Would you leave your job if your employers didn't reopen your office soon?

[moochedit]

I had 3 months working at home last year (april, may and june) then spent rest of year back in office as normal but have been back at home again since the new year. Only a matter of time before i have to return to the office again (much as i like working at home). Even when working at home i had the odd day in the office. I wear a mask when there and don't really worry about it. It is a small company though. I think i would be more concerned in a larger organisation with hundreds of employees on site. Also my company has factory staff that can not work at home. Home working only works for office staff. I can do 90% of my job at home but i have had to visit the site for some tasks.

 

[StoneRoad]

sunak is a twat, and he's listening too much to ££££ / tory landlords & business owners / wotspyontheworkers / party donors again.

Yet others have differing views ! ...
Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere' - BBC News
and
'I can't see myself going back to a five-day week' - BBC News

.-\o/-.
Personally, I want & need to do much of my admin at home, away from the noise of a business involving a lot of noisy wood-working.
but I also need to be hands on with some of the actual work and for supervision ...

This is after spending much of my working life in office (library) based positions, in the rich tapestry of my career with some widely differing threads.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Best bit of wfh is lunch time. Give an office a decent kitchen I can make a proper meal in and I'm there fine, it's good to split work and home.

It's been a year of not having to live on dull sandwiches or emergency Tesco meal deals.

 

[NoXion]

They're apparently planning on getting rid of the desktop machines at my workplace, much to my chagrin because frankly I don't think the laptops are up to the task. I'm hoping that this is because they are intending to integrate WFH into our post-Covid schedules, and not because some overpaid wankstain of a technical consultant told them "Durrrrrr, laPtOpS gOoD!".

 

[BigMoaner]

Not to mention the fact that we are privileged enough to live in a nice spacious house with enough rooms/technology for everyone and enough money not to have to worry about heating bills etc. There are loads of people trying to work out of tiny shared houses, horrible atmospheres, noisy surroundings, using crap or unsuitable tech - undoubtedly some of them will want to be in a real work space.

Absolutely.

 

[nagapie]

I'm hoping my kids' dad gets to do some days wfh as it means he can actually help before and after school a bit more but this may not happen as he works for a Tory LEA . Funnily years ago he worked two days a week from home with no problem and then some dinosaurs took over the management and pretty much banned wfh.

 

[BigMoaner]

Best bit of wfh is lunch time. Give an office a decent kitchen I can make a proper meal in and I'm there fine, it's good to split work and home.

It's been a year of not having to live on dull sandwiches or emergency Tesco meal deals.

I read and kip in bed in my lunch break. Hot water bottle. Wondrous.

 

[BigMoaner]

They're apparently planning on getting rid of the desktop machines at my workplace, much to my chagrin because frankly I don't think the laptops are up to the task. I'm hoping that this is because they are intending to integrate WFH into our post-Covid schedules, and not because some overpaid wankstain of a technical consultant told them "Durrrrrr, laPtOpS gOoD!".

Hate the laptop slouch. Stating down at it all the time. Can't be healthy.

Also my body is turning to jelly from one my once lithe Greek god turn out

 

[prunus]

Haha fuck no fuck off Sunak and your shares in Pret*. I'd be more likely to leave my job if my employer insisted we went back to full time office work, having shown for a year that we function perfectly well and with better life satisfaction without it (they won't - they ditched the office lease last December).

* Yes I know they're owned by McDonalds but whatever.

 

[strung out]

I'd be more likely to quit my job if I was told to work from home permanently, than if I had to work at the office permanently.

I like the people I work with, appreciate being able to grab chats at people's desks or in the kitchen, and enjoy having the option to buy lunch at a cafe rather than having to make it myself. I love my wife and my cat, but I'm ready to be back in the office at least some of the time now.

 

[Looby]

I wouldn’t leave but I am in a job where discussion and informal support is so important. Working in isolation is hard and although we’re better at using tech than we were, it’s still not the same. It’s not healthy for us.

I’d like a mixture which I think will happen anyway as there’s half the amount of desks we need for everyone to be in the office. Our organisation was reducing accommodation anyway so this is perfect for them. Being able to focus on heavy written stuff at home without distraction is good.
I am lucky though that I can shut myself away in the space room where I have a desk for proper work and a bed desk for more relaxed reading and report writing.

I do really miss the bagel shop and the two lovely coffee shops near work. 1st April I’m down there for a halloumi and roasted pepper bagel and an overpriced coconut latte. Maybe even the amazing rocky road that’s so sweet it makes your teeth hurt.

 

[Orang Utan]

I just can’t motivate myself to do any work if I’m on my own at home. Dunno how people manage it

 

[marty21]

My employer , a Local Authority , used to be fairly strict about wfh , one day a week, that was it. What I'm hearing now is that they are now way more flexible about wfh . Mrs21 loves wfh , and it's quite likely she will never set foot in the office again as she retires in a couple of months. I've offered to take her kit in when she does retire ( we work for the same employer) . I'd prefer to be in the office. But my job is different to hers.

 

[neonwilderness]

I'd be more inclined to leave if they tried to force everyone back into the office. I don't miss the office politics and passive aggressiveness (there's still plenty of that, but it's easier to ignore when it's done remotely ).

I prefer working from home on the whole, but I'm fortunate to have enough space that I can have an office so there's some separation between home and work. I've mostly been more productive which means I can easily slope off for a bit during the day to go for a walk, or go shopping, etc. There's some things that can't be done at home, but I don't think we'll ever be back in the office full time. I think the current plan is to open three days a week at the most, but there's no date for that. Currently people are just calling into the office as needed, maybe a few hours per week.

My boss needs to realise that every call doesn't need to be on Teams, sometimes a quick phonecall or email will do

 

[farmerbarleymow]

I'd happily never set foot in the office again - get far more done at home as it's quiet. Downside of working at home is that there are far more meetings than there used to be in the olden days - I often have back to back calls all day.

I read and kip in bed in my lunch break. Hot water bottle. Wondrous.

I sometimes have a an hour's kip on the settee during the day if I've got a gap between meetings and I'm a bit tired.

 

[maomao]

I hated teaching online and am very happy to be back in a school. Am also happy that the school I currently work in takes covid restrictions more seriously than the last one.

 

[Looby]

I just can’t motivate myself to do any work if I’m on my own at home. Dunno how people manage it

It’s mixed for me. I always preferred being in the office before. Sometimes though I have to write up really long reports and assessments and I’m easily distracted in the office because I like chatting.
Of course now we have Teams telephony, I can’t hide from the phone at home.

 

[Pickman's model]

I just can’t motivate myself to do any work if I’m on my own at home. Dunno how people manage it

tbh it's really very easy when fuck all work comes your way. but now i've been given a big task with a deadline about 10 weeks away and i still can't be arsed to do it.

 

[BigMoaner]

Still one my ten mins on, 10 mins faff schedule.

All these who log on at 9 and keep going all the way to 5. I don't know how they do it

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

I wasted too much time on Urban in the office and I still do at home tbh. So no real change.

 

[Teaboy]

My job is about meetings so it will be entirely dependent on when London's architects and structural engineers decide to go back to their offices. Currently no one I speak to has any plans and even when they do go back I wonder how many will want to do face to face meetings inside an office? Not many I would have thought.

It'll be MS Teams for a long while yet for me I reckon.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

I for one would relish the chance to spend four grand a year on a train ticket that allowed me to spend three hours a day commuting, bring that shit on!

 

[Pickman's model]

I for one would relish the chance to spend four grand a year on a train ticket that allowed me to spend three hours a day commuting, bring that shit on!

i would relish the chance to get someone else to spend four grand on a ticket that allowed me to spend three hours a day commuting

 

[NoXion]

My local bus companies were taking the fucking piss with their price increases. Crappy service too, the buses were breaking down far too often for my liking. At least once a month I would end up getting home horribly late because the scheduled bus simply didn't turn up at all. Freezing in the winter and sweaty in the summer. And this was all before the pandemic, I can't imagine it's gotten any better since.

If I could spend most of my time working from home, while occasionally going in for a sanity check or to do stuff impossible at home, then that would suit me just fine. The commercial landlords can all fuck off and get real jobs, fucking parasites.

 

[BigMoaner]

gonna be fascinating how this plays out.

 

[maomao]

Still one my ten mins on, 10 mins faff schedule.

All these who log on at 9 and keep going all the way to 5. I don't know how they do it

Maybe they're just better at pretending to work than you. I used to be proficient at looking like I was working when I was sitting in an office full of people; convincing people I was working hard from home sounds like a piece of piss.

 

[souljacker]

Still one my ten mins on, 10 mins faff schedule.

All these who log on at 9 and keep going all the way to 5. I don't know how they do it

There is a skill involved with working from home whereby you always ensure that it looks like you are doing work whilst actually watching netflix/having a wank/playing call of duty. I've worked from home for getting on 10 years now and I have perfected this ability. All you need to do is remember to send out an email every couple of hours and ALWAYS answer the phone straight away if its someone important.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

I just can’t motivate myself to do any work if I’m on my own at home. Dunno how people manage it

When work comes in, I get deadlines. I'm constantly delivering something in some form. They are paying me (freelance) by the day/hour so they want to get what they are paying for. When I worked in house and had months to get my shit together, I couldn't motivate myself to really do that in an office until I really really had to even if I was in the office all the time. I think it's just down to deadlines.
I am supposed to be editing a music video at the moment but there is no fixed deadline and so far it's taken me a couple of weeks to lay down what essentially a mornings work. . . . just found out that the release date is Monday, but I'm not getting any pressure to finish it. . . . so today I mostly had a bath.

 

[NoXion]

If I get hit with the post-lunch drowsiness these days, my bed is right there for me to take a short afternoon nap. It feels a hell of a lot better to take half an hour off to get it out of my system, instead of sitting at a desk while trying to both work and fight my drooping eyelids at the same time.

 

[Leafster]

When work comes in, I get deadlines. I'm constantly delivering something in some form. They are paying me (freelance) by the day/hour so they want to get what they are paying for. When I worked in house and had months to get my shit together, I couldn't motivate myself to really do that in an office until I really really had to even if I was in the office all the time. I think it's just down to deadlines.
I am supposed to be editing a music video at the moment but there is no fixed deadline and so far it's taken me a couple of weeks to lay down what essentially a mornings work. . . . just found out that the release date is Monday, but I'm not getting any pressure to finish it. . . . so today I mostly had a bath.

It's the same for me - most of my work has deadlines or at least times where I have to give my clients feedback. It's not really relevant where I do the work so long as I have the equipment to do it. I just on with it. But I guess if the work someone does doesn't have those targets to aim for then may be the work environment helps to keep them chugging along.