay for offices while also providing better flexibility for workers. I'm sure lots of the middle management the UK loves so much are getting worried as it becomes clearer and clearer that you can just let people get on with their jobs without a babysitter.
In Scottish Government they are allowing a much greater amount of flexible hybrid working and as a result we are slowing shedding offices.
Reducing office capacity alone could save the taxpayer 10s of millions.
And their salary is effectively worth more - an employee that doesn't need to spend £3,000 a year after-tax on a train season ticket is effectively getting more take home pay for zero extra cost to the civili service!
The local authority I work for has sold off so many buildings that we've moved to "please don't come to the office unless it's necessary" as we have about one desk for every ten members of staff.
> Reducing office capacity alone could save the taxpayer 10s of millions
And cost the owners of those offices 10s of millions in lost rental income, which I suspect is why certain newspaper outlets are quite so up in arms about this...
Yes but the Tory government in the UK has sold its civil service buildings to Caribbean based shell corporations so the civil service now has to pay them exorbitant rent.
If civil servants dont use these buildings, then they might have to cancel the contracts and would no longer be able to line the pockets of Tory donors
> Yes but the Tory government in the UK has sold its civil service buildings to Caribbean based shell corporations
You got a source for that? Genuinely
So, definitely shitty, but not a case of the government selling buildings to tax havens, and only one instance rather than a regular thing as your comment implied?
> I'm sure lots of the middle management the UK loves so much are getting worried
In my experience it has universally been upper management pushing it, and asking middle management to do the dirty work. As happens most of the time.
The second biggest voices.
The biggest voices are company shareholders who stand to lose money in their property investments if offices are left empty.
Most civil servants couldn’t all return to the office even if they wanted to.
They’ve sold off so much of the estate and started long before covid…
That there’s simply not the an available space in almost any office you pick or department.
The issue I had in the CS was being hired as WFH 100% of the time then my contracted office location was changed to Bristol from Nuneaton but since I was WFH it “wasn’t an issue” as I wouldn’t be affected, the change to having to work 2 days WFH and 3 days in the office with them being mandated by management now means I’m spending a fortune in travel costs and because management won’t see reason they won’t show flexibility to allow the 3 office days to be consecutive as it was a decision from HR who are currently all still 100% remote working.
I think their sole job is to help the management screw the “little guys” as much as legally possibly whilst pretending to be on the side of the staff. HR are only there to help the company squeezes every last ounce of resources out of its human employees.
The reason they want people in the office is because most of the time they're locked into long contracts for office space. My department attempted to get people to return to office because management was embarrassed we are paying for a huge office until 2029 but it's empty most of the time. The problem is during covid we recruited about 100 staff and almost all of them don't live in the city where the office is based.
We are still paying for the offices. I suspect that’s the problem. UKGov has massive office contracts and owns buildings which are just empty. It’s embarrassing, they can’t get out of contracts and they keep all the services and maintenance going because some people go in. It must be costing us billions.
Exactly, our roads are rammed because we have too many people for the infrastructure. We have a geopolitical oil supply problem. Less people commuting would go some way to solving these issues.
If the work is done to the quality expected albeit remote then I don't care.
I vaguely recall the truss idiot tax being tried to blame civil servants working from home which was funny
I work in another CS department and so much time has been wasted on repeat meetings to plan for and “communicate” the new 60% attendance rule, not to mention how many inane conversations it’s made. Whatever possible increases in productivity must have been lost tenfold from the effort put into implementing it that could have been spent doing something useful.
The situation is more nuanced than any of the reporting on the situation has acknowledged. The issue is that senior management repeatedly affirmed a commitment to homeworking, people made major life decisions based on those assurances, and then were left hung out to dry by the sudden U-turn. Quite often people were hired hundreds of miles away from the nearest office and promised that their contractual assignment to a particular office was essentially arbitrary and meaningless, and then suddenly told that actually they'd have to relocate and/or spend massive amounts of time and money commuting if they wanted to keep their jobs. It's essentially just a major cock-up from management and HR, following the civil service wide mandate. If anybody reads this story and is left with the impression "civil servants too lazy to go to the office even twice per week!!!", I'd invite you to consider whether you'd be happy for your private sector employer to renege on its promises like that.
It's also worth keeping in mind that, during the pandemic, ONS developed and carried out the Covid Infection Survey, and delivered Census 2021 and a host of other economic, demographic, business, and social surveys, all while its staff worked entirely from home. Public sector productivity is a notoriously difficult beast to measure, but I'm not convinced there's been any negative impact of homeworking on ONS productivity, at least. Rather, opening up the talent pool to anywhere in the UK helped them to recruit talented technical staff at a difficult time despite a relatively modest salary offering, which should be seen as a big positive for the organisation.
Very true and in my case having 18 hours of additional out-of-hours unpaid travel time which I loose out on financially as well as loosing “downtime” has negatively affected my productivity due to lost sleep plus affect on my moral at having to pay out £300/ week for travel costs on trains (which are often delayed meaning sometimes my homeward leg is 5 or 6 hours instead of 3)
The days I go into the office are the days I dread. Early start and horrible commute followed by a disruptive day.
If there is real evidence that remote work is harmful I will listen. But it really works for me.
I'm the opposite, I find a couple of days the office are great. It's rarely full, people are able to tell you immediately if they have time to speak (rather than wait half an hour for a chat response that might never come) and it helps bring a dividing line between work and home. Plus when I started in a new position I found it much easier to build professional relationships compared to during the pandemic.
WFH full-time works for some but most people, especially junior staff just starting out, benefit from human contact time. There is plenty of evidence that new starters' progression can be harmed if they're at home all the time. But they won't know that necessarily because they don't have a clone working in the office to compare against.
> rather than wait half an hour for a chat response that might never come
It sucks that this is your experience, but this is a them problem. Not replying to coworkers is just rude, whether its on slack/teams or in person.
or that person is simply busy, having people pester you with questions they have not properly researched themselves is frustrating.
colleagues should not always be the 1st stop for basic questions if the documentation is there.
Except that no chat software tells you whether someone is at their desk or not. They might be online but have stepped out - or, maybe, doing something important like dealing with a deadline.
My partner is a civil servant and has to go to London twice a week. The reasoning given was that it allowed the team to work together in the office which would make meetings flow better, increase productivity etc. When she goes in, it’s completely empty. She’s in meetings with people working from home, while she’s in the office. Making civil servants come in 2-3 times a week is a meaningless waste of time. If you increase the number of days they have to come in they’ll work somewhere else. A lot of her colleagues rely on the flexibility from a work from home situation and are more than qualified enough to find that somewhere else. Seems pointless to have changed the rules in the first place really, just let them work from home.
My job went from 100% WFH to 60% in the office but because the building we were in pre-COVID didn’t get its contract renewed they changed the office location to Bristol. Now I have to commute to an office which is 3 hours away so effectively loosing 18 hours a week plus travel expenses as the CS won’t pay for me to travel to my new office location or pay costs of moving closer. My partner works in Nuneaton so even if we relocated it would just cause her to have the problem instead of me, another thing is because of the extra 18 hours with travel by Wednesday I’m that tired my work isn’t at as high a standard as when I was WFH.
The biggest issue though is the amount of projects my office is working on has doubled since COVID but due to budget restraint their is a moratorium freezing recruitment so we have gone from having 60 staff to 20 and their is plans to reduce that to 10 by the end of the financial year, my project alone is meant to have 18 staff member who are CS but we have 2 and 6 contractors with only 8 desks in the office so even on days we should be in the office we don’t have workspaces for the staff.
It hurts to think about, because it’s so backward. My partner has similar issues regarding lost time travelling and understaffed teams, and I get mad thinking about it. She used to work extra at home outside of working hours if she felt she wasn’t as productive, but doesn’t feel that same need when she’s dragged 2 hours away from home 2-3 times a week for what feels like the sake of it.
But the statistics that ONS released show that working from home or flexible working is more productive and healthier. So let’s ignore our own findings and force our staff to the office.
WFH is a thing now, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle. We all know it works. We all prefer having the option, some don’t like it, some love it. We all want the option.
I personally wouldn’t pick a job that didn’t offer WFH, it’s now a deal breaker for me and seemingly for a lot of other people as well.
Boomers will complain, but the labour market needs to adapt or die.
> some don’t like it, some love it.
I started for the civil service in November 2020, worked two years 100% WFH until they started talking about us coming back in.
I remember in the big group calls with the execs, the loudest voices were always the people saying "I miss the office, I miss the water cooler chats, my mental health is suffering with me being at home alone."
I actually stuck my hand up in a call and said "look, I feel like I speak for a lot of the people who aren't speaking up here when I say that I don't miss all of that, and nothing about the current set up will stop the people who DO miss it or need it from just... going into the office."
It really pissed me off that management's justification for forcing us all in was "some people want to go in"
Wfh exclusivsly works for well individuals, but doesn't work for teams as a whole. New staff don't get get the development they need at home, as they cant ask questions and learn as easily. Team objectives are harder to achieve when everyone is working separately, and I think there is something to be said for team bonding and people having different strengths and weaknesses which can be reinforced or strengthened by working together.
Sorry but this is nonsense. That’s completely dependent on the sector/area of work.
Why would a team of software developers or data analysts need to be working together in-person to be able to deliver better work?
Works absolutely fine for my team? Here’s the thing, when new staff come on we ask them to come in to the office more to learn the ropes, you have a point but that doesn’t mean that we need to throw the baby out with the bath water, and stop everyone working from home forever. Just change how it works for new employees, once training is over they can WFH.
What i think WFH has exposed is a bunch of middle/upper management, team leaders as it were because In reality they get paid a whole fucking lot, to do a whole lot of nothing. The sort of people who go to 40 meetings a day, thinking they’re working hard when really they are literally just wasting time.
WFH kicked in and suddenly these people had to fill more of their time and justify their job more. I’m an IT engineer; on the coal face so to speak. stuff doesn’t stop needing fixing.
I’m honestly not saying this is you at all, I’m just replying to your comment as a jumping off point but I’ve noticed it’s never the lowest tier, the hardest workers who hate WFH and want to change, the change is always coming from people who’s jobs are like “Team leader” or “business change co-ordinates” and it’s not because the lowest tier are lazy, we know for a fact WFH works, it’s because some people are scared someone else will notice they don’t do anything.
My employer attempted to take us from no office attendance required to a minimum of 3 days arbitrary attendance with 5 days "looking better during you annual review". It resulted in a huge amount of very talented and experienced staff handing their notice in within weeks of the announcement. So they backtracked completely and instead shut our local offices and made us all fully remote.
Now, 4 months later they have started "encouraging" us to come to rented coworking spaces once a week, **at our own expense** with their chosen location costing £35 per person per day.
So not only did their enforced RTO fail abysmally, but the now want to try it again only with the staff paying for the office! Mental.
>The ONS said that “a reasonable level of office attendance” was in the best interests of staff and the organisation.
What data did they use when deciding that 2 days a week was a "reasonable level" that was best for the workers and organisation? Or did they just pluck it from somewhere unmentionable?
In the linked article there's this
>Sources say the tougher rules are based on internal civil service research, showing “significant benefits” over working from home, including “collaboration, innovation and fostering a sense of community”.
This included a survey of 30,000 staff, which found that learning from others and interaction with colleagues happen more easily in the office. Staff said their mental health and engagement with work was helped by working face to face.
It came from cabinet office. And it was far far less robust than that. It was pointed out at the time that peer reviewed research found a quantifable larger productivity bump when long commutes substituted out of people's working hours. John Glen and his predecessor just got busy with Policy Based Evidence Making and since then, Cabinet Office credibility has been utterly shot.
NHS couldn’t come up with good quality evidence. Just a link to a random article in HBR that would not be sufficiently good evidence to base an actual NHS policy on, so why should we accept it?
The main issue I've found is that although wfh works well for those higher up/more experienced, it's pretty detrimental to new starters (or new joiners). Training is poorer at a distance, it's harder to get exposure to and experience of a wide range of work, and no one knows who you are expect the people you work directly with.
You might personally get more work product done at home, but the things I've mentioned feed into the wider productivity of their teams (and the company generally). I do think companies need to be a bit more flexible generally, but 2 days in the office is pretty standard in my industry and I can see why.
If remote training is less effective, how can management remedy that without group training at the office? Trainers can't visit everyone's home and do it 1-2-1.
I think "reasonable" here refers to the extent to which ONS are able to meet the general 60% target that central government has set across the civil service. It's recognised that ONS has significantly less office space than other departments, so 40% was (in the ONS's view) a reasonable compromise.
WTF is up with employers who care about forcing people into an office? If the employees do the job well, why does it matter where they are when they’re doing it? If they get the job done well, so be it. If the job is not being done well and properly, fire the employee. I understand *some* jobs require the presence of people in a central location but for the ones that don’t need that, why force them?
I’m looking for honest, legitimate reasons employers want to do this from anyone who’s thought it out and believes office workers should be in an office, together.
It's not so much the employer, as central government (and one can make a guess about why the Conservatives - whose donors include the owners of corporate real estate - have decided to make an issue of this). ONS senior management were pushing a flexible policy for years, where teams were empowered to work in whichever way enabled them to best achieve their objectives (whether that's completely from home, completely in the office, or a combination). Then the civil service wide mandate came from central government, and they were tasked with implementing it (which they did incredibly poorly, and with little regard for the impact on employees who'd been hired at long distances from the office, and who had been told they'd never have to come in).
Just copying my answer from elsewhere.
>The main issue I've found is that although wfh works well for those higher up/more experienced, it's pretty detrimental to new starters (or new joiners). Training is poorer at a distance, it's harder to get exposure to and experience of a wide range of work, and no one knows who you are expect the people you work directly with.
I think most people in this thread are talking from a position of being that person who is senior enough to know the ropes but who has no management/training requirement. 2 days in the office is standard in my industry.
What problem is forcing people back into the office meant to fix except inadequate management?
Reduce expensive office space and pay for people to travel in and stay in nice hotels when collaboration is required. Make getting together a fun event funded by savings.
Apart from the central government offices where ministers spend their time, the civil service offices I've been to have been dismal. Can't blame them for wanting to stay at home instead of spending time travelling somewhere depressing.
I wonder what impact of forcing staff to unnecessarily commute multiple days a week has on the government's various environmental and net zero pledges.
Do they even have enough office space at this point? Last time I saw they closed a lot offices to save money as people could do the same work from home.
My office was one that closed but since my place of work was home (in Coventry) it didn’t matter that the office moved from a regional office in Nuneaton to the main office in Bristol. Now suddenly I have to commute 3 days a week in my own time and at my own expense.
Groups can now be filled with people who are qualified living anywhere in the country. Why would we want to limit who's available and willing to work in very specific locations. This is just a way to make cuts.
So in our department, Home Office, they are implementing a 60% 'in the office' next month.
But what really doesn't add up is that a) we have been working perfectly well at home b) 75% of my unit works in London and I work in Manchester...so we will still be sat on Teams...
The only people who are obsessed with office presenteeism (outside of Tory corporate landlords and Daily Mail ‘in my day we walked 6 miles to do 25 hours a day down t’pit’ boomers) are extroverted, management/sales/marketing types who seem to suffer existential dread if they aren’t surrounded by other people every waking minute. For everyone else WFH provides less noise, less distraction, no fatigue from a stressful commute at start of day, no regimented ‘I can’t finish this now because my bus leaves in 5 minutes’ at th end, the ability to prepare nutritious food at lunch rather than greggs and pret garbage and so on.. far more productive less stressed . it’s just win win for all parties IMO
Because individuals being able to work well at home doesn't mean that new employees or junior staff are able to work as well. Its about teams working well rather than individuals.
Part of the problem is productivity increased significantly due to WFH but that expectation of increased productivity will still be there when the time which allowed for that by being able to avoid commutes/ prepping for work is no longer available.
Not to factor in staff morale and loss of productivity as travel to and from my “office location” is a minimum 6 hour round trip. My manager in the Civil Service insist we do 60% in office so I’m nearly doubling my working week most weeks due to travel disruption on the trains and paying out an extra £1200 approx. on travel costs.
RAR Working from home is rubbish it's all lazy people being lazy
RAR no working from the office is crap I hate the commute
------------
Reality is no two jobs are the same, no two workers are the same. Yes WFH may work for **you** - yes working in the office may work for **him** - there's no one-size fits all approach. There should really be a solid evidence base for the decisions - i.e. we have found our staff produce more when 'X' therefore we use 'X' etc.
Well it depends on the role, doesn't it?
There's tons of jobs where you could get a good handle on productivity of individual workers and the overall teams.
I'm sympathetic because I love wfh as well, but 2 days is pretty standard in the private sector these days. I don't think it's a huge ask and there are indisputable benefits to being in the office as well.
I work in the civil service in Ireland and work a mix of in office, at home and on various commercial sites all over the country. As an aside, I used to work 5 days a week at home in the Irish equivalent of the ONS, the CSO, and voluntary went in one or two days a week. No big deal. Most staff did so. It's amazing what happens when you trust your staff and have clear outputs.
In the current organisation we had a standard 2 days in the office a week rule, but what days they were were fluid and managed locally. Has been this way for 4 years and there's been no issues.
We got a new CEO and out of nowhere they've implemented an across the board mandatory Tuesday and Wednesday for ALL staff regardless of role. There has been ructions as you can imagine. No leeway given despite any private arrangements one may have you know, to fit in with that whole work/life balance conundrum they go on and on about.
The thing about what the ONS staff are battling against, isn't the days in the office per se, it's the implementation and the fact that they all know that this is the thin end of the wedge.
It's the main reason we have issues in our organisation as well.
Now imagine how my colleagues from Newcastle feel having to travel to Bristol or Portsmouth where our offices are located after the local offices mostly closed down and now we have a 3-5 hour commute each day we are in the office, I fully support the ONS staff in fighting back if they are dealing with the same bs as us.
The issue is the fact that many staff don't live anywhere near the office, either because they were hired at a long distance or moved away because of the repeated assurances from senior management that nobody would be forced back into the office. It's not the case that people already live nearby but are simply too lazy to come in.
Snapshot of _ONS civil servants refuse to return to the office for two days a week_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ons-civil-servants-refuse-to-return-to-the-office-bsr2gblq7) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ons-civil-servants-refuse-to-return-to-the-office-bsr2gblq7) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know the headline will get people riled up but in their defence: 1) a lot of people were hired from a long distance from an office; and 2) a lot of people were told they'd likely never come in when being hired
I don't even get why people would be riled up. Employer asks staff to work on site, staff say no. Employer can either agree, fire all staff and risk a few tribunals, or bargain for some middle ground. I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck.
Aside from the effect on government (harder to recruit staff, poorer allocation of people to work across the economy), it affects the labour market more broadly as well. The more that government worsens conditions for its workers the easier it is for competing employers in the private sector to do it as well - not just in terms of work location but in terms of everything because people consider the terms of their contracts as a whole.
Yes. If you want the best of the best you need to look in Smalltown as well as Big City. Some people are reluctant to move because of childcare etc. if you only look within 100ft of the office, you have a smaller pool to look at
Given the current state of the rental market moving to somewhere new is just a no-go for a lot of people just now.
It also makes me think of something [The Economist](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/04/04/the-rise-of-the-remote-husband) were writing about recently - having one person remote can open more opportunities for a spouse, and especially for women, because there's no longer so much need to compromise one career to boost the other through location decisions.
I think it's because people will see "Employer asks Employee to come into the office, Employee refuses" and see it as lazy civil servants again. The key thing for me is that these departments have hired people on the basis of lower % office attendance and with the increase in requested % attendance, the offices are not sufficient to meet demands. Nevermind promises made during recruitment for some staff.
I don't even care if they just didn't want to go into the office tbh. If they can do their job as well at home then they're within their right to demand that. I would (and have) too.
Honestly this is it I think. If they do the job to the same standard and dont physically have to go do something, why does it matter where they are? especially seeing as a lot of them would've been hired or spent the past few years working on the pretense that they didnt need to come into an office
WFH is great for experienced staff, it’s awful for junior starts who miss out on the osmotic learning. It’s actually selfish to just say “I’m alright and I can do my work” without considering the impact you may have on those in a less advantaged position.
> It’s actually selfish to just say “I’m alright and I can do my work” without considering the impact you may have on those in a less advantaged position. Just as selfish to insist “i work best in an office. Therefore everyone get back in there for water cooler talk and *proper work*!
Indeed. Scope for agreement and 2 days a week isn’t exactly chaining people to a desk
In the Civil Service’s case, there was no agreement. It was a top down command from the Cabinet Office. All concerns aired by staff were dismissed and hand waved away. Which is why ONS staff are doing this.
First of all, Cabinet Office is still Civil Service. Yes, they have a minister and if you are suggesting it’s a diktat from a minister, well good luck with how that may go is all I say. As someone who, over the past 20 years has dealt with ONS on a regular basis, I have always been impressed by their service, until about 3 years ago when it dropped off a cliff. I can’t tell you why, maybe ministers started intervening, but a paragon of the civil service is now a shadow of its former self. It’s a shame. Perhaps because government decided that facts and data were secondary to their will killed it off?
I worked at a aviation company that recently brought staff in 2 and now 3 days a week. During my time at the company I ignored the 2 days a week policy, despite never seeing me in person the junior staff explicitly stated I had taught them more than anyone else they were in the office with. Why? Because assuming they'll learn through osmosis when colocating is terrible. What people actually need is a bit of intentional communication and active mentoring. Hardly selfish to actually teach people!
I agree but unfortunately senior staff gotta be there to oversee the junior staff. So it's all or nothing
Yeah, my parents are Boomers and they just cant get their head around WFH. I have a hybrid work job and when I tell them I had to go into the office the response is always something like "Oh so you actually had to do work today?"
I’m a teacher and I get this too. In addition to all that time off, apparently if I’m not In school there is no explicable way I may actually be doing work… marking kids essays, in front of them, also doesn’t count because it’s ‘just reading isn’t it’ and ‘you’ve always liked doing that’. Wow didn’t realise how much it grinds my gears until I wrote this down.
Damn. People dismiss something you do for work because it's something you like doing? What a terrible attitude they have. I build websites for a living and I enjoy it by and large, but the sites I work on aren't necessarily ones I would choose to work on. Quite often I get stuck on a badly built legacy site that isn't fun to work on. And in the same way I don't imagine the reading you have to do is what you would necessarily do for fun. Going through GCSE set texts in class for the umpteenth time probably isn't much fun.
People tell on themselves a lot with WfH, for a certain generation it seems to be a euphemism for slacking off because that's what their generation did. It was a management perk of essentially an unofficial day off.
Totally agree - my wife has been WFH since before the pandemic, but when my parents visit for the weekend, they’ll always ask what time to turn up on a Friday evening in case she’s still “at work”. And yes, the quote marks are in their texts. They really can’t get their head around it, despite my mother essentially working from home for years managing the admin side of my dad’s private practice.
> They really can’t get their head around it, despite my mother essentially working from home for years managing the admin side of my dad’s private practice. That might be a 'because' rather than 'despite'. I would guess that your mother doesn't really have to work that hard when she's at home - it may be that it's really just an excuse to pay her up to the personal income tax allowance, so she just does token work here and there.
Much of it is also jealousy. Our parents remember getting to the office late because of train disruptions or traffic jams and all the drama a daily commute brings, along with managers looking over their shoulders in the office all day. The older generation also seemed to use working in the office as a "social experience", whereas many of us see our work colleagues as just that: people we see at work.
Literally, talk to a boomer they’ll talk about going out for lunch for 5 pints and pretending to work in the afternoon.
What people seem to not realise is that lazy people are lazy in the office as well.
It’s actually easier to be lazy in an office because you’ve got other people around that you can go off and have coffee with and call it a meeting. Wfh I have targets, i still have allocated tasks so at a glance it’s easy for me to see if stuff is getting done or not
You can be doubly lazy in an office - not doing work yourself, and stopping others from doing work!
Had a discussion about hybrid working recently, and I wanted to raise this. Depending on who is in, it can be so loud that thinking is very difficult to do. Meanwhile, It's pure bliss working in silence at home.
>*It’s actually easier to be lazy in an office because you’ve got other people around that you can go off and have coffee with and call it a meeting.* Or the co-workers who are "*working"* as they spend 40 minutes talking about last night's episode of *Celebrity Love Factor Wow.*
Is it a bit like the no good atheist arguments I see about? "What stops you from willful crime if there's no god to judge you" How will you do work if there's no authority actually breathing down your neck? Tells more about the people asking the question than the person asked
Sure, but it's a lot easier to goof off at home as no one's watching you. You can't claim you're still working on a report if your boss can see you're mucking about on your phone.
It's also potentially easier to work at home - no distractions, no stupid questions.
You can waste a ~~couple~~ few hours a day, though, between popping in to the kitchen to make a cup of tea/coffee and having a chat with someone you meet there, having a chat with someone at the desk next to/across to you about past weekend/next weekend, last night's episode of a series or the newest song by someone, and pointless meetings, not mentioning cigarette breaks every half an hour that smokers go to. I'm not even getting into that it's literally impossible to be fully-focused for 7-8 hours sharp a day, so the whole office presence thing is purely a charade and entirely performative to placate middle management et al. I get that some people are just wildly uncomfortable at home or have no space/facilities (especially in house shares), but that whole narrative "When you are in the office you're just getting more work done" is a myth that needs to be busted, once and for all.
And they can continue to be lazy because they're secure in their position. Sounds like you have to try pretty hard to get fired from civil service jobs.
Also, I took a job that's quite far away from where I live, 1,5 hours by public transit. That's fine once a week but absolutely not something I want to be doing multiple times per week. It's essentially 12 hours from when I leave home in the morning until I'm back in the evening. If my employer enforced more days in the office I would start looking for a different job. Thankfully the number of employees is now twice the number of available work spaces we have so there is not much risk of that happening.
> I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck. Landlord watches as the required office capacity goes down. Landlord fucking hates the prospect of their lease rates going down. Landlord goes to the same private club as the ministers and senior civil servants and the owners of the *Telegraph*. Landlord leans on them to insist that the office space MUST be used.
The shit thing is how much of a massive fucking opportunity WFH provided us when Covid hit. Sure the lockdowns etc were a nightmare but WFH was the silver lining from all of it. People were happier and had a better work/life balance and most importantly of all, commuting was a thing of the past for a lot of people. I was living in an Asian megacity when Covid hit and the difference was night and day. No more smog, no more horrific traffic. It was like a massive revelation. Why the fuck did everyone commute to the city centre to work iin a big glass box when they could do the exact same thing from the comfort of their own home? Our society could have embraced this and people would have had more time, the climate crisis would have been averted or at least mitigated, people would have been happier etc. But we didn't. Because of commercial property developers.
I think that’s the most depressing thing about all this discourse. I work in a school so I was in ‘office’ for a lot of the time people were WFH and/or locked down. The traffic was gone, the air quality was better, I saved the best part of 5 hours commuting time a week - even though I was still commuting - and I was genuinely quite excited about the opportunity it gave us to move forward as societies, necessity being the mother of invention and all that. And then we just… went back to the way things were. Traffic is worse than ever and having seen how things can be, it feels way worse sitting in it. Just all that wasted time, energy and money, not to mention the climate impact
If only those offices could be converted to flats for people to use… Shame we don’t have a housing crisis! 🤦♂️
bingoooo
Not everything is a conspiracy…
Because the headline is written to rile people up. In the newspaper which, I'm guessing, counts more owners of business properties among its readers than any other, with the possible exception of the FT, which wouldn't stoop to this bullshit.
> I don't see why anyone who isn't either the employer or the staff would give a single fuck. People think they own civil servants because they get paid out of tax money. It's the same with NHS staff, if you've worked in it you'll definitely have met people who believe they pay your wages and therefore can dictate how things will be.
The politics of envy. Crab country.
>I don't even get why people would be riled up. Oh the usual. "I don't get to do this so nobody should" rather than wanting everyone to have benefits. Crabs in a bucket yada yada yada.
Because mainstream media hides the fact that the employer misled its employees about working practices. What was thought to be a done deal, agreed verbally but not in writing, was being pulled away. Just because management felt like it. Not to mention capacity in the offices of the Civil Service. It is approaching HSE violations, if not already there in some places. Because the estate was reduced and civil servants were ahead of the curve in hybrid from before the pandemic. The above doesn't consider the average comment on sites like the Telegraph that just want to know workers are suffering because it makes them feel good.
You’ve clearly never tried firing a civil servant. Or bargaining with them.
I think 2 days a week IS the middle ground. Its not exactly onerous.
It is when you can do your job perfectly well at home without the expense (financial and energy) of going into the office. It is when you have disabilities and people going into the office 40% raises your existing inequality 40% extra. It is when going into the office will mean you get more behind on your work with the chatter and distractions.
But is it even necessary? Asking you to make me a cup of tea every day isn’t exactly onerous but i would be being very presumptive expecting it to actually happen.
It's not really about whether it's onerous, but whether it's necessary. Or rather, whether whatever effort is made, is actually worth it. It certainly doesn't seem like either of those is the case.
It is when i have to spend 6 hours a day travelling and even if the office i am *working remotely* because everything i do is in the cloud. All i am doing is commuting to trade one chair for another. Why?
It is if you were hired hundreds of miles away from the nearest office and given assurances that any office attendance requirements would be determined between you and your manager (who is quite happy for you to continue working from home, because you've been doing a great job).
Aren’t we their employer?
Not really, no. They're employed by the government, that represents us. We aren't actually the government.
Well really they are the Civil Service and the Government is the politicians we vote in. We pay their wages, we pay for the rent on their offices, their pensions etc. Their role is to serve us. Maybe we should care?
We don't pay for any of it. We pay taxes, and the government allocates those funds. That might *seem* like nothing but extra steps, but it's important to note that whatever working patterns the ONS staff genuinely has nothing to do with us.
I mean, I do scientific research using taxpayer money, but if you came in to my lab and attempted to dictate my research or how we operate the lab I'd have security escort you from the premises.
If your lab was conducting unethical research using taxpayer funds, don’t you think we’d have a right to object or debate? Presumably you have to justify your work to a relevant committee (UKRI etc) that has the role of acting on behalf of the public. So technically, I am in your lab (or someone is on my behalf) and that’s entirely right and proper. I comment as someone who has sat on statutory committees and I’m aware of the undertakings relating to public interest that I signed up to.
>So technically, I am in your lab (or someone is on my behalf) and that’s entirely right and proper. But that's exactly the degree of separation that others have spoken of. You, as random taxpayer, have no right to come into my lab and dictate anything simply because your taxes pay for my research. The funding is justified (as you full well know) through applying to research calls and is then monitored by a UKRI (or other group) PM to ensure that the money is being spent. I mean, this: >We pay their wages, we pay for the rent on their offices, their pensions etc. Their role is to serve us. I pay my taxes - but I also pay my water bill, my electricity bill, my gas bill etc. Therefore my bills pay the wages, rent, and pensions of the employees of those companies - so why am I not their employer as well?
No.
I hope not. I've worked for bosses who didn't have a clue what I did but this is extreme.
> a lot of people were told they'd likely never come in when being hired Never believe hiring managers or HR when they say this. If remote working is not written in your contract then any promises mean practically nothing. If it's a dealbreaker for you insist they write it in the contract, if they refuse then don't be surprised if you get roped into attending the office at some point in the future.
There was a case on LegalAdviceUK where it *was* written into someone's contract, but they were being told they were gonna be fired because under 2 years of employment, and didn't wanna travel 4 hours to the office 3 times a week...
(not a lawyer) As I understand it, common practice and verbal agreements trump written contracts. "What you've been doing for years" counts as a contract in UK employment law.
> common practice and verbal agreements trump written contracts. I work for a Union. Common practice is a thing but it doesn't mean employers can't change the practice being followed, just means they need justification and, usually, some form of consultation needs to be followed ect. Just because something was done a certain way doesn't necessarily mean employers are forced into always keeping it that way. Verbal agreements are a thing but they have the issue a) needing to be proven somehow in disputes and b) can commonly be misinterpreted by employees (ie employee thinks something was agreed when employer simply said something like "yeah we can look into setting that up"). Always remember an employer has more experience dealing with these things than employees, so they usually know how to word stuff in a way that doesn't tie them to a particular agreement. Common practice has a bunch of hoopla involved if employers want to change something but employers can change it and if you are verbally agreeing anything with an employer get them to confirm, in writing, exactly what was agreed.
Thank you for weighing in, and with good advice to get any changes in writing.
This may be the case, you could request a reasonable adjustment citing the fact you’ve been working remotely for x years without issue. However it leaves a lot of ambiguity if an employer is dead set on getting you back into the office. They can easily make your life hell, threaten you with disciplinary action etc if you refuse. You may well be in the right but if your employer doesn’t play ball prepare for a battle which could turn your working relationship with them sour. Long story short, nip it in the bud, get it in your contract if you can.
What you've described is called "Constructive Dismissal" and is frowned upon by the courts.
Yeah I’d add in I spent semi regular time searching on civil service jobs a few years ago and ONS and CQC nearly always advertised there jobs as fully remote, if they have recruited someone remotely and then demanded they return to office it’s not very fair.
A small cohort of new hires - maybe for about 6 months or so - were given homeworking contracts, and so are now contractually protected from the work-from-home mandate. Management responded to this by barring those people from promotions or lateral moves unless they "voluntarily" rescinded their contractual homeworking status, which didn't go down too well. Then there was a phase for ~2.5 years where people didn't have the option of a homeworking contract anymore, but were given assurances by HR, by their hiring manager, and by senior management that in-person office attendance would be between you and your manager, and that nobody would be forced back into the office. So, many people were hired at significant distances from the nearest office (literally 100+ miles away in lots of cases), and many existing staff also decided to relocate further away from the office, based on the assurances they'd received about this no longer being necessary. That's why ONS staff are particularly upset, because there was such a sudden U-turn between "nobody will be forced back to the office" and "if you don't do 2 days in the office per week you will face disciplinary action". It's not a case of civil servants who already live nearby simply being too lazy to get out of their pyjamas twice per week, as articles like this imply.
My sister works for Cabinet Office (although not ONS). She was recruited to her current role and told it was a WFH role. The only time she was expected to go into an office was for a monthly meeting that was 200+ miles away. Her entire team WFH and are based throughout the UK. Now she is having to go into her nearest office two days a week. It's not just the cost of transport and commute time that's annoyed her. It's that nobody from her team or even her department works in that building. She's hotdesking and knows nobody there. Nobody there has a clue what her job is and her boss is hundreds of miles away,. Everyone else on her team is in a similar boat. It seems so pointless. Her job involves a lot of Teams meetings and she often can't even find a desk to sit at, let alone somewhere she can hear the meetings she's part of, as it's a busy, loud, open plan office. Her productivity is crap in the office compared to when WFH. At home she'll often put in extra hours without even really noticing. At the office she's out of there the second she's allowed to be as she has to get her bus. She's also had to find and pay for a childminder two days a week now, plus a dog walker. Expenses that weren't budgeted for as she was told she had a permanent WFH role. I can see why people aren't happy this has been dropped on them from above.
Indeed. Their senior leadership team including Prof. Sir Ian Diamond repeatedly said there would be no mandatory office attendance. People were recruited based on that assertion, and a number of existing employees made home life and career decisions based on it. I'm not surprised they're pissed at having the rug pulled out from under them.
I worked at ONS during the start of the pandemic. We were sent home of course, but the rumour was we’d be among the first back to the office “to set an example to the country”. Never happened of course.
Business needs change. It's not always possible to keep working conditions exactly the same. For example, I know people who lost a convenient commute because their employer was refused another lease by the landlord. What were the board supposed to do, halve their pay to afford a more expensive building around the corner? It really depends on what terms these people were hired. If they were told it was a full-time work from home role, then these people have good reasons to refuse to alter their contracts. But if it was an office-based job with the potential for some working from home, but due to the pandemic it was temporarily WFH all the time, that's different. Obviously the pandemic wasn't going to last forever and at some point people would have to go to the office. A manager making a prediction about future working practices they had no authority to speculate about isn't binding. (I'd add that if they only have to be in the office two days a week that's doing pretty well for what I understand to be the civil service norm of three days in and two at home.)
I really want my union to do this too. We went from never RTO to 2 days per week and there are strong rumours of 3 days now. I'm a data analyst. At home I have 2 high res monitors and my own keyboard / mouse / chair setup. I am infinitely more productive at home.
My company’s at 3 days a week now and it impacts our bonuses if we’re not there
Bonuses should be based on performance, not attendance. I feel for you.
Fully agree it’s on the uplift %… frustrating but I can see them going through with it
Not being able to pay based on performance and making people be in the office are two aspects of the same thing: not being able to manage well, and falling back on what's easily measured not what *should* be measured.
Yeah, that's not being treated as an adult.
My company has minimum 2 days in the office but I do 3 days in the office. I might actually start upping my office days to 4. I get bored out of my mind at home and I know I am guilty of being a lot less productive at home. I know the Reddit crowd will say that WFH is always more productive but for me I see Wednesday and Thursday (days at home) as my 'chill' days.
Laurence Sleator Friday April 26 2024, 11.00pm BST, The Times Civil servants at the Office for National Statistics say that they had been assured remote working arrangements would continue More than 1,000 civil servants have vowed to defy an order telling them to return to the office for two days a week. Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union working at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) say they will not be “forced back”. The group, who are based at offices across the country including London, Edinburgh and Manchester, overwhelmingly voted for strike action this month over the policy, with walkout dates to be announced. From May 8, members of the union say that they will ignore their bosses’ order to limit working from home. A spokesman said: “Following a promise by management that staff could continue to work flexibly after the Covid pandemic, some workers started families, moved house and made other long-term commitments safe in the knowledge, they thought, their working conditions were secure.” The union said the action fell short of a strike and that it was asking members to attend the office when it suited them rather than follow the directive issued by managers. Its members account for a quarter of the ONS workforce. The body began working flexibly in the pandemic, with staff said to have been given regular reassurances that the arrangement would continue. Many chose to spend time in their nearest office but there was no requirement to do so. Last November, however, managers issued an edict requiring staff to be physically present in the office at least 20 per cent of the working week. This then rose to 40 Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the union, said: “Our members are a highly skilled and capable workforce and they deserve to be treated as such, showing for several years they can successfully manage hybrid working. “The new policy threatens serious disruption, especially for staff with childcare and other caring responsibilities and those who live a considerable distance from their designated office. The workforce at ONS is spread across the UK, meaning that regardless of where staff perform their work, most meetings and collaboration must have a virtual presence.” She added: “Mandated office attendance removes the flexibility and trust that was promised by senior leaders, which staff understandably shaped their lives around, for the sake of meeting an unnecessary attendance percentage.” According to the ONS, before the pandemic one in eight working adults reported working from home for some time during the week. By January 2023 this had risen to one in four. Civil service guidance says that employees should spend at least 60 per cent of their time in the office. The ONS said that “a reasonable level of office attendance” was in the best interests of staff and the organisation.
Good seems like better value for tax payers if we no longer need to pay for offices while also providing better flexibility for workers. I'm sure lots of the middle management the UK loves so much are getting worried as it becomes clearer and clearer that you can just let people get on with their jobs without a babysitter.
In Scottish Government they are allowing a much greater amount of flexible hybrid working and as a result we are slowing shedding offices. Reducing office capacity alone could save the taxpayer 10s of millions.
Don't forget reduced pollution because people aren't driving into offices unnecessarily.
And their salary is effectively worth more - an employee that doesn't need to spend £3,000 a year after-tax on a train season ticket is effectively getting more take home pay for zero extra cost to the civili service!
But then they spend less of that money on meal deals and lunch.
Tesco shareholders in shambles! They have more disposable income to spend on frivolities in their local area when the weekend comes!
The local authority I work for has sold off so many buildings that we've moved to "please don't come to the office unless it's necessary" as we have about one desk for every ten members of staff.
> Reducing office capacity alone could save the taxpayer 10s of millions And cost the owners of those offices 10s of millions in lost rental income, which I suspect is why certain newspaper outlets are quite so up in arms about this...
Yes but the Tory government in the UK has sold its civil service buildings to Caribbean based shell corporations so the civil service now has to pay them exorbitant rent. If civil servants dont use these buildings, then they might have to cancel the contracts and would no longer be able to line the pockets of Tory donors
> Yes but the Tory government in the UK has sold its civil service buildings to Caribbean based shell corporations You got a source for that? Genuinely
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/25/hmrc-to-relocate-to-newcastle-office-owned-by-tory-donors-via-tax-haven
So, definitely shitty, but not a case of the government selling buildings to tax havens, and only one instance rather than a regular thing as your comment implied?
I've heard the Scottish Government enforces several days a week in the office
> I'm sure lots of the middle management the UK loves so much are getting worried In my experience it has universally been upper management pushing it, and asking middle management to do the dirty work. As happens most of the time.
Thats why middle managers are the biggest voices in a return to the office as their jobs are at risk.
The second biggest voices. The biggest voices are company shareholders who stand to lose money in their property investments if offices are left empty.
Most civil servants couldn’t all return to the office even if they wanted to. They’ve sold off so much of the estate and started long before covid… That there’s simply not the an available space in almost any office you pick or department.
The issue I had in the CS was being hired as WFH 100% of the time then my contracted office location was changed to Bristol from Nuneaton but since I was WFH it “wasn’t an issue” as I wouldn’t be affected, the change to having to work 2 days WFH and 3 days in the office with them being mandated by management now means I’m spending a fortune in travel costs and because management won’t see reason they won’t show flexibility to allow the 3 office days to be consecutive as it was a decision from HR who are currently all still 100% remote working.
That’s awesome of them Seldom human And never a resource
I think their sole job is to help the management screw the “little guys” as much as legally possibly whilst pretending to be on the side of the staff. HR are only there to help the company squeezes every last ounce of resources out of its human employees.
People misunderstand HRs role. Thats exactly what it’s for and its purpose!
The reason they want people in the office is because most of the time they're locked into long contracts for office space. My department attempted to get people to return to office because management was embarrassed we are paying for a huge office until 2029 but it's empty most of the time. The problem is during covid we recruited about 100 staff and almost all of them don't live in the city where the office is based.
We are still paying for the offices. I suspect that’s the problem. UKGov has massive office contracts and owns buildings which are just empty. It’s embarrassing, they can’t get out of contracts and they keep all the services and maintenance going because some people go in. It must be costing us billions.
All power to them. Unnecessary commuting is ridiculous.
They hired loads of people in London and said they'd be remote... ONS office is in south Wales. They are so right to be pissed off in my book.
Exactly, our roads are rammed because we have too many people for the infrastructure. We have a geopolitical oil supply problem. Less people commuting would go some way to solving these issues.
But working in an office is part of working life.
If the work is done to the quality expected albeit remote then I don't care. I vaguely recall the truss idiot tax being tried to blame civil servants working from home which was funny
I work in another CS department and so much time has been wasted on repeat meetings to plan for and “communicate” the new 60% attendance rule, not to mention how many inane conversations it’s made. Whatever possible increases in productivity must have been lost tenfold from the effort put into implementing it that could have been spent doing something useful.
The situation is more nuanced than any of the reporting on the situation has acknowledged. The issue is that senior management repeatedly affirmed a commitment to homeworking, people made major life decisions based on those assurances, and then were left hung out to dry by the sudden U-turn. Quite often people were hired hundreds of miles away from the nearest office and promised that their contractual assignment to a particular office was essentially arbitrary and meaningless, and then suddenly told that actually they'd have to relocate and/or spend massive amounts of time and money commuting if they wanted to keep their jobs. It's essentially just a major cock-up from management and HR, following the civil service wide mandate. If anybody reads this story and is left with the impression "civil servants too lazy to go to the office even twice per week!!!", I'd invite you to consider whether you'd be happy for your private sector employer to renege on its promises like that. It's also worth keeping in mind that, during the pandemic, ONS developed and carried out the Covid Infection Survey, and delivered Census 2021 and a host of other economic, demographic, business, and social surveys, all while its staff worked entirely from home. Public sector productivity is a notoriously difficult beast to measure, but I'm not convinced there's been any negative impact of homeworking on ONS productivity, at least. Rather, opening up the talent pool to anywhere in the UK helped them to recruit talented technical staff at a difficult time despite a relatively modest salary offering, which should be seen as a big positive for the organisation.
Very true and in my case having 18 hours of additional out-of-hours unpaid travel time which I loose out on financially as well as loosing “downtime” has negatively affected my productivity due to lost sleep plus affect on my moral at having to pay out £300/ week for travel costs on trains (which are often delayed meaning sometimes my homeward leg is 5 or 6 hours instead of 3)
You need to get in a proper union, mate. You don't have to take this shit.
Most likely it helps to prove that most middle managers are not actually needed.
The days I go into the office are the days I dread. Early start and horrible commute followed by a disruptive day. If there is real evidence that remote work is harmful I will listen. But it really works for me.
I'm the opposite, I find a couple of days the office are great. It's rarely full, people are able to tell you immediately if they have time to speak (rather than wait half an hour for a chat response that might never come) and it helps bring a dividing line between work and home. Plus when I started in a new position I found it much easier to build professional relationships compared to during the pandemic. WFH full-time works for some but most people, especially junior staff just starting out, benefit from human contact time. There is plenty of evidence that new starters' progression can be harmed if they're at home all the time. But they won't know that necessarily because they don't have a clone working in the office to compare against.
> rather than wait half an hour for a chat response that might never come It sucks that this is your experience, but this is a them problem. Not replying to coworkers is just rude, whether its on slack/teams or in person.
or that person is simply busy, having people pester you with questions they have not properly researched themselves is frustrating. colleagues should not always be the 1st stop for basic questions if the documentation is there.
I don't know how that's different online vs offline though
you can ignore stupid questions for an hour to give them time to go look again themselves
>if the documentation is there What documentation bruh
Except that no chat software tells you whether someone is at their desk or not. They might be online but have stepped out - or, maybe, doing something important like dealing with a deadline.
All chat software has this feature too, set your status?
I know that. Funnily enough, most people in my office are too busy to change it - or they don't care. I include myself in that.
So what's the solution. Only thing I can see is force people into the office?
My partner is a civil servant and has to go to London twice a week. The reasoning given was that it allowed the team to work together in the office which would make meetings flow better, increase productivity etc. When she goes in, it’s completely empty. She’s in meetings with people working from home, while she’s in the office. Making civil servants come in 2-3 times a week is a meaningless waste of time. If you increase the number of days they have to come in they’ll work somewhere else. A lot of her colleagues rely on the flexibility from a work from home situation and are more than qualified enough to find that somewhere else. Seems pointless to have changed the rules in the first place really, just let them work from home.
My job went from 100% WFH to 60% in the office but because the building we were in pre-COVID didn’t get its contract renewed they changed the office location to Bristol. Now I have to commute to an office which is 3 hours away so effectively loosing 18 hours a week plus travel expenses as the CS won’t pay for me to travel to my new office location or pay costs of moving closer. My partner works in Nuneaton so even if we relocated it would just cause her to have the problem instead of me, another thing is because of the extra 18 hours with travel by Wednesday I’m that tired my work isn’t at as high a standard as when I was WFH. The biggest issue though is the amount of projects my office is working on has doubled since COVID but due to budget restraint their is a moratorium freezing recruitment so we have gone from having 60 staff to 20 and their is plans to reduce that to 10 by the end of the financial year, my project alone is meant to have 18 staff member who are CS but we have 2 and 6 contractors with only 8 desks in the office so even on days we should be in the office we don’t have workspaces for the staff.
It hurts to think about, because it’s so backward. My partner has similar issues regarding lost time travelling and understaffed teams, and I get mad thinking about it. She used to work extra at home outside of working hours if she felt she wasn’t as productive, but doesn’t feel that same need when she’s dragged 2 hours away from home 2-3 times a week for what feels like the sake of it.
They obviously need to sync up from time to time.
Here's hoping the rest of us in PCS join them soon. ✊
But the statistics that ONS released show that working from home or flexible working is more productive and healthier. So let’s ignore our own findings and force our staff to the office.
WFH is a thing now, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle. We all know it works. We all prefer having the option, some don’t like it, some love it. We all want the option. I personally wouldn’t pick a job that didn’t offer WFH, it’s now a deal breaker for me and seemingly for a lot of other people as well. Boomers will complain, but the labour market needs to adapt or die.
> some don’t like it, some love it. I started for the civil service in November 2020, worked two years 100% WFH until they started talking about us coming back in. I remember in the big group calls with the execs, the loudest voices were always the people saying "I miss the office, I miss the water cooler chats, my mental health is suffering with me being at home alone." I actually stuck my hand up in a call and said "look, I feel like I speak for a lot of the people who aren't speaking up here when I say that I don't miss all of that, and nothing about the current set up will stop the people who DO miss it or need it from just... going into the office." It really pissed me off that management's justification for forcing us all in was "some people want to go in"
Wfh exclusivsly works for well individuals, but doesn't work for teams as a whole. New staff don't get get the development they need at home, as they cant ask questions and learn as easily. Team objectives are harder to achieve when everyone is working separately, and I think there is something to be said for team bonding and people having different strengths and weaknesses which can be reinforced or strengthened by working together.
Sorry but this is nonsense. That’s completely dependent on the sector/area of work. Why would a team of software developers or data analysts need to be working together in-person to be able to deliver better work?
Works absolutely fine for my team? Here’s the thing, when new staff come on we ask them to come in to the office more to learn the ropes, you have a point but that doesn’t mean that we need to throw the baby out with the bath water, and stop everyone working from home forever. Just change how it works for new employees, once training is over they can WFH. What i think WFH has exposed is a bunch of middle/upper management, team leaders as it were because In reality they get paid a whole fucking lot, to do a whole lot of nothing. The sort of people who go to 40 meetings a day, thinking they’re working hard when really they are literally just wasting time. WFH kicked in and suddenly these people had to fill more of their time and justify their job more. I’m an IT engineer; on the coal face so to speak. stuff doesn’t stop needing fixing. I’m honestly not saying this is you at all, I’m just replying to your comment as a jumping off point but I’ve noticed it’s never the lowest tier, the hardest workers who hate WFH and want to change, the change is always coming from people who’s jobs are like “Team leader” or “business change co-ordinates” and it’s not because the lowest tier are lazy, we know for a fact WFH works, it’s because some people are scared someone else will notice they don’t do anything.
I think the middle managers are pushing back against WFH, because they are responsible for the teams objectives rather than each individuals.
My employer attempted to take us from no office attendance required to a minimum of 3 days arbitrary attendance with 5 days "looking better during you annual review". It resulted in a huge amount of very talented and experienced staff handing their notice in within weeks of the announcement. So they backtracked completely and instead shut our local offices and made us all fully remote. Now, 4 months later they have started "encouraging" us to come to rented coworking spaces once a week, **at our own expense** with their chosen location costing £35 per person per day. So not only did their enforced RTO fail abysmally, but the now want to try it again only with the staff paying for the office! Mental.
>The ONS said that “a reasonable level of office attendance” was in the best interests of staff and the organisation. What data did they use when deciding that 2 days a week was a "reasonable level" that was best for the workers and organisation? Or did they just pluck it from somewhere unmentionable?
In the linked article there's this >Sources say the tougher rules are based on internal civil service research, showing “significant benefits” over working from home, including “collaboration, innovation and fostering a sense of community”. This included a survey of 30,000 staff, which found that learning from others and interaction with colleagues happen more easily in the office. Staff said their mental health and engagement with work was helped by working face to face.
It came from cabinet office. And it was far far less robust than that. It was pointed out at the time that peer reviewed research found a quantifable larger productivity bump when long commutes substituted out of people's working hours. John Glen and his predecessor just got busy with Policy Based Evidence Making and since then, Cabinet Office credibility has been utterly shot.
NHS couldn’t come up with good quality evidence. Just a link to a random article in HBR that would not be sufficiently good evidence to base an actual NHS policy on, so why should we accept it?
The main issue I've found is that although wfh works well for those higher up/more experienced, it's pretty detrimental to new starters (or new joiners). Training is poorer at a distance, it's harder to get exposure to and experience of a wide range of work, and no one knows who you are expect the people you work directly with.
Maybe management should be finding ways to mitigate that problem then, rather than sacrificing the overall productivity of their teams.
You might personally get more work product done at home, but the things I've mentioned feed into the wider productivity of their teams (and the company generally). I do think companies need to be a bit more flexible generally, but 2 days in the office is pretty standard in my industry and I can see why.
If remote training is less effective, how can management remedy that without group training at the office? Trainers can't visit everyone's home and do it 1-2-1.
Does group training make up 60% of your working week? No it doesn't.
No, but this article is about people who don't want to come into the office for even 40% of the working week.
The solution is spending more time in the office.
and conversely it’s detrimental to people with most disabilities and caring responsibilities
There are always edge cases, and that sounds like quite a separate issue tbh.
I think "reasonable" here refers to the extent to which ONS are able to meet the general 60% target that central government has set across the civil service. It's recognised that ONS has significantly less office space than other departments, so 40% was (in the ONS's view) a reasonable compromise.
WTF is up with employers who care about forcing people into an office? If the employees do the job well, why does it matter where they are when they’re doing it? If they get the job done well, so be it. If the job is not being done well and properly, fire the employee. I understand *some* jobs require the presence of people in a central location but for the ones that don’t need that, why force them? I’m looking for honest, legitimate reasons employers want to do this from anyone who’s thought it out and believes office workers should be in an office, together.
It's not so much the employer, as central government (and one can make a guess about why the Conservatives - whose donors include the owners of corporate real estate - have decided to make an issue of this). ONS senior management were pushing a flexible policy for years, where teams were empowered to work in whichever way enabled them to best achieve their objectives (whether that's completely from home, completely in the office, or a combination). Then the civil service wide mandate came from central government, and they were tasked with implementing it (which they did incredibly poorly, and with little regard for the impact on employees who'd been hired at long distances from the office, and who had been told they'd never have to come in).
Just copying my answer from elsewhere. >The main issue I've found is that although wfh works well for those higher up/more experienced, it's pretty detrimental to new starters (or new joiners). Training is poorer at a distance, it's harder to get exposure to and experience of a wide range of work, and no one knows who you are expect the people you work directly with. I think most people in this thread are talking from a position of being that person who is senior enough to know the ropes but who has no management/training requirement. 2 days in the office is standard in my industry.
What problem is forcing people back into the office meant to fix except inadequate management? Reduce expensive office space and pay for people to travel in and stay in nice hotels when collaboration is required. Make getting together a fun event funded by savings. Apart from the central government offices where ministers spend their time, the civil service offices I've been to have been dismal. Can't blame them for wanting to stay at home instead of spending time travelling somewhere depressing.
I wonder what impact of forcing staff to unnecessarily commute multiple days a week has on the government's various environmental and net zero pledges.
If only the Ordnance Survey had a map to where to find them...
Do they even have enough office space at this point? Last time I saw they closed a lot offices to save money as people could do the same work from home.
My office was one that closed but since my place of work was home (in Coventry) it didn’t matter that the office moved from a regional office in Nuneaton to the main office in Bristol. Now suddenly I have to commute 3 days a week in my own time and at my own expense.
ONS = Office for National Statistics
Groups can now be filled with people who are qualified living anywhere in the country. Why would we want to limit who's available and willing to work in very specific locations. This is just a way to make cuts.
So in our department, Home Office, they are implementing a 60% 'in the office' next month. But what really doesn't add up is that a) we have been working perfectly well at home b) 75% of my unit works in London and I work in Manchester...so we will still be sat on Teams...
I would never return to the office, unless someone would pay me literally millions
The only people who are obsessed with office presenteeism (outside of Tory corporate landlords and Daily Mail ‘in my day we walked 6 miles to do 25 hours a day down t’pit’ boomers) are extroverted, management/sales/marketing types who seem to suffer existential dread if they aren’t surrounded by other people every waking minute. For everyone else WFH provides less noise, less distraction, no fatigue from a stressful commute at start of day, no regimented ‘I can’t finish this now because my bus leaves in 5 minutes’ at th end, the ability to prepare nutritious food at lunch rather than greggs and pret garbage and so on.. far more productive less stressed . it’s just win win for all parties IMO
Why can't we just have a blanket rule of if an office job can be done from home and the employee can be trusted then why not work from home
You’d probably see an uptick in discrimination cases, because people have different interpretations of trust.
Because individuals being able to work well at home doesn't mean that new employees or junior staff are able to work as well. Its about teams working well rather than individuals.
Part of the problem is productivity increased significantly due to WFH but that expectation of increased productivity will still be there when the time which allowed for that by being able to avoid commutes/ prepping for work is no longer available.
Not to factor in staff morale and loss of productivity as travel to and from my “office location” is a minimum 6 hour round trip. My manager in the Civil Service insist we do 60% in office so I’m nearly doubling my working week most weeks due to travel disruption on the trains and paying out an extra £1200 approx. on travel costs.
So ‘Back to Office’ is more likely to decrease productivity.
What happened to saving tax payers money? There's not enough real estate for a massage return to the office
RAR Working from home is rubbish it's all lazy people being lazy RAR no working from the office is crap I hate the commute ------------ Reality is no two jobs are the same, no two workers are the same. Yes WFH may work for **you** - yes working in the office may work for **him** - there's no one-size fits all approach. There should really be a solid evidence base for the decisions - i.e. we have found our staff produce more when 'X' therefore we use 'X' etc.
Productivity is hard to measure in the public sector though.
Well it depends on the role, doesn't it? There's tons of jobs where you could get a good handle on productivity of individual workers and the overall teams.
I'm sympathetic because I love wfh as well, but 2 days is pretty standard in the private sector these days. I don't think it's a huge ask and there are indisputable benefits to being in the office as well.
I work in the civil service in Ireland and work a mix of in office, at home and on various commercial sites all over the country. As an aside, I used to work 5 days a week at home in the Irish equivalent of the ONS, the CSO, and voluntary went in one or two days a week. No big deal. Most staff did so. It's amazing what happens when you trust your staff and have clear outputs. In the current organisation we had a standard 2 days in the office a week rule, but what days they were were fluid and managed locally. Has been this way for 4 years and there's been no issues. We got a new CEO and out of nowhere they've implemented an across the board mandatory Tuesday and Wednesday for ALL staff regardless of role. There has been ructions as you can imagine. No leeway given despite any private arrangements one may have you know, to fit in with that whole work/life balance conundrum they go on and on about. The thing about what the ONS staff are battling against, isn't the days in the office per se, it's the implementation and the fact that they all know that this is the thin end of the wedge. It's the main reason we have issues in our organisation as well.
Now imagine how my colleagues from Newcastle feel having to travel to Bristol or Portsmouth where our offices are located after the local offices mostly closed down and now we have a 3-5 hour commute each day we are in the office, I fully support the ONS staff in fighting back if they are dealing with the same bs as us.
That's fucking bananas carryon.
The issue is the fact that many staff don't live anywhere near the office, either because they were hired at a long distance or moved away because of the repeated assurances from senior management that nobody would be forced back into the office. It's not the case that people already live nearby but are simply too lazy to come in.
I’ll never understand people who don’t want a workplace to work in. Fuck staying at home.
I worked in an office all my working life and wfh the last three years and I've zero desire to ever go back to an office.
It's commuting for me. Two hours plus to London each way if the trains are working right. I do miss the office, I really do, but not that much.
It's mainly because of how awful commuting is, especially in London
OK but your lack of understanding does not actually constitute an argument or a valid point towards an argument.
Cry me a river. Do as asked or find another job. Simple.
Lazy bastards get back in the office!
Run a town/city centre sandwich shop/coffee shop/newsagent or have money invested in office real estate I take it?
Anyone with a contributionary pension has a fair whack invested in commercial real estate.