UK Bosses Try To Turn Back Clock On Hybrid Working (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0175824647
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/03/2149243/uk-bosses-try-to-turn-back-clock-on-hybrid-working
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/03/post-christmas-blues-as-uk-bosses-try-to-turn-back-clock-on-hybrid-working
> 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. [...]
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> 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 [2]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.
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> 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 [3]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."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/03/post-christmas-blues-as-uk-bosses-try-to-turn-back-clock-on-hybrid-working
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/whoarethehybridworkers/2024-11-11
[3] https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/return-to-the-office/
S&P Best Two Years in 30 Years (Score:3)
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.
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Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way. - Chris Lowe
Re: (Score:2)
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
Humans above profits (Score:3)
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
If you require people in the office, turn off VPN (Score:1)
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.
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)
I'd agree about the desire ; but I'm not sure exactly how that will turn into decision making. 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.
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.
Re: (Score:1)
> 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: (Score:2)
> 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. Thi
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, it's transparently absurd, even by the standards of IM programs Teams seems especially twitchy about status(I haven't worked out exactly what the rules are; but it seems to miss at least some types of input when it does not have focus; I mostly see that when I've got fullscreen RDP up, haven't poked at it closely). It just happened, thanks to the real hard bundling push overlapping pretty neatly with the pandemic era out-of-office stuff, to become a dramatic object lesson is how quickly and vigorously s
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
That may be, but it's not always exactly clear how one could best maximize profit and many businesses will fail as the market figures that out. It typically requires some business to fail (or at least to fail to give its customers a reason to stay with them) for another to succeed and realize that goal, up until they stumble themselves.
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: (Score:2)
"Experiment" implies some planning, a testing regimen, consideration of how you are going to interpret the results, and what you are are going to respond depending on what the findings of that interpretation are.
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 norma