Remote working (part of a continuing series) June 28, 2024
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
This doesn’t entirely surprise me.
Irish workers are increasingly willing to turn down job offers that do not include the option to work remotely or in a hybrid arrangement, a new global survey has found.
Published by Stepstone Group, the global recruitment company behind IrishJobs, it found that almost half of the more than 1,700 Irish survey respondents said they would refuse a job offer if there were no remote working options compared with a global average of 29 per cent.
The research, conducted in partnership with Boston Consulting Group and a global alliance of more than 70 recruitment sites, is the first instalment of the Decoding Global Talent study to be published since 2021.
It suggests that work-life balance is the top priority for jobseekers in the Republic, unchanged since the last survey. Financial compensation, meanwhile, has moved up six places within the list of priorities since the last survey, Stepstone said, highlighting the impact of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
Albeit this is a survey done, one suspects, purely for publicity, the finding isn’t that strange.
I’m not sure that the pandemic changed everything but it changed some things, and quite radically. Or perhaps, more accurately, it allowed for approaches where there was already an existing infrastructure and underlying logic for them to be implemented.
So, after decades of networking homes with wi-fi and broadband the capacity was there (just about) for many workers to work in that context should the opportunity arise. And – as we know people on here being already in that situation – this did pre-exist the pandemic. But for a larger shift in working patters it did require the pandemic to push employers and workers into implementing actual change.
This following does surprise me a little:
A study published in 2023 by the University of Galway and the Western Development Commission indicated that 59 per cent of respondents were working in a hybrid arrangement last year while 38 per cent worked fully remotely. Only 3 per cent worked fully on-site.
I wonder about that 3%. I’d have thought with retail and a host of other work environments that figure would be much higher.
There’s this:
The prevalence of hybrid working appears to be changing other habits and priorities within the labour force. Nearly a quarter of all first-time homebuyers borrowed against a property in a different county than the one they were living in last year, according to a Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland report from last week.
That’s quite high too. Cross-border dynamics on this island, perhaps? Though one wonders at the numbers involved.
Stepping back a little, the potential for technology to break or blur for many workers the link between workplace and work is a genuinely fascinating to see. This is certainly the most intriguing and visible dynamic I’ve seen in decades of working. It puts all that nonsense about open-plan offices (remember when they were the future?) and loose talk about disruption into context. Then again, it goes with the grain of processes long in play.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Big issue at work for me. Lots of concern about increasing in-office days, and could have three colleagues with commutes of 123km, 205 km, and 234km.
Somebody else moved to a regional town during covid because they could afford a house there and the employer has an office there. They had to get a letter from HR confirming to the bank for the mortgage that they were based in that regional office. A few months ago, a deputy CEO tried to force them to attend the Dublin office three days per week on the basis that their original contract had not been changed and it says they would be based in Dublin.
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As with a lot of things, I do wonder how the new working arrangements have different impacts on younger workers, new entrants to the workforce, compared to old timers like many of us. We have the experience of how things were and thus can contextualise and compare the pros and cons, whereas the new workers will only know this new WFH or hybrid world of work. Our eldest is a nurse so she’s always going to be non remote, but our youngest is doing her intra / work experience in her course in DCU at the moment and she’s definitely struggling with the WFH, not just of herself but of her colleagues on her team. It’s difficult to get stuck into something in a work experience at the best of times and while she’s getting the work done quickly she’s basically not being kept busy and that in itself is difficult when doing WFH. It’s not a good introduction to work and the self discipline required. Mind you she’s hybrid so it’s not a complete disaster. I suppose we’ll see how it all works out longer term. I suspect it will take many years to settle.
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On that I tend to think that in general say 3/5 days in office is optimal? But individual circumstance may differ. There might be an argument that for younger cohorts that could be ramped up to a full week in, a week of 3/5. But workplacess can be inventive about this stuff. It’s on them to make a bit more of an effort – the key thing is though that workers themselves have a degree of autonomy and flexibility, that if they want a bit more time WFH or conversely they want a bit more time working in an workplace they have greater flexibility than we ever did – delivered by technology. In a way this is the biggest single break towards an increase in workers autonomy, albeit for some workers only, since… well, I’m trying to think what. Increased unionisation? Five days weeks?
Though work experience is a tricky one – that’s often make work anyhow in most contexts I’ve had it (the classic is ‘just sit there and see what I do’ being the instruction I’ve heard time and again and nothing to do).
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Yes, agree with all of that. I suppose the only quibble might be that what younger / inexperienced workers “want” might not necessarily be in their best interests in some ways in terms of learning how to work and so on, and engaging in the social aspects of the workplace. But yes, I do agree completely about the autonomy aspect. I’d imagine there will be and already are technical solutions to monitoring WFH workers which will attempt to reduce that autonomy.
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Of course, absolutely – in fact think back to yourself at 25 and your experience of work. What you or I wanted was far from necessary a good or useful thing. I just remember being glad to get a job and in the door.
That’s interesting re the social life. I’d go out for a beer after work and so on but a workplace – well, in London or even Dublin, tended to see people come and go but it wasn’t always the central focus of my own social life – tbh I’d kept friends from college and from school so that took up a fair bit of slack there. But that depended on the workplace – some places I got on really well with people and found a group and others not so much – I worked for London Underground for half a year on one occasion and it was grand but the social life was staid whereas in the company I next worked in it was a lot better. In the latter context a friend who I made through work and I wound up sharing a house with others, so my mileage varied as well. But I guess I’m saying looking back that across the companies I worked for the ones where I made long lasting friends were the exception rather than the rule and it’d be interesting to know is that true or more rather than less people.
The surveillance stuff is genuinely disturbing. Just measure output. If the job is being done fine, if not not fine.
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No, like yourself I wouldn’t have any close lasting friendships from work, but certainly in my 20s there was a fair bit of socialising after work that was fun at the time. Then lids and life came along and that type of socialising became less important. But I’d view all that as a part of life’s journey, and a good part, so I’d hope the current generation don’t miss out on those types of positives of work life due to WFH. But maybe as you say the pre-existing friendships from school and work will simply fill the gap for many people, unless work brings them to new places away from those social circles.
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It’s a tricky balance. I found London ultimately too much hassle. Too much work focus, not enough other focus and returned to Dublin. But it’s crucial to have some social links in work as you say, it’s developmental. Then again it also depends on the workplace. For lots of people in shops or other settings that sort of office socialising just isn’t a thing. I know someone whose son is in the north of England and finding it a bit of a grind, work work work, and the nature of the work is health and mental health related so there’s not a lot of socialising going on with colleagues (shift work and also demographic reasons due to age of other workers) and my sense is they’re quite isolated. In that context I’d think doing that jog in Ireland if possible might be better because the social networks pre-exist and can supplement work networks whereas in England the workplace is the focus.
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It’s a really interesting topic workplaces and socialising. As you’ve said there’s a demographic aspect to it too. The one thing I always hated was when the bosses got involved.
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The key obstacle here has been the insecurities of the upper management classes, who it turns out didn’t need open-plan offices (for the workers) to establish the Panopticon, or indeed the enforced ritual of all those meetings. The wide variance in interpretation of WFH rules in different sections of workplaces also rather highlights the presence of the control freaks and the vindictive among the supervisory/managerial classes.
I strongly suspect that the empire (IBEC) plans to strike back through the introduction of ever-greater surveillance of workers via their WFH machines; input device monitoring metrics and ML-driven surveillance (Microsoft to the fore on this). Unions need to be pro-active in stopping these in their tracks.
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+1 re the Panopticon. This has really skewered that and not before time.
+2 re vindictive managers. Heard of that.
+3 re Unions.
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