A top civil servant says she only wants her staff to go into the office two days a week so women aren’t dominated by men and she can continue using her Peloton bike.
Sarah Healey, the permanent secretary for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said meetings would still be held over Zoom, even for those working in the office, in a bid to stop male workers asserting themselves over their female colleagues.
A newspaper outlet reported that the mother of three, who’s hailed working from home as a very, very good thing in terms of spending more with her children, spoke at the London Tech Week conference.
She said that she finds big meetings with lots of people were most effectively done online because then you can see better who wants to speak, and that she’s noticed that sometimes women struggle with that.
Sarah Healey also welcomed the opportunity to use her exercise bike at home, while saving time on commuting.
Her comments came as public sector workers seem to be resisting a return to the office, with more than 100 government buildings earmarked to be sold as a consequence of the shift in working patterns.
This is despite millions of workers in other sectors making their way back to traditional workplaces in recent weeks as a result of the end of the school holidays and the lifting of COVID restrictions.
But Sarah Healey maintained a hybrid approach to allow for some office time was necessary, highlighting the impact on younger co-workers who she described as having spent the pandemic working in the corner of their bedroom.
It comes after it was revealed that more than two million workers could be allowed to ask their bosses to let them work from home from day one of a new job under proposals unveiled by ministers.
The proposal would ease the current rules that allow workers to request flexible working once they’ve been in a role for six months.
It’s been launched after millions of people worked from home during the COVID pandemic, with numerous firms deciding to keep some measures in place permanently.
Ministers intend to keep in place rules that enable businesses to refuse the requests if they have good business reasons to do so, but they want to put pressure on employers to negotiate with their workers rather than deny requests completely.
Many people who’ve been working from home prefer this to working in an office all day, getting distracted, plus the commute to the office would be drastically less productive than staff working from home, and it appears to be the way forward and numerous companies are realising this.
But what about those people who don’t have the space to work from home? I guess those that don’t have the space will have to go into the office, but it doesn’t stop those that are considerably more productive and far better off financially from working from home.
Work is work, as long as you get the job done. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it now appears that working in an office is old fashioned and out of date now, and working from home seems to be the future.
Although we haven’t had work from home for long enough for anyone to have a vast knowledge of the topic, and numerous firms saw a decline in productivity early on and there are numerous disadvantages to working from home, some of which are not yet understood.
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