A fear of being ordered back to the office is having an impact on workers’ wellbeing, according to a poll, after a string of companies issued return-to-office mandates. More than a third (38%) of workers surveyed said recent news stories about companies hardening their stance on office attendance had negatively affected their wellbeing
Is this still an issue? Stay flexible, certainly, and make best use of technology. That said, get everyone back into the office ASAP, for the bulk of their working time. How else are the youngsters to learn, whatever is their trade? How else is proper human contact and continuous learning at all ages - the bedrock of practical human existence - to be maintained? We are social animals**, and let no one think otherwise; nor any right-thinking organisation that proposes to survive as a viable, thriving, enduring enterprise.
Anyone wedded to wholesale homeworking is begging to be AI'd out of existence, and rapidly, too. On a purely Drawinian basis, any organisation continuing to tolerate it is not destined to flourish.
Or it's a government department, of course ...
ND
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** OK, we all know exceptions ...
24 comments:
"How else are the youngsters to learn, whatever is their trade? How else is proper human contact and continuous learning at all ages - the bedrock of practical human existence - to be maintained? "
Not to mention the useful information gleaned from conversations at the coffee machine.
I'm trying to persuade my son of this atm, bad for career to only be in the office once a month for four days. His HQ is moving to an unglamorous midlands location, and he's very happy where he is in a varsity town full of young people.
HMRC is hamstrung by its legions of WFH staff. The stress excuse is deployed at the drop of a hat to avoid coming into the office.
"His HQ is moving to an unglamorous midlands location"
My father-in-law hoped to continue working to age 90 but had to jack it in a couple of years early because the company moved their offices to somewhere inaccessible to him in a reasonable time.
Some forty-somethings in my extended family are browned off at being ordered to the office full time but suspect that those who show reluctance will simply be "laid off" i.e. fired.
I spent much of my career as an academic so I spent 50, 60, 70 (occasionally even 80) hours a week in the office, but the office concerned might be a lecture theatre, an undergraduate lab, my departmental office, my lab, someone else's lab, someone else's departmental office, a workshop, this library or that library, a seminar room in a different department, or my study at home.
Trouble is, few non-academics could be trusted to put in the hours, and not all academics could be trusted either. "I'm at a conference on Crete all next week."
Oh aye.
If companies are planning to replace their WFH staff with AI, I suggest sinking cash into their competitors who aren't.
I've been using it a lot of late, and in some situations it is a time saver, but generally it is very dumb, and it's hallucinations highly problematic. Stats are starting to roll out that it's a productivity killer in general (https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/), AI agents (one of which I'm working on) generally don't work most of the time, and can only be trusted to do small chunks.
In short, the gap between what is being sold and what is being experienced is not much different from finding that the sports car you bought has a Trebant's engine inside.
dearieme - if you're in medicine the conferences do tend to be in nice locations ... not so much if it's geology.
I started work at a tender age in industry. Very much a wakeup call, rough men and rough speech and put to work as an apprentice. This was the making of me for I think most teenage boys think their father is a silly old fool. But those rough men with rough speech pointed the way forward.
A series of jobs revealed the nature of 'a company' a team of compatriots with some common aim. Mostly pretty jolly and good fun with folk mostly very good to get on with.
This weekend I visited a family one of whom is WFH. It does not look a barrel of fun, he does go into the office and works and socialises about 4 days/month. But I fear this life is not doing him any good, he can't afford to move out of home and the job market is not very encouraging. He sits in a shaded room in front of a laptop all day, last winter he developed a 'prison pallor'.
Colleagues have left and moved into banking and tell him life is worse there. So I feel a big barrel of trouble is brewing for the next decade or two. WFH is not the only cause, the housing market, social mobility and the stratification of social peer groups. All seems a long way from chasing factory girls in the 1960s.
BTW I agree with Caeser re AI but there are not many other good fads around.
Another oil refinery goes phut ... while the FT100 is at a high.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/21/prax-lindsey-oil-refinery-shut-staff-lincolnshire-redundancies
I have no great experience with AI, but I fear that a lot of people are being totally complacent about how transformative AI is going to be in the workplace. A lot of white-collar jobs are going to go phut!
Like bankruptcy, it's going to be a case of slowly at first, then all at once,
and a lot of well off middle class professionals are going to be caught on the hop.
How much monitoring of actual working time is routinely carried out - particularly with local government. I hear from granddaughter that activity monitoring on in house activity down to keyboard stroke activity at the big finance companies. Also can't have life in London on £50 grand
@jim - you have to be disciplined with WFH, not with just being productive, but looking after yourself.
I tend to do a 6k walk, but it's easy to get out of the habit when you get a block of meetings when you'd usually do it.
Same with socialising, you need to meet people.
I'm not against office work, but for the majority of desk jobs, it's utterly pointless for it to be the primary location. Commuting is a miserable affair, and you restrict yourself to candidates within a defined area rather than the best ones for the job.
I commute about the nation every now and then, I can work with companies around the world, and yes, on occasion pop into the office. Were it to be a 4/5 days in the office, I'd have a much smaller pond of opportunities.
There are those who think that means outsourcing will replace UK jobs - I work with outsourced teams too, and they need a lot more support and prodding than Brits do. A company I'm dealing with thought shifting to India would cut costs, instead it's extended delivery dates, annoyed customers, and delayed revenue streams by whole quarters. There are already chats about re-onshoring or nearshoring.
Most of the issues I've encountered with WFH not working well are management failures, either micromanagers stressing over loss of control, or the more lax ones not ensuring things are being delivered.
@BlokeInBrum - AI is already in-office use, and now the novelty is wearing off, and actual impacts are being studied, the number of professions in danger is starting to shrink.
It will impact jobs, but you cannot trust its output, and so you need at least one person checking the output, and a person with knowledge at that.
It's a risk vs reward scenario, the reward is that you can cut headcount and costs, the risk is an uptick in errors. If those errors cost less than your savings, quids in, but it is all a Bell curve, and one of those errors might just be in the low probability/high cost...
There's already insurance products for it.
Caeser Hēméra - have you seen the latest birth statistics?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/parentscountryofbirthenglandandwales/2023
"37.3% of live births were to parents where either one or both were born outside the UK, increasing from 35.8% in 2022. India remained the most common country of birth for non-UK-born mothers and fathers, with Pakistan remaining second."
We may find that we can do "extended delivery dates, annoyed customers, and delayed revenue streams" onshore soon !
I imagine that some of the management techniques in India might not translate well to the employment lawyer-happy UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o
"The cost of building the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk has jumped to £38bn, adding £1 a month to household energy bills for at least a decade. The previous official figure for the project was £20bn, but the plant's joint managing director Julia Pyke said earlier estimates did not account for inflation or risk.
@anon - I've dealt with UK-based diaspora and children/grandchildren of immigrants. They tend to work within the UK work culture, rather than within their heritage one.
Accents can still be problematic for older workers, but in all honesty, that goes for Scottish and Geordie ones too.
As for birth rates, maybe the heritage culture's tendency to non-nuclear families and multi-generation households is part of it. Free childcare and social care.
It's something we've moved away from, and maybe shouldn't have. No culture has a 100% coverage of that, but the more you do, you less you rely on the state, and more flexibility to work and parent.
I find Scottish and Geordie accents a piece of piss compared to London, Liverpool, and Irish.
Just to amuse I trawled the local jobs market to see what gives. Unsurprisingly they are mostly pretty crap with crap wages. But WFH did feature in a good number of them. Moving on to local IT jobs, not brilliant either but again WFH does feature widely. Plainly people like it and a lot of jobs can easily be done from home. There were some goodish wages - in Yorkshire.
But it was a depressing trawl, bog cleaning, DPD driving, care work and for the IT skilled - Help Desk work or some pretty mundane support work. All this a few miles outside the M25 where house prices start around £350k.
No wonder Angela is in trouble, this is no way to run an economy, not so much a shoestring more a frayed cotton thread.
Those highly skilled/well paid industrial jobs that used to exist in large numbers are so passé. We can do so much better giving each other tattoos, haircuts and manicures and selling each other houses.
I think that we will see in short order whether deindusrialisation works as well for the Germans as it did for us.
It's the economy stoopid. The UK (and Germany) are finding out what happens when you deindustrialise - you get poorer and tax revenue falls - until you find other things/people to tax.
So all you do is invent new products or industries and tax them. But anyone with sense knows to offshore, so what things can only be done or initiated onshore? Big and heavy or very secret perhaps.
Perhaps the Eng Lit unis can turn out 10,000 J K Rowling lookalikes evey year. Today she probably would get chucked out for wrongspeak. And some unkind economist might figure out that the market for Harry Potter variants is rather limited. But a bit hard to see what other cerebral stuff we can offer - psychiatry seems non mass market despite the need. Finance is good but has great skill in keeping any profits out the hands of the tax man. Similar with law or its close cousin the sex industry. Energy is good but can find profitable and less tiresome customers elsewhere.
We do quite well in aircraft and military gear, not so well in home grown nuclear power. The much vaunted Green revolution went nowhere due to the laws of physics. Sad to say physics has been a bit dead these last 40 years. Lots of promise, not much money. Medicine is good but you need shiny expensive hospitals to attract an international market.
So Rachel is scratching in the dust looking for corn. Long term I feel Israel is leading the way to the future though some might be a bit squeamish.
That's quite an essay there, Jim
"not so well in home grown nuclear power"
That's a 1998 Blair decision for which we are still paying (one of many such decisions of his). "No new nuclear build" he announced, and said goodbye to a generation of nuclear engineers. I know ND criticises CEGB, but they had a lot of nuclear expertise. All retired now.
"Green revolution went nowhere due to the laws of physics"
Carbon capture = perpetual motion? Just burn the same carbon again and again and again ... it would have worked if it hadn't been for that meddling entropy!
@ I know ND criticises CEGB, but they had a lot of nuclear expertise
Oh yes, certainly. And you'll have read me commenting that Sizewell B was a pretty decent project - on time, on budget, performance stats pretty much as promised. SZC should have been SZB[2], with EDF nowhere to be seen.
It's not expertise I criticise, it's the outrageous way they abused their monopoly. But hey, not just them: the old British Gas was just as bad, and doubtless monopolies everywhere: those are just the two I dealt with
"Anonymous said...
"not so well in home grown nuclear power"
That's a 1998 Blair decision for which we are still paying (one of many such decisions of his). "No new nuclear build" he announced, and said goodbye to a generation of nuclear engineers. I know ND criticises CEGB, but they had a lot of nuclear expertise. All retired now.
11:37 am"
Clegg the same in 2012.
Had we started to build them then, they would be built. Well, if we were any good at building things, which clearly we are not. Brunel, where are you?
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