Being in the office is more about ‘appearance’, study suggests

What a sas loss of new techniques to a workplace. All to nake a boss feel like they have their little kingdom. Worse kind of boss you can have. Cold with no thought of valuing the staff

Never had a problem with it. Met all targets, and got more "paper" work done at home including training and meetings. The tech is there, use it where it suits. Saved money and no time travelling was a bonus. Better work life balance, what is not to like.

I dare say that a lot of office property companies fell into a blind panic at the prospect of staffs continuing to work from home as it would seriously affect their bottom line, not to mention devastate a significant part of city centre economies. I also suspect that this aspect is as much a consideration as the topic of the article, which stresses the appearance aspect. There's a lot positive about the trend towards working from home which could be hugely beneficial to the economy of South East Wales, especially the apparent lunacy of much of Cardiff's workforce making the daily trek from the Valleys and then back again, causing gridlock, pollution and regular pile-ups on the M4. Properly planned, many currently desolate Valley communites could be transformed with digitally dependent businesses, but for the utterly crazy, tardy and inefficient rollout of gigabit symmetric fibre broadband in Cymru.

Personally got more done during WFH as there were less distractions, admin folk though I have seen their workrates plummet. Very much depends on the role and the quality of the employee.

Once a month I have to travel from north to south Wales to work 3 days in the office. While I was recently down my boss decided he was working from home because 'he has too much work on', so making the case that the office is too distracting. I agree with him, it is. But then I am made to travel the length of the country once a month just to show face. It is bonkers.

....Almost half of bosses admit having staff in offices is more about appearance than purpose,......Where a business leader reaches that conclusion he/she should have the sense to revert to a form od working that works well. Hybrid working is known to deliver in so many environments. The only people who have anything to fear from reduced demand for office space are the property speculators who have built so many ugly monstrosities in our major cities. No doubt they are lobbying like mad to get things back to their version of normal.

Offices being primary bases are a long gone thing of the past. The only ones who want this backward thinking are the property owners. The positive environmental outcomes just by not having 10s of thousands of cars doing unnecessary journeys is a good enough reason by itself, but also, sick days are down, work place stress is considerably down, work/life balance has considerably improved. What kind of business logic would want to get rid of these positives??

I suspect many have always freewheeled an amount of time in the office equivalent to the personal time lost to the commute. If you spend three hours getting there and back, they can expect four hours of real work and three hours of chatting, coffee breaks and web browsing.