Ease the cost of living crisis by making more people unemployed ?

I was a Civil Servant for nearly 40 years (in a minor role). Civil Servants are treated appallingly by some members of the public. It's as though the are not real people. They are just trying to earn a living like everyone else. I used to end up fibbing about what I did sometimes as the 'jokes' and 'Oh it's alright for you' got a bit much.

It is all about the job.

Many civil service jobs can be very well carried out at home.

Civil servants do not have a dedicated desk, so they can’t all be in at the same time in any case, there isn’t enough space.

Both my children work from home.

One works in partnership with someone in Argentina - Large pharmaceutical - although that contract is soon to end, and she will then change her job and company as the existing company wanted to extend her contract but it meant travelling world wide and she wasn’t prepared to do that with children still at home plus husband.

She has now taken a job with another scientific company but this entails mostly working in the office at the moment as they are a bit old fashioned. Daughter is hoping to bring them up to date and work from home as it suits.

Son works from home. Government Agency His job - part of it is checking complicated legal documents and he finds the much quieter atmosphere at home more conducive to concentration. He also manages his project managers etc from home but also does work on the field as it were from Dorset to the Thames estuary and travels as necessary.

Putting a blanket on work practice and saying everyone should be in the office is silly and not keeping up with modern forms of work.

The private sector is more forward thinking it seems.

bums on seats should be at the discretion of the employer, depending on the circumstances.

And it’s not working. Some people have had to cancel their holidays as passports haven’t turned up 10 weeks after applying for them. Very stressful for some taxpayers just wanting to enjoy their leisure time.

I worked for a electronics/software company. Wrote s/w for companies all over Europe. The only people who had to come in were the test team, because they needed the test rigs. The s/w engineers came in about once a fortnight to pick up any hardware they needed and drop off what they didn't need any more.

The call centre staff didn't come in for about 18 months. I haven't seen any of them since I retired.

Obviously it depends on the company or organisation but "bums on seats" isn't the default any more.

Or you can empathise it’s workers whose jobs give them no choice but see/read about others on full pay with no deductions regarding say ‘London weightings’. It’s a joke and the middle classes are the ones laughing. And saving money. And putting the dishwasher on or pegging out the washing if it’s sunny. In between answering calls and emails of course. Look, they’re loving it. They aren’t going to give this up voluntarily are they?

OK I along with DH own a SME.

It was open throughout the pandemic.

Some people need to be in the office, no matter how good their home Wi-Fi is, no matter how organised they are, they need to be in the office in order for the job to be carried out professional and efficiently.

We have one member of staff working from home, but they still have to come into the office several days each month.

It is not a blanket either or option, it had to be for the profitably and effective running of the business.

Taxpayers, taxpayers, taxpayers...

I personally worked from home for the first two months of the pandemic. Before I retired. So to the people reading this....

You can either believe someone who gets their knowledge of the world from the right wing press or you can listen to somebody who has managed teams and actually lived the whole WFH thing for the last few years

So many complaints from the public about different departments not delivering - passports, driving licences, tax rebates. WFH was supposed to be a temporary solution to the pandemic. I feel sorry for the taxpayers who have no choice - supermarket employees for example - who have no choice in the matter themselves yet have to put up with inadequate service from those WFH. Talk about rubbing their noses in it “we aren’t coming back into work but are still being given the same rates of pay!” Saving on fuel, lunches, time etc. What’s not to like? Nothing, if it’s working but it’s patently not.

Maybe cut the salaries for those WFH? Make it a level playing field with like-for-like choice?

Because you are assuming that supporting people to work from home costs more money than getting them into the office.

But you can save money on office space, electrical and power costs. Absenteeism is reduced. Time spent on travelling into the office is reduced so any subsidies for travel costs can be saved. Most people have a phone and a PC at home now that can be made secure. If you need specialist equipment, come into the reduced-size office on the days you need it. Have meetings on Zoom. No need to provide a working lunch.

It's really not a case of "come into the office to work" any more. I'd also really like to see real analysis of whether the perceived reductions in service are due to people working from home or just lack of management oversight of the people at the end of the phone.

Why so?

No.

Would it not be a better use of taxpayers’ money for people to go back to the office where all the tools they need are available, rather than resources - human and financial - being spent to fully equip them to wfh, which is no longer necessary?

I've managed and led many people over the years. Inluding tech support call centres, incidentally. It's been quite a few years indeed since I cared how long their bums were on the seats. What I cared about was whether they met their objectives and whether they were available when I needed them. And if I needed them at the drop of a hat, then they had to change their plans, but I had to know whether it was really an emergency or whether the problem was of my own making due to not being able to plan ahead properly.

If the Civil Servants do not have the tools they need to work effectively from home, then they need to be given them. That's the employer's responsibility. And the employer needs to know what they expect from the staff, not just get your body into this office now so that I can keep an eye on you.

Why do I keep thinking of Scrooge and Cratchit?

From comments upthread it seems that some civil servants cannot work efficiently from home and deliver the service the taxpayer pays them for. In which case they should be ordered back to the office so that they can do what they’re paid to do. And that will also benefit the service industries who rely on them.

He is a petulant child throwing his toys out of the pram. He wants them back in the office to protect the income of the rich Tory owning property magnates, to ‘set an example’ to other workers so office buildings are kept full. They don’t comply. His response - sack them all. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with how hard they work.

If he is "boss" of the civil servants and can't motivate them to do a proper job, that's his weakness. Not theirs.

Rees-Mogg may have his suspicions but does he have any proof that civil servants are not working as required? He's just trying to divide and rule, by turning people against each other.

As I've said on another thread many private companies are continuing with WFH, either fully, or hybrid. I personally know the companies include Barclays, Ocado, John Lewis, BUPA, EDF Energy. These are high-level jobs, not Indian call-centre material.

They're not allowing this for the greater good but for the good of the company - if it affected the bottom line they would no doubt cease the practise.

It also means that staff don't have to live in London/South East - surely this would go some way to 'levelling-up'.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has told of his “suspicions” that civil servants are only working a three-day week, as the Government went to war with Whitehall mandarins.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Rees-Mogg – the Cabinet minister in charge of government efficiency – accused civil servants of working from home on Mondays and Fridays because they “think that the working week is shorter than it really is”. (copied from The Telegraph today)

They think they can do what they like full pay for working part time, cull the lot of them starting with the so called mandarins who think they are untouchable.

Casdon

Boris and Rees-Mogg are talking through their arses as usual, with absolutely no investigation into the achievability of this plucked out of the air target, as Smogg admitted this morning.

This makes very interesting reading if you want to see whether the cuts will fall (if it ever happens, which it won’t)
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/civil-service-staff-numbers

That was an informative link, Casdon.

The trouble is, my faith in this Government is now so low that I don't actually expect them to be any more accurate about which jobs fall into the 'civil servant' catagory than Joe public.
What I mean is that if it suits their narrative, either now or in the future, to surreptitiously include job reductions from things like Local Government into the figures that they spout, I don't have the slightest doubt that they will do it! I now expect them to lie and/or deliberately mislead, such is their obvious contempt for the ordinary people of this country.

Civil Service diplomats work abroad, their jobs are based abroad. Civil Servants working from home are not allowed to use their computer equipment abroad because of data security issues.

Urmstongran

Rees-Mogg has now opened a new front in the battle. Rather than putting notices up he is ripping old ones down, removing Covid posters that informed civil servants to keep two metres apart and the like.

“I have asked the Government Property Agency, which comes under this department, and in the buildings it operates, to take the posters down,” he explained. “The notices saying ‘only one person allowed in the lift’ need to come down because it is no longer true that only one person is allowed in the lift. There is absolutely no need for those notices.”

Hmmm ... has he been taking lessons from Piers Corbyn?

On the BBC news website there is an article from today Friday 13th may where Rees-Mogg was reported to have said the following:
“He said his own department, the Cabinet Office, had imposed an employment freeze for the last six months.’
I’ve just checked on the civil service jobs website and there are 31 job adverts listed for the Cabinet Office. Some of these adverts are for just one post. But some of the Cabinet Office job adverts are for more than one post. For example one Cabinet Office job advert is for ‘Grade 7 Data Architects’ with 30 posts available.
So my question is this: Is Mr Rees-Mogg incompetent or was he lying?

Rees-Mogg has now opened a new front in the battle. Rather than putting notices up he is ripping old ones down, removing Covid posters that informed civil servants to keep two metres apart and the like.

“I have asked the Government Property Agency, which comes under this department, and in the buildings it operates, to take the posters down,” he explained. “The notices saying ‘only one person allowed in the lift’ need to come down because it is no longer true that only one person is allowed in the lift. There is absolutely no need for those notices.”

Apparently they now now feel they can work from abroad. That's possibly true, but of course so can Indian call centres at a fraction of the cost. Be careful what you wish for civil serpents.