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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.
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.
Thank you! I’m not able to work so I can’t say with certainty which one I’d choose. I think WFH because it just seems more flexible to me - and I don’t like people, or getting up early, or commuting. And it’s better for the environment and cheaper for me. But having a 3 day weekend every weekend sounds great! I wonder if my life would have a clearer home/work balance and if that would make me happier 🤷🏼♀️ I was just interested in what people who do work think, I didn’t expect any hostility from such an inoffensive question!
I've got pretty severe ADHD so WFH is a mixed bag, it's great to have the flexibility but some days I dig myself a hole of not actually doing anything and putting myself under severe pressure to get stuff done in way less time than I would have, and so on. If anyone in the comments has any tips on overcoming this they would be gratefully received :D
4 days...WFH! 😅
Would you do that for a 20% pay cut?
I just did. I'm lucky that I can afford it. Although, because of tax, it affects my take home way less than 20%.
It's wild really. I'm lucky, and most of my career I've been in the maximum tax bracket in my country. Also cause I'm lucky, I kept getting raises and bonuses, because I work damn hard and I'm pretty good at what I do.
The thing is though, I'm no better off in terms of my life quality for all that money. I live in a small semi-detached in a nowhere town. I'm incredibly grateful to have been able to buy rather than rent, but I'd still like to strive for a little more space, a little more privacy or a little more excitement. But the way property is, even though I'm earning well, it seems impossible. I've tried unsuccessfully 3 times in the last 5 years to move , and come to the conclusion without earning a considerable amount more than I am it's impossible.
My basic needs were met long ago. I find ways to waste money here and there, but nothing to really work towards. I guess I could have kids, but this place is too small for a dog, let alone a couple of sprogs, and I wouldn't wish this world on another generation. The only good reason to be earning more for me is to maybe protect the quality of life I have should I lose my job or the situation gets worse in general (inflation, climate change etc), and again it doesn't seem like it's much protection. I believe in the important of tax, I'd pay even more if I thought it'd be used for good, but with this circus in charge, it'd hard to imagine much of my considerable tax bill going to help people rather than ending up in the pocket of some corpo with a government contract.
Add to that, jobs seem to get worse and worse. I swear everyone I know, across multiple sectors, is burning out. Corpos and governments alike are treating people like garbage, working them to death then discarding them as reward. Profits go up. Nothing of value gets made. Everyone but the bosses gets fucked.
As for my job, I worked hard and gave it a lot. I've seen the company mistreat and discarded good people for years, while outsourcing to halfwits and grifters (and I can't even be that angry at the grifters given what they're paid regionally). It's impossible to make a positive change, although I still try. But I hate it. The job grinds me down and takes everything.
I plan to work as little as possible, even if it means cutting back. I live in hope that it'll mean I recover a little, maybe find some joy again. Not much hope, but worth 20%.
(Sorry for that becoming antiwork tirade. It's been a shitty few years.)
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
I work from home so that I don't have to go to the office.
I don't have to go to the office.
Let me work fewer days. 4x10 days would be nice. From home. So I don't have to go to the office.
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.
I’m sensing you don’t like going to the office…
Yes it's true. Why go to the office just to be on Zoom all day? I can do that at home and save myself some money. More importantly: I can do that from home and save myself the time it would take to drive to or from the office. Not to mention that I could be on Zoom all day from home and save myself the stress of driving around maniacs. Last, but not least, I could do it all from home and the company could save money by not paying for an office.
I can't believe anyone would choose commute.
I have a 25 min commute by subway and I enjoy banter with my colleagues. Due to covid I also know that I devolve into a troglodyte on full WFH so :shrug:
They’re a definite minority but at least 3 people here chose the 4 day week.
WFH always, all the time.
4 days on site, not even close.
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.
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.
What does FIRE stand for?
Financial Independence, Retire Early
Basically earn a bunch of money, invest smart, and retire early.
A bunch of people want to act like it's some secret new method and treat it like a fad diet, but people have been doing it forever.
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.
I remember at the start of the first lockdown there were a bunch of young people in flat shares that really really struggled because the only private place they had to work was their bedrooms. I can definitely understand why people might like to work in the office for that reason and reasons like your own.
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.
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!)
My comment goes against the trend, but I'd choose to go into work since I find it much easier to focus, to the point where I could likely get the same amount of work done in 4 days at the office vs 5 days at home.
Currently my employer makes us come into the office three days per week, unless we choose to switch to full-time remote.