Asklemmy

1 day doesn’t make much of a difference for me, so I’ll still take the 5 WFH days. It’s still a much better use of my time when you total all the time saved from commuting and being able to run errands/chores while WFH vs. being in the office for 4 days. 3 days though? Maybe I’ll consider it.

I went back to 5 days a week in office in summer 2021. I hated it when I was told but now I'm glad it happened. I walk 2 miles each way to work. That walk is one of the nicest parts of my day. I get crazy paranoia when I can't speak to people face-to-face, and I can maintain a routine. I appreciate I am lucky in my situation but I would take the 4 days and enjoy a long weekend where I can properly unwind

First of all, thanks for the question, I think it's really interesting and I'm sorry that some people are responding with so much hostility.

If I commute 2 hours a day and work 5 days a week, that works out at 10 hours, which is more than a single day's work - so for that reason alone I think the question is a little flawed.

However, the company I used to work for was a 5 minute or so commute for me. So if I could have a short commute like that and work 4 days from the office, I'd totally go for it. More time for me! If it was even as much as 20 minute commute (4.5 days work equivelent) then I'd rather work from home.

With my current job, remote. My company moved from being a 20 minute commute to a 1.5 hour commute. The four days commuting would cost me 12 hours vs 8 hours for the extra work day remote.

Even my old half hour commute... I think I would still take the remote. My position is very flexible, so I can get offline a little early and do something with my son, then wrap things up in the evening if I need to. That is a lot easier with being remote.

I can't believe anyone would choose commute.

WFH always, all the time.

4 days on site, not even close.

1. I work from home so that I don't have to go to the office.

2. I don't have to go to the office.

3. Let me work fewer days. 4x10 days would be nice. From home. So I don't have to go to the office.

4. I don't want to go to the office just to be on Zoom all day anyway. It's a waste of time, a waste of carbon, and a waste of company money on the office space.

After doing WFH for several years, I'll only take a job on site as a last resort or for like double my pay. Then I would cut my time until FIRE roughly in half. I don't hate doing work. I hate having a huge chunk of my time taken up by having to work 40 hours.

If work weeks were cut to 24 or even 32 hours, I might even reconsider the FIRE path.

4 days on-site. I like the mental separation by having a completely separate space for work, and I enjoy talking to my colleagues. I don't see many people outside of work, so I need the social interaction. And the lunches at work are usually much healthier than something I'd cook up myself, so that's also a plus.

I have tried to work from home a few days, but don't really like it at all.

A lot depends on the exact conditions. If the WFH/remote work let's my live anywhere in the world, I'd take that in a heartbeat. If I still have to be in a specific country it depends on how bad the commute is. If it's 10 minute to a train station, hop on a train for 40 minutes and another 10 to the office, then I take the 4 day work week. But if the commute is driving or lots of transfering then I would go with WFH.

I will take Working From Home, knowing that I can get the equivalent of a day off per week anyway and I can use it mostly as I need it through the week.

I'm assuming that my employer doesn't monitor my machine to make sure my mouse pointer is moving. If that were the case, I'd have to fix that problem first.

Not to feed into the bosses' paranoia, but I'd say WFH 5-days (on paper) and bunk off, which is a lot easier to do WFH anyway.

I don't actually think the employer misses out here, even if most companies already take far more than they're owed from their employees to begin with.

The reality for a lot of jobs, especially those that require deep work, creativity etc, is that watching how long people are sat at their desks is not a good way to improve results anyway. Better a motivated happy workforce, and managers that are thinking in terms of how well a team is delivering useful things for the org rather than obsessing about timesheets.

If the company is happy to pay me X salary for the results I provide them, everybody wins. It's foolish for organisations to think that getting people to work longer hours, whether it's forcing people to work 4, 5, or 6 days, is going to get them more bang for buck.

As for remote working, I've worked exclusively from home for over a decade in fully remote teams. Everyone wins with WFH. There can be problems to mitigate and there's always some subjective preference to consider, but on the whole the average employee and employer wins big from the arrangement.

All the pushback I've seen on WFH since the pandemic seems in large part management using it as an excuse for their own incompetence.

"How can I tell my employees are working if I can't see them at their desks?" If you cant tell if they're working now, then you didn't know they were working before either!

On-boarding new people, building up young people, is just different from before. Make sure they have decent equilment for video and normalise teams sitting in video rooms when the work. Encourage buddy working at all levels. Recognise and respect the upfront cost of training. Encourage and fund opportunities for socialising both remotely and in person.

Managers don't know what's happening without the "water cooler effect". They're used to be able to shout at teams across an office, or easedrop. Again, this demonstrates a weakness in their ability to communicate and interact with the people they claim to "lead". Good managers will be in the same video rooms and chatting shit with the people they lead while they work as a united teams. Shitty managers will sit on their hands while not even noticing their team does everything they can to avoid a unhelpful or unsupportive "leader".

The worse one is productivity. I have no doubt things are going worse for corpos since the pandemic. This likely correlates with increase WFH. The ideas that this is proof that WFH is outrageously. During the pandemic we had teams working 17 hour days. Corpos took the opportunity to cut every corner and show contempt to the workforces, and they didn't fix things when the COVID numbers went down. The big shots made some truly terrible strategic calls. All these things and more are seeming to lead to a kind of mass enshittification across a ton of organisations. But bosses don't want to own their mistakes, let alone fix them , so WFH ends up the scapegoat.

(Sorry! This thread seems to have brought out the rant in me!)

i would choose WFH. i am currently in a team lead role, and i think it would be more beneficial for myself and the team to have 5 day coverage. it could also encourage others to feel more comfortable to choose the WFH option, so they can sync their hours with mine. team members working in the office will always have somebody there for help if they need it, so no worries there. plus i like taking lunchtime naps with my cat.

I have done it both ways actually and I would take the 5 days WFH because I could still do the same amount of work in both scenarios and get paid the same. And on my "extra" 5th day of WFH I can just pretend to work and do whatever anyway.

Even if I had to actually work more, I'd still do WFH instead of commuting to the office because the commute and office + city experience just suck that much more.