Extending Commute times...

ukcarper

wymondham wrote: »

would indeed be interesting, but you don't see sky high buildings full of builders/plumbers etc....

True but then supermarkets, department stores, hospitals etc employ a lot of people. But even without working from home the amount of time travelling can be reduced for some people by working longer days but less of them but that is also not another thing some employers seem reluctant to allow.

boliston

wymondham wrote: »

true, but we get lots of posts about people being slave to high house prices due to having to live near (ish) to their place of work, which lots of people don't consider working anywhere other than London for a variety of reasons...

If I 'worked' in London I'd much rather work remotely and live in a nice affordable house overlooking the countryside rather than coming back to my £500,000k one bedroom flat....

One bed flat? Studio more like if you are talking central london

melanzana

When the cctv or camera on your laptop is constantly relayed back to head office and timed.... then WFH will work, pardon pun.

Outputs are all very fine, but the perception is out there that WFH is a dodge and a great gig. Sit in your Pjs and all the rest of the myths.

I do agree that it is the way of the future, so you can live up the side of a mountain if you wish. But there is that element of "control" that is needed by HO or the owner of the company, and there is something about the social element of working with people rather than on your own. Although I know some types of work actually need you to be on your own and all that.

So, I would be all for it, provided it was monitored properly, just so someone who has to trek in to the city or wherever feels s/he is treated the same as the WFH person in the pjs. (myth or reality?). LOL.

chewmylegoff

Does it matter if the person who is WFH is wearing pyjamas? They could be dressed like a Pulp Fiction Gimp for all I care as long as they do their work.

I don't manage anyone at the moment but when I did I found it pretty easy to monitor whether people were doing their work or not regardless of whether they were sitting next to me or logging in from Timbuctoo and irrespective of what clothes they were wearing at the relevant time.

What I did was to look at their work to see if they had done it.

I found it just as hard if not harder to get people to work in the office. There are just different distractions - people to gossip with, those coffees won't buy themselves, must have a meeting about nothing etc etc, but because you're physically in the office anything you do supposedly counts as "work" rather than "p1ssing about surfing the Internet" which is what it should be called.

Spidernick

My wife works in HR: they describe working from home as 'shirking from home'!

Moby

Interesting news piece on R4 yesterday describing how rising house prices has driven social workers, teachers, police, firefighters etc to areas outside London requiring now a three hour, (round trip I hope!) commute to their place of work.

michaels

Moby wrote: »

Interesting news piece on R4 yesterday describing how rising house prices has driven social workers, teachers, police, firefighters etc to areas outside London requiring now a three hour, (round trip I hope!) commute to their place of work.

Surely you can do all those jobs for similar wages outside London so why would you decide to commute?

Moby

michaels wrote: »

Surely you can do all those jobs for similar wages outside London so why would you decide to commute?

You can sometimes...... but there are a lot of vacancies for eg social workers in places like Haringey; lots of inner London Borough's are short staffed when it comes to public service/teaching jobs. There is an extreme shortage of nursing staff in London hospitals, hence the recruitment drives.

CLAPTON

michaels wrote: »

Surely you can do all those jobs for similar wages outside London so why would you decide to commute?

Sadly all the major parties are colluding in the 'affordable housing' myth, which means the only people who can how get housing in London are the unemployed and people on benefits.
People doing real jobs like utility workers, nurses, social workers etc can't compete on price to buy and don't qualify for 'affordable ' subsidised housing.


Hopefully, the economy will continue to grow and the essential workers will find jobs outside the capital and the essential services in London will actually collapse.
Maybe then a few politicians will just consider than maybe, just maybe we need local homes for real people willing to work and not just the lifestyle unemployed.

Generali

CLAPTON wrote: »

have you ever worked from home?

have you worked from home when there are young children present?

have you supervised staff that are working from home (or indeed at work)?

have you ever known anyone to take a 'sickie' without due cause?

My kids are less of a distraction than my colleagues.

IME I get far more done at home than from work. Partly that's because my working day is just longer: I generally spend half the saved commuting time on work and half on play. If I need to work on a complex piece of analysis I can just keep my head down for as long as I need to concentrate, knowing that I'm not going to be asked to help/if I want a coffee/can come to a meeting/where a colleague is.

Sometimes you simply need to be in the office. For example today we had someone over from the US and it would have defied the whole point to be at home. I normally spend about a third of my time working from home. I could probably up that to 2/3rds for much of the year.