Working from home: Who benefits most?
Law firm Stephenson Harwood is offering its staff full-time homeworking in exchange for a 20% pay cut. Is this practical and will accountants follow suit?
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Who benefits most? That's obvious, the family dog or cat that is no longer left alone for hours on end.
I do contract work and most roles now require you to be in an office 2-3 days a weeks and I suspect this is because companies are experiencing productivity difficulties with 100% homeworking. The best employees will work hard and are effective wherever they are located but a lot of people probably need the discipline of being in an office to bring out the best in them.
Home working helped during the lockdown but for me it doesn't work long term.
It is the minutiae that falls by the wayside, all the little jobs I now have do that if staff were available I could pass on.
Home working helped during the lockdown but for me it doesn't work long term.
It is the minutiae that falls by the wayside, all the little jobs I now have do that if staff were available I could pass on.
If you started off working from home and then built your business and have an office, I doubt very much that you would want to go back working from home. So Accountants won't follow suit. Doing an Audit from home is impractical.
If employees work from home a firm should be able to reduce costs of their premises. Typical of a Law firm to want both ends of a deal!
A reduction in gross remmuneration will impact mortgage applications.
Honestly, I have nothing but contempt for businesses that effectively attempt to profiteer off people wanting to avoid a grinding commute, or move out to the sticks, or just want to achieve a better work/life balance.
The market will decide, but I predict that they will rescind the cut within 12 months. They will fail to properly manage the differences between full time WFH, the manager that demands all his team in occasionally for the inevitable look-at-my-empire meeting, and the person that wants to come in once every couple of weeks, but declines the pay cut as they aren't full time WFH.
And what about client confidentiality and data security? In the rush to home working during lock down these tended to be put on the back burner just to get things done. I wonder how much real consideration has gone into this aspect of the proposed change in working practices.
And what about client confidentiality and data security? In the rush to home working during lock down these tended to be put on the back burner just to get things done....[snip]
No they weren't. A colleague worked for NHS Digital during lockdown. All non-clinical staff went home for nearly 2 years and nothing relating to patient confidentiality was compromised. At. All.
The private sector has been running access-anywhere secure systems for more than a decade. The failure here is lack of investment in appropriate technology - which is largely down to inter-departmental empire-politics and wilful failure to adopt the recommendations of the government digital service.
The comment about Jacob Rees Mogg is wholly unjustified. I received a reply to a letter I sent to Companies House 9 months later in which they said that due to working from home, long delays in replies to letters through the post must be expected. The same applies to HMRC, the passport office, DVLA and many othe Govt Depts. This cannot go on. Yet the Govt is being blamed for not sorting it out whilst people equally criticise them as in this article.
Unless HMRC have been allowing staff to work from home for the last 10 years, they can't use this excuse.
Not sure anything negative said about Jacob Reese-Mogg can be described as unjustified. For some reason, he does seem to repeatedly do and say grotesquely inappropriate and often deeply offensive things.
The comment about Jacob Rees Mogg is wholly unjustified. I received a reply to a letter I sent to Companies House 9 months later in which they said that due to working from home, long delays in replies to letters through the post must be expected. The same applies to HMRC, the passport office, DVLA and many othe Govt Depts. This cannot go on. Yet the Govt is being blamed for not sorting it out whilst people equally criticise them as in this article.
Will they be pulling their own crackers at the Xmas Party, I wonder
Lawyers wanting to reduce salaries by 20% for home workers really haven't thought this through. Maybe the employees can sue the law firm for the cost of lighting and heating their home office. Charge them rent for using a room in their home.
Then of course there's the environmental impact, zero pollution by cutting out commuting, so I guess all environmentally conscious clients will take their business elsewhere.
I thought lawyers were supposed to be intelligent, obviously not this lot.