Working from Home

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

WFH, or Working From Home, has been with us since the Covid scam and possibly before as Matthew Parris helpfully pointed out recently. Results have been mixed to say the least. Bosses generally don’t like it because they are convinced their workforce consists of lazy devils who do very little from home. Middle managers don’t like it because it shows their functions up for what they are, not required. Middle managers are all about meetings and a more pointless exercise would be difficult to find. Occasionally these meeting do have some merit but mostly they don’t.

Tales abound of workers skiving from home using mouse jigglers to pretend they are actually at their screen and doing something useful. I fear that much of the workforce are of this ilk and they are spoiling it for those that aren’t. When I was doing software support in the late 80s and 90s I would have killed for a chance to work from home much of the time. Instead I spent at least 15 hours a week travelling and mostly on planes.

I have not seen one report that details the productivity loss caused by WFH, maybe someone can provide one. The theory that the workers are shirking obviously comes from management, many of whom do their fair share of shirking anyway. A classic case of projection. It is an oft told tale that workers aspire to management because they get paid more, can boss people around and think they don’t have to do any work when they get there. My often repeated theory about management was that you don’t have to be a good manager to recognise you are saddled with a crap one. I once had one who kept on about having warm feelings about something. I was always tempted to ask him if he had confused it with soiling himself. The fool was also a fan of the “light at the end of the tunnel” phrase.

Across the pond the Donald has decided that all Federal employees have to get back in the office or be fired. In the Federal part of the USA, WFH is no longer acceptable. Will it be the same here, I doubt it because the unions will go ape in the public sector.

Many organisations in the UK have moved to smaller premises or downsized their office space. This means that they don’t have the space to fit all their employees into their existing building(s). They have adjusted to people only being in the office a few days a week. Hot desks abound.

I can now tell you about an unexpected side effect of the WFH revolution in the UK and this story is from a certain Council. Some enterprising types decided that WFH was here to stay, forever and some of these enterprising types are quite senior managers. They have moved house and some now live over a hundred miles from work with no easy way to commute if required. Their journey can be well over 2 hours and that is on a good day. They are almost never in the office and turn up one day a month at best. It goes without saying that they moved to much cheaper areas and now have a much better dwelling.

Another side effect of the hot desk syndrome is less obvious. When there is a team meeting it has been done via Zoom or Teams since the coof hit us. As a digression there is apparently software that modifies your camera’s image to make you look attentive. The mind boggles. Anyhow with hot desking, members of a team are not necessarily in proximity with each other and so we have the ridiculous spectacle of teams of people all in one building who have to use Teams software to have a meeting when meeting rooms are at a premium. How daft is that, they are all meeting via a screen just like they do if they are at home.

Needless to say the public service unions are dead against everybody in the office orders, it ain’t gonna happen here while we have a gummint that is paid for by the unions.
 

© well_chuffed 2025