My sister moved about an hour and a half out of London mid-pandemic because she thought that remote and barely coming in would be here to stay. Did think it was a bit of a gamble, sure she’ll not be the only one by a long way.
As someone who in my job only ‘has’ to come in 1 or 2 days a week but comes in more most weeks cos I prefer it, I think there’s also a bit mindset shift when it’s enforced and you’re told you have to. Even though I do 3 or 4 days a week on average in the office I think it would annoy me if I was told I had to do that.
Yeah also being put on the 3 days a week in the office train.
They’re handing it appallingly, telling us we’ll work better coming into the office, even where our team is dispersed across the country.
It wouldn’t grate so much if my office wasn’t such awful quality. It’s dismal, run down, there’s nowhere to take a call or sit away from your desk. Nowhere. Maybe make it a nice place to work first? We’ve not even had drinking water on my floor for four weeks now.
My office is actually proposing basically taking out the office computers and replacing them with laptop docking stations. I’ve said I’m happy with that as long as a) they still provide monitors, b) they provide me with a work laptop and c) they provide me with somewhere in the office to leave it securely every time I come back home.
We’ve got work issued laptops, and they’ve changed all the desks in the office to laptop desks, where you plug in a USB-C cable and your laptop works with the monitor, keyboard, mouse and webcam on the desk
We might be headed towards some nastiness and litigation. Could it be legal to discriminate against someone that comes into the office less and a peer? Or will this be likely buried within the bonus assessment process to the detriment of employees?
I know nothing about bonuses or banking but I could imagine the current bonus structure being heavily weighted towards people (lads) that management (lads) think are good lads.
You can’t be a good lad if you’re working from home.
When I’ve worked in it, it’s very results driven. I think at the end of the day if you’re delivering the figures for them they’re actually probably not going to give a shit if they never see your face. They’ll prob mainly use it as an excuse to ‘manage out’ the people they wanted to get rid of anyway
yeah. I don’t work in banking but in a similarly “results-driven”, “performance-based” (ick) culture. I can already see that people who were already touch-and-go in terms of their position are making a point of coming in more often because they assume - probably correctly - that eventually, the company will factor attendance into performance reviews.
it’s no coincidence that the manager dashboard for tracking attendance uses the exact same terminology as the performance review system which decides our bonuses and stock awards - ‘requires improvement’, ‘approaching expectations’, ‘meets expectations’, ‘exceeds expectations’ and ‘exceptional’ for 1-5 days a week respectively.
have been WFH for full weeks a lot of the time, but am being asked to/choosing to go in 1 or 2 days a week more recently - and yeah, fine with that balance
I managed to get my contract changed so I went from working in the office to being a perma homeworker. I think If I lived closer I would prefer a hybrid setup and would choose 2-3 days in the office, but I’m very happy with my current situation, given the circumstances.
