Post-Christmas blues as UK bosses try to turn back clock on hybrid working
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/03/post-christmas-blues-as-uk-bosses-try-to-turn-back-clock-on-hybrid-working
Posted by Currency_Cat
Post-Christmas blues as UK bosses try to turn back clock on hybrid working
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/03/post-christmas-blues-as-uk-bosses-try-to-turn-back-clock-on-hybrid-working
Posted by Currency_Cat
40 Comments
Can confirm, was told just before Christmas that at the end of Jan our office can no longer wfh
Useless “supervisors” who get paid just to email each other realise the cat is getting out of the bag.
I don’t think it would be possible for my office to go full work from the office.
And I don’t think the bosses want to do it. Because they also work from home.
Just an interesting fact and something I’m sure doesn’t factor into headlines like this.
There are 48 REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) listed on the LSE with a market cap of approx £60B. Now these aren’t all tied up in office rents but a large chunk of it is.
They’ve realised that they can get 5% more productivity from staff and all it costs is the staff wellbeing and morale.
With a bit of what should be a standard business skill called planning, you can get almost all of the benefits of being in an office together from one or two days a week. For the other three wfh, both employer and employee can benefit, in my opinion.
As covid struck our bosses sold the three regional offices keeping only head office which is a six hour round commute away.
Think I’ll be staying at home for the foreseeable, not that it actually causes any problems whatsoever so long as you get your work done everyone benefits.
Even prior to what would have been the six hour round trip I was commuting for 1:30 a day (around 40mins no traffic). That’s 1:30 I can keep to myself, or when shit hits the fan at work give back to them.
Only bosses calling people back are those that don’t trust their staff (often unfairly) or took out expensive leases on offices they really need to justify.
The only reason my office does hybrid working l is because the office my department uses is too small. It has enough space for roughly 50 people, and the whole department consists of almost 80 people. We’re based in a small building, 5 floor, but only 4 used, as the fifth floor, is used by IT. So the only way we could do whole weeks in the office is if we had a bigger office.
I used to work for BT. 20 years ago they were encouraging staff to work from home and like many telecom and IT companies promote their own remote working solutions for their clients.
They saw it as a way to reduce the amount spent on maintaining their buildings – they have a huge estate that they can’t easily get rid of.
Recently I feel that they use the work from home mandates to reduce their huge staffing numbers (est 90,000 to 100,000 staff). Make the work environment so unpleasant that people feel its best to leave.
I’ve worked remotely for over 14 years. Two years ago I joined a fully remote company (I’m in Sheffield, they’re in Brighton) and at the end of the year they also said they were going 4 days a week (no catch, 8 less hours a week, same pay). They employ almost 20 people, and while they do have an office it’s completely up to people if they want to work there or not. Remote working hasn’t affected productivity, and moving to a 4 day week hasn’t either. Companies who push against both are dinosaurs.
Good luck doing this, if I had to be in the office 5 days a week I would look elsewhere.
On the other hand, with the constant raising capabilities of AI maybe comapnies don’t need as big as a workforce as they once did.
I changed job then after 6 months they said cant hybrid so i quit wothout a plan.. wish me luck
Yeah standard. I work at a self titled “cutting edge” software company. I’ve worked from home for decades, but there was always this mistrust and like suspicions you are watching cash in the attic or some shit. Covid changed things a little, but you can see things changing slowly backwards. Hopefully new starters will have the power to tell them to shove it. WFH works for a lot of people, and saves on a lot of costs. That’s without mentioning the amount of saving the planetness we get from less committing. Which we all want. Right guys?… Guys…
Just idiot boomer/gen x bosses looking to justify corporate “culture”.
They can get private jets to the office but expect everyone else to dedicate up to 10% of their salary and over 280hrs a year just to occupy a space.
3-4 years into WFH and I’m so efficient now it’s literally insane. Far less distracted by menial tasks, less interruptions, zero physical meetings so I’m responding to emails during meeting small talk, no lunchtime cheeky pint etc etc. I’ve also got a far better work/life balance which makes me a happier person….but bosses need to physically see you 🥱
Never had pandemic working where I work and I can tell you it wouldn’t make a difference if some worked from home or not. The managers do naff all and the office staff as little as possible.
I work for local authority and have worked almost entirely from home for about four years now. I’ve never been happier in terms of a job and I get all my work done no problem. MS Teams/365 makes it an absolute breeze to collaborate etc. I’ll happily do this job or something similar for the rest of my working life if it means my work/life balance remains this way. Worth its weight in gold.
I’m going from WFH 5 days a week to hybrid, 2 days in office and 3 days WFH from Monday – just in time for a commute with snow and ice weather warnings!
When working from home became the normal during Covid I thought we were heading in the direction of more companies mandating that people work from home and then eventually closing offices all together as it would save money on electricity and heating offices and they could stop paying rent on offices or if they own them sell them, overall it would save companies money. However it seems to be going the other way and they want people back into the office, not sure why, its cheaper to have people work from home, people can work more flexibly and from my experience people work longer hours at home and if the only concern is people not working then sack them if they don’t work. Seems a win win for both employers and employees.
We won’t be removing hybrid because it’s working just fine. 2/3 days in, 2/3 home works great.
A few people who aren’t productive at home are told to come in to the office every day. People who get stuff done at home are left to it.
The problem with WFH is that managers struggle to justify what *they* then do with *their* time.
I am a business support consultant, and I often see that the rate-limiting factor on productivity is more-often-than-not the supervising manager.
I work for a huge multinational company. Before Covid we all worked in offices and teams mostly comprised of people from that office. My local branch office consisted of 3 whole floors of a pretty big office block.
During Covid and the years since, teams have spread. My old team disbanded and I was put on team where my manager was in Arkansas and I had teammates in Singapore, Chicago, London, Frankfurt.
The company has thrived as a result. People have more mobility and can more easily advance their career internally. The company has also not had the mass lay offs that a lot of our industry saw because they instead gave up a lot of real estate. My local office is now only half a floor in that same office block.
I went from a small insular team that existed mostly in the Birmingham office and if I wanted to advance internally I would likely of had to move cities to being promoted 3 times in the last 5 years working for managers across the globe all from the desk in my spare bedroom.
As an engineer full time in-office tells me the place is likely to be a poorly managed mess. It’s a big red flag indicating a shit show.
Our company would really struggle to end hybrid working.
We’re mostly in the office 1 or 2 days a week and WFH the rest of the time. I really love the balance – it means that I can work from home most of the time but see my team when we’ve got meetings that would benefit from being in person. It’s also good for socialising (I actually *like* the people I work with) – people are much more likely to go to the pub after work on the one day we’re all around than when any potential pub-going is spread out over five days!
If the company told us we had to come to the office 4/5 days a week, I think we’d lose a lot of our best people. We’ve got rivals who would love to snap up our best people by offering them a job where they can WFH, and they’d be laughing if they could poach them without even having to offer them much of a pay rise.
So the company would be left with lots of vacancies and lots of miserable staff who didn’t think they could find a better job anywhere else.
Although business would argue there’s a business need for you to be in the office, I don’t know if this has been legally challenged? In the UK, you have a right to request it and be given it unless there’s is a good business reason not to do so.
**If you’re legally classed as an employee, you have a statutory (legal) right to request flexible working**. Employers can accept, partially accept or reject a statutory request. An employer can only reject the request if there’s a genuine business reason.
Office roles that benefit from office settings:
* Call centre staff
* Call centre managers
* Receptionists
* IT desktop support
Roles that do not:
* Everything else
Why? Its been proven to increase productivity. Again and again.
Why do reality denying idiots end up running all the companies?
Whatever happened to that 4 day work week experiment that’s what I want to know…
I can definitely empathise with the frustration people feel on this particularly if you are an experienced worker who has quite a set role eg so long as “your” work is done, you’ve done your bit. That said, whilst I don’t think we need to go back to 5 days a week in the office I personally can see an argument for pushing for more days in.
It will depend on the jobs people do but from my experience I think part of the challenge is upskilling the younger workforce- I genuinely think they learn more when working with the more experienced members of their teams and being around the general office environment where they can pick up on the intangible they wouldn’t when working from home. I also think it’s easier to pick up when they need help through their body language.
For that to work though then everyone needs to come in across the team and actually work together- no point the younger workers coming in if the more experienced team members aren’t around.
I also think there could be benefits from an inclusion perspective. In general I would think there are already issues with work politics in terms of opportunities going to more extroverted people or people who are more known to senior people (for various reasons including gender/cultural bias) and wfh, particularly when it’s driven by the individual, is probably not going to help that.
100% know we’re not going back to the office full time because the office space they’re renting doesn’t have enough desks for everyone to be in at once.
ah the new year and the weekly ‘WFH is the spawn of the devil that will open the gates of hell’ story. Its almost as if a lot of rich people own empty offices who’s values are tanking are paying papers to demonise WFH.
Boss: I need you all back in the office, 5 days a week.
Staff: You first then.
Boss: ….
My company realised that rather than employ hundreds of UK workers to WFH, they could move 90% of the roles to India. So I’m the only one left from my team in the UK.
The positive, is that there’s no point to return to the office to work by myself. The negative is that eventually my role will also move to India.
Companies pick the time of year people are most depressed to force employees to quit, as a result of their disappointing financials, trying to boost numbers before/shortly after financial end of year
It’s not firing, it’s “a return to office mandate” lol
We’re simultaneously told disabled people need to go to work but also we need to scrap WFH policies, and then people wonder why some of us are completely done with society at this point!
My last job turned around and told us all we need everyone in the office for a minimum of three days a week. However, in their infinite wisdom, they’d neglected the fact that they had reduced office sizes to take maybe 200 at anyone time, including meeting rooms over covid despite employing around 850 at the time. They still tried to get me in, but I was on a fully remote contract.
My current job has at least acknowledged this, but has dedicated office days for each team, only two days a month, plus travel and expenses for those living further afield. Overall, it’s a pretty good gig and it works well for everybody.
Incoming tears of privileged millennials worried they can no longer watch Netflix on company time
This comment section is the age old battle of management v leadership. The Two are not the same and some of the replies here are very revealing of who are good, managers, bad leaders etc.
This is why I’m glad I work for a company that is WFH because the boss doesn’t want to pay for the rent of an office. The rare times we do meet in person it’s always in the cheapest office for hire we can find
This is very concerning to me. Our office seems to be completely fine with it, they said to come in at least two days a week but many don’t. It’s really at the manager’s discretion. I do usually come in two to three days a week anyway, but I only live up the road and the office is quite nice. I hope they don’t change their minds.