UK Bosses Try To Turn Back Clock On Hybrid Working (theguardian.com) 38
As UK workers face a tougher-than-usual January return to offices, many large employers, including Amazon, BT, PwC, and Santander, are enforcing stricter in-person attendance mandates. The Guardian reports: As of 1 January, BT is requiring its 50,000 office-based employees across the UK and several other countries to attend three days a week in what it calls a "three together, two wherever" approach. Workers at the telecoms company have been told that office entry and exit data will be used to monitor attendance. The accountancy firm PwC is also clamping down on remote working; the Spanish-owned bank Santander is formalizing attendance requirements for its 10,000 UK staff; the digital bank Starling has ordered staff back to the office more regularly; and the supermarket chain Asda has made a three-day office week compulsory for thousands of workers at its Leeds and Leicester sites. The international picture is similar. [...]
Multiple studies suggest that the future of work is flexible, with time split between the office and home or another location, in what has been called "the new normal" by the Office for National Statistics. The ONS found in its latest survey that hybrid was the standard pattern for more than a quarter (28%) of working adults in Great Britain in autumn 2024. At the same time, working entirely remotely had fallen since 2021, it found. One of the most frequently reported business reasons for hybrid working was "improved staff wellbeing," the ONS found, while those who worked from home saved an average of 56 minutes each day by dodging the commute.
UK staff have been slower to return to their desks after the pandemic than their counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US. London, in particular, has lagged behind other global cities including Paris and New York, according to recent research from the Centre for Cities thinktank, where workers spent on average 2.7 days a week in the office, attendance levels similar to Toronto and Sydney. It cited the cost, and average length of the commute in and around the UK capital as one of the main reasons for the trend. Despite this, there has been a "slow but steady increase in both attendance and desk use" in British offices, according to AWA, which tracked a 4% rise in attendance, from 29% to 33%, between July 2022 and September 2024. "Hybrid working is here, it's not going away," said Andrew Mawson, the founder of Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA), a workplace transformation consultancy. "Even though companies are trying to mandate, foolishly in my view, to have their people in the office on a certain number of days, the true reality of it is different."
Multiple studies suggest that the future of work is flexible, with time split between the office and home or another location, in what has been called "the new normal" by the Office for National Statistics. The ONS found in its latest survey that hybrid was the standard pattern for more than a quarter (28%) of working adults in Great Britain in autumn 2024. At the same time, working entirely remotely had fallen since 2021, it found. One of the most frequently reported business reasons for hybrid working was "improved staff wellbeing," the ONS found, while those who worked from home saved an average of 56 minutes each day by dodging the commute.
UK staff have been slower to return to their desks after the pandemic than their counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US. London, in particular, has lagged behind other global cities including Paris and New York, according to recent research from the Centre for Cities thinktank, where workers spent on average 2.7 days a week in the office, attendance levels similar to Toronto and Sydney. It cited the cost, and average length of the commute in and around the UK capital as one of the main reasons for the trend. Despite this, there has been a "slow but steady increase in both attendance and desk use" in British offices, according to AWA, which tracked a 4% rise in attendance, from 29% to 33%, between July 2022 and September 2024. "Hybrid working is here, it's not going away," said Andrew Mawson, the founder of Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA), a workplace transformation consultancy. "Even though companies are trying to mandate, foolishly in my view, to have their people in the office on a certain number of days, the true reality of it is different."
It's not like that everywhere (Score:1)
I currently work from home two days and from the office three days, but my bosses want me to change that to home four days and the office one day. Why? Insurance.
The rest of the staff are only required in the office one day per week, all on Thursday, and with me being all alone in the office on Wednesdays and Fridays it's considered to be an insurance risk.
Interesting experiment (Score:3)
Over the next few years we will see how companies WFH policies influence their success. Then presumably most companies will pick policies based on that. I have faith in businessâ(TM)s desire to maximize profit.
Re:Interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
An endless parade of fretting about being unable to judge the productivity of people they can't see(or trying to compensate for it by camping their direct reports' teams status indicator lest it flicker from green to idle for a moment); along with a bunch of thinkpieces from people who have closed doors and personal assistants to attenuate being in the office about how critical to spontaneous collaboration being in the office is.
This isn't to say that return to office isn't actually the strategy that shows better outcomes over the course of a decade, it might be, might not be, or might vary based on circumstance; but it has been a pretty dramatic reason to suspect that if they are right it's mostly by having the good fortune to be emotionally attached to the answer that turned out to be correct; not by reasoning their way to the correct conclusion(much less by a process with some degree of rigor to it).
Saying that businesses desire to maximize profit is sort of like saying that parents mostly want to raise non-shit children. It's not false; but it doesn't actually imply any particular expertise in doing so, or even in finding out how to gain expertise in doing so; and you'll see everything from radically child-led unschooling to basically paramilitary punishment camps trotted out as good-faith solutions to the same problem, with a lot of variations on winging it in between.
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Saying that businesses desire to maximize profit is sort of like saying that parents mostly want to raise non-shit children. It's not false; but it doesn't actually imply any particular expertise in doing so, or even in finding out how to gain expertise in doing so; and you'll see everything from radically child-led unschooling to basically paramilitary punishment camps trotted out as good-faith solutions to the same problem, with a lot of variations on winging it in between.
Exactly.
I don't fault bosses for doing a lot of managing by "gut" - a lot of factors are notoriously hard to measure. It would be nice if they were more honest about what they are doing though, even with themselves.
Re:Interesting experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
>camping their direct reports' teams status indicator lest it flicker from green to idle for a moment
Which is ridiculous. Very few jobs have you constantly moving a computer mouse or typing on the keyboard. Teams switches to 'away' all the time.
But as a nice buffer to that, the PHBs at my employer decided it was necessary to integrate the activity monitors of multiple systems including our scheduling system. The result is that we almost always show 'busy' regardless of what's actually happening. This makes management happy, so nobody mentions that it isn't working properly.
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Re:Interesting experiment (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the more striking details of the whole work from home/hybrid thing has been how apparently vibes-based and unsystematic a lot of (at least) the intermediate management layers are.
My experience is much more that this is all being pushed by senior leadership, the C suite, not middle managers. When I was in that game, all the middle management were grousing at each other about how incredibly stupid, annoying, objectively pointless, and in some cases dishonest and flat out unethical the RTO mandates were.
And that's coming from someone who was running an R&D group, something that often does benefit from in person work.
TL;DR: I'm taking the Shaggy defense. It wasn't me.
Saying that businesses desire to maximize profit is sort of like saying that parents mostly want to raise non-shit children. It's not false; but it doesn't actually imply any particular expertise in doing so, or even in finding out how to gain expertise in doing so; and you'll see everything from radically child-led unschooling to basically paramilitary punishment camps trotted out as good-faith solutions to the same problem, with a lot of variations on winging it in between.
Very well put!
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I think it all really comes back to two things: middle management needing employees in offices to justify their own existence and companies (probably middle management aga
Re:Interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the individual companies that are now restricting WFH have any of those, other than possibly in aggregate once the damage is done as you suggest, and certainly not in the planning part or they'd have waited a few more months. The UK is currently in the middle of an worse than normal flu season, norovirus is doing the rounds, and the latest covid variants are still around, meaning the NHS is already seeing above normal stress for the time. And yet you have CEOs mandating that people come back to the office in higher numbers right in the middle of all that so they can spread the germs around, rather than defer it to March/April when things have usually settled down.
So, what are employees to do if they're feeling a little unwell if they can't WFH and self-isolate at the same time anymore? Drag themselves into the office as mandated and spend the day coughing and spluttering to ensure as many of their colleages have the opportunity to experience whatever delightful symptoms they have, do the responsible thing and phone in sick to avoid exposing others, or, potentially, do both in that order as their condition worsens? Whatever the decision, as long as it doesn't include WFH and self-isolation it's going to maximise the impact on the company bottom line - a new "work to rule" tactic for the WFH generation, perhaps?
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About ten years ago I ran into someone who'd left our organisation and had a new job working for, I think, a big Pharma company. Their role required them to travel to sites one day a week, and the rest was work from home with online meetings, and a monthly get together/social in person.
She said it was amazing, and it all worked really well. I was sceptical, but when I thought about the nature of what she was doing, it seemed to make a lot of sense.
Of course Covid only came many years later, but I guess that
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It’s not just that some jobs require physical attendance; it’s that other jobs mean physically gathering the team is impossible. I work for a big tech company. My boss is in North Carolina, my team are in Seattle, Orlando, Munich and Devon, and I’m based in London. We all spend all our days on Teams calls with other people who are equally spread everywhere - Bengalaru, Paris, etc. There is absolutely zero value in going to the office, in fact negative value, as it just means more time when
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I quit my last job partly over RTO. Current one is fully WFH and I've only been to the office twice in four years.
Occasionally I get enquires and roles I might be interested in, but realistically they need to pay substantially more than they are offering to make commuting worth it, or be extremely interesting.
I see the same companies trying to find people month after month, year after year.
It's about control (Score:2)
Occasionally I get enquires and roles I might be interested in, but realistically they need to pay substantially more than they are offering to make commuting worth it, or be extremely interesting.
Don't bother. I took a role for significantly more if I worked from the office and thought it might be a good idea after being WFH for 3 years vs one for less where I could work from home %100. I was sincere and social and wished I took the job for less, kept the WFH going spent more time exercising or working on my own projects. It just wasn't worth the extra money and I class working from the office jobs as a stop gap until you find a fully remote role.
Work from office is as dead as company loyalty a
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I think you are right. The money would have to be setting me up for early retirement kind of thing to make it worth it.
S&P Best Two Years in 30 Years (Score:5, Interesting)
The S&P has had the best two years in a row at over 20% gains in over 30 years.
These same companies demand people come back to improve performance.
There is no doubt that many positions need some facetime, but 40+ hours a week of it in a dingy office with crappy food and a terrible commute? Smells like Ego to me.
--
Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way. - Chris Lowe
Re: S&P Best Two Years in 30 Years (Score:1)
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Agreeing with you on some face-time in the workplace. I have a very handy commute, so I go to the office 5 days a week since 2023.
But I actually enjoy the alone-time as much as the face-time here in the workplace. In my specific case, I have the alone-time I would have at home here at the workplace, but with the better facilities from the workplace. For me, best of both worlds.
Still, I do like face-time, as there is so much more communication between persons going on than just words in conversation/discussi
Re: S&P Best Two Years in 30 Years (Score:2)
Something like 60% off communication is non-verbal when you're communicating with someone in person.
People are missing out on a lot communicating just with text or not even bothering to turn on video in calls.
Re: S&P Best Two Years in 30 Years (Score:2)
Remote work is inconvenient to executives who are painted as completely redundant if they have no people around them to boss around.
Humans above profits (Score:5, Interesting)
Slavery, indebted servitude, having no safety standards, no minum wage, or 7 day work-weeks were great for profits too, or at least people thought so back in the day.
In the end the only thing that ends those things is legislation. You can see even today that narcisistic imbeciles like Jeff Bezos will always prioritize whatever suits him best over the wellbeing of his minions. I think the working from office has nothing to do with profits but is purely about control. Any boss that wants to end hybrid or flexible work is purely doing this because he gets a hardon from bossing people around and it's not quite the same over slack or google meet.
Just add a simple piece of legislation and end this nonsense.
Not really (Score:2)
Yes Jezz Bezos is probably a sociopath like most people in his position. But for certain jobs beyond the obvious (eg medics, customer facing) going into the office works better because being social apes we interact better face to face. A lot of people in tech - who frankly are on the spectrum so don't have the mental tools to comment on human interaction - think every job is like theirs, ie sitting in front of a PC all day and barely talking to anyone except during a Teams standup. Most peoples jobs are NOT
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So while going back to the office 5 days a week is probably unnecessary, SOME office attendance per week most definately is.
That's what hybrid is. I specifically said hybrid or flexible and didn't speak about remote work. I think full remote is a bit of a separate discussion but neither the post nor my comment are about that.
Not saying that I agree with your assessment that all the millions of tech workers are clearly autistic and remote work only works for them btw. Just it's a little different discussion.
If you require people in the office, turn off VPN (Score:2)
If it's really important that you are in the office, get rid of corporate VPN access. Workers would absolutely need to come to the office.
On the downside (for companies), they couldn't get people to do work after hours.
Pick one, I suppose.
Re: If you require people in the office, turn off (Score:2)
You are evil. I like it.
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There's an easy solution to that. Just turn on the VPN after hours only!
BT person here (Score:2, Informative)
I work for one of the companies named in the article, hence anon. This has been 'advice' for a couple of years but is now becoming 'policy'. The biggest problem is not about making people come in to the office, many of us are just fine about it where it makes sense and having 2 days of freedom to be in for deliveries etc is cool. No, it is that HR simply cannot answer questions about corner cases around this.
In typical BT fashion they wrote the FAQ before the 'policy' was announced but totally miss most of
Fear Of Change (Score:5, Insightful)
I happened to sign an employment contract exactly one day before the Covid-19 lockdown orders commenced. Before that I was a consultant to the same company and visited the office as needed. Once I was employed there for the next 19 months I never once went to the office.
Since then I never went to any office either at two subsequent jobs.
At first I was of the same mindset as the CEOs of those companies. We talked about it and both felt that there was "something missing." And it was definitely different from the way things were done for most of our lives. We declared ourselves "go to the office kind of guys" and resolved to return once there was no need to be remote.
But that never happened. What it really boiled down to was anxiety, not any actual loss of functionality. Sure, I couldn't wander over the the conference room to disrupt whatever was going on there or go barge into the next office and pee on the desk of the VP Sales on a conference call. But at home the coffee is much better and the chair is mine and much more comfortable and I am there if the wife needs something.
Over time, however, we adapt to the plusses and minuses and it becomes more natural. The "fear" recedes. You know how to get things done. I give more hours to the company now than if I were commuting.
Musk is of the view that most remote workers are slackers and pretending to work. He is probably right for a too-big percentage of them. I would submit if that is the case then get rid of those workers and hire those you can respect and trust. You need to train your managers how to do that. But he is in the grip of fear that he can't pace through corridors and glare at anyone who has a card game up on their monitor. A very strong control need and he is afraid to give it up either for himself or as delegated to managers.
One other thing has changed. The remote work tools -- video conferencing with screen share specifically -- are vastly better than they used to be. My current gig has all remote workers and occasionally we arrange F2F somewhere. Last one was in Las Vegas, which turns out to be less expensive than San Jose once you add up the air fares and room rentals. I got the engineers together to do a joint coding session and long story short is that even though we were in the same room we still ended up on Slack so we could see each other's screens, just as if we were trans-continental as usual. Of course it didn't work as well because the hotel's wifi service was getting hosed.
But the world has changed and fear of that is not productive.
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The social-butterflies and micro-managers are the ones that want RTO. The social people want to just float around, doing no work, and wasting everyone's times. Sure, I liked when Fred used to stop by and say hi on his way back from the break-room...but dammit man I'm trying to get work done. At the same time, in a different office, the boss is constantly checking in because he absolutely has to micro-manage everyone at every given moment.
I got into an industry that, to a degree already had remote work; but
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Yep, pretty much. Musk is a good example, because he is not even grown-up and sophisticated enough to pretend to be an adult (or a decent human being, at that).
I have been doing mostly WFH for about 22 years. These days it is less, because I mostly teach and that is in person. But it never was an issue. It really is anxiety and lack of sophistication in the management layers and there mostly at the top. Essentially fear of losing a type of control they never had. Slackers will slack, no matter where unless
Possible security issue changes things? (Score:2)
I think one factor that could change EVERYTHING is the possibility that some "state actor" hacker figures out how to break the encryption used by remote work software such as Cisco AnyConnect. If such a hack becomes successful, all heck breaks loose and work for home will end in very short order.
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Not really. Corporate networks are easier to attack than VPNs. Hence changes NOTHING. Makes for a nice strawman though.
WFO mandated - still 95% on line with at hoc WFH (Score:2)
My hardware/software company made us go to the office 100% after COViD hiatus. The argument was "team work". In practice, I have all my meetings and communication on-line still so I could be home and nobody would notice.
Software teams were very unhappy as they perceived it as "we do not care about (what you think about your) productivity". Hardware teams natively need to be at the office a lot so it was "don't care".
The norm is now "dont ask dont tell" where occasional (frequent) WFH are ok. Flexibility of
rent seeking literally (Score:2)
Remote by contract. (Score:2)
When I was recruited for a fully remote role the initial contract included boilerplate terms saying that I could be called to the office at any point for any reason. I responded with "which part of FULLY remote so you not get?". Luckily, I had enough leverage to force the company to remove these clauses before signing the contract. Now, they can't summon me to the office for any reason.