WFH is a model that has been chosen in the UK for a lot of places. Even in our organisation where face to face meetings with clients were once a neccessity for funding, the funders have adapted and agreed to allow 90% of our clients to be via telephone and 10% should be face to face.
With this, we were able to reach the targets set out for us and pull in 200+ clients a month for my team. Before Covid, our targets were around 100 clients between 6-7 advisers. Now there's 2 advisers and 3 support officers who are pulling in 200+ clients a month.
For me personally, in my previous role in this organisation there were a few benefits to working from home such as the flexibility, better productivity, I loved being alone and working without having to deal with office drama or politics etc but I had a few downsides. Being an introvert, I don't have many passions so I ended up overworking. Some times, I'd be up at midnight logging on or logging in on the weekends and working for an hour or two to get my cases up to date. My contracted hours were 35 and some weeks I ended up doing 60-70 hour weeks.
This was never the case when I worked from the office, I would do my 9-5pm days and be home and in time for dinner with the family. I'd spend my evening with them cooking dinner and just enjoying a relaxing evening and not have to think about work at all. That was balanced work/life for me.
All of the overworking stopped recently and changed when I had taken up a new role as training lead for the organisation, I felt my role had gotten boring. Before I used to be on the phone nearly 4-5 hours a day calling clients and opening up cases whilst I worked on the sidelines trying to innovate and introduce new processes that changed the way we worked as a business and save them money ( I wanted a pay rise so I worked hard to save money for them whilst I pushed my manager for a raise.
Given how I had changed the way we work within my own team, the CEO decided he wants the new processes rolled out in the whole organisation and gave me the raise I'd be pushing for 😂
I do enjoy this role, it is challenging and all new but I am sometimes bored. I feel there's not enough work to fill my days and even reiterated the same to my managers. My friends have said if it were them, they'd have just watched netflix but I absolutely love working. I am an introvert so I don't tend to go out much except for the odd weekends and I prefer staying in with a good book than going out to eat. Now out of my contracted 35 hours, I get all my work done within a few hours.
I think certain roles and people do have to work from the office as they require some sort of structure. I know I'd prefer my trainees to be at the office because I'd be able to manage them better and train them better because I do feel they're not able to balance their work/life and have some sort of structure.
There are a few downsides with the WFH model within our organisation because there is so many varying roles, some are able to work whatever time they want, and I appreciate that we all have flexibility, but sometimes I just want a quick response to an email or chat and it can take hours because they're shown as away from their laptop for hours. In the office, we'd go to the person's desk and get that quick response or ask the person next to ours for a quick response to anything.
Another downside is some colleagues taking advantage of the WFH model and not doing what they're supposed to do. The organisation had been unable to do anything about this colleague for a while because she cited so many issues such as the internet being down, or she's been up to her eyeballs in xyz, every time they tried confronting her about the work, she claimed bullying and put in a grievance and they couldn't prove anything because she had been using her personal laptop to work rather than the office one. After a 2 year battle, they've finally followed the steps of the legal team and now going to get rid of her. It was really demotivating for a lot of staff on my team and me that she was being paid a supervisor wage and not showing anything for it. And thanks to her, the office issued out chromebooks (which is absolutely shit) to everyone in the organisation to use and they're able to watch what we're doing now.
Our organisation adopted the working from home model and had ended the lease with their previous landlord. They then moved into a building that shared office space with others and had different areas across 5 floors where we could work from in order to get people to move around freely and not work from one desk stiffly for 7 hours which has been received positively from a lot of us. It did encourage a few to come into work. Doing this, the organisation had saved thousands especially with the cost of living and energy crisis right now. They're no longer paying multiple bills along with rent for the building they had rented out previously. Now they pay one fixed amount per month and its less than what they'd paid before.
They were also able hire from outside of the 4 areas that we used to previously hire from. Now we have colleagues from London, Birmingham, Coventry etc... That would not have happened if they hadn't changed the model of the business.
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