>”[C]ard swipe data” [will be] used to monitor their return.
…
>[I]n cases where staff are unwilling to increase the number of days they spend in the office, managers may have “more formal conversation[s]” about the requirements and expectations of their role, according to the note.
Ooof!
It’s not the 2 days in the office that staff have much of a problem with. It’s the carefully worded reference to the removal of compressed hours. This article nearly completely missed this point. Loads of people work their full time hours but compressed into a 9 day fortnight or whatever.
This was always going to happen. The idea that anything would change after Covid was a pipe dream.
Shame. Lloyds obviously like leasing and heating an office for no reason.
There’s substantial investment in office real estate that can undermine banks, investors, and pension funds if vacated. Never mind the restaurants, taxis etc that cater to office workers. Our cities and towns are built for commuters to head there for work.
I’m not a fan and prefer WFH. However the above is an extremely strong lobby and vested groups that will resist changes.
This would not be an issue pre covid due to the number of more local offices that were open. These have been closed forcing more in central city locations which are expensive to commute to while the work benefit is non existent. It’s either a way to reidce staff count without redundancy payments or pressure from the government to save pret
I hate how we as a workforce have just rolled over and accepted reasons such as collaboration and being able to braid each other’s hair in person as legitimate reasons to sacrifice our time and money to commute into the building to do the exact same job you can do on your laptop at home.
All of this of course peddled by C-suite types (some of whom won’t give you the time of day in communal staff areas) who have been told by building management or business owners that they need to maximise office use to avoid a sunk cost on their lease.
All operating under the overarching goal of controlling the working class so that the already rich and wealthy can horde even more wealth they carefully curated by exploiting silly little things ordinary people need like money to buy food and housing.
Really really sucks that we are going in this direction. My employer wants everyone to be in the office 3 days a week with word that they wish to increase this to 4 in the future.
Will staff get a payrise in line with the increased cost to rent in high cost of living areas/transport costs?
Because for many this is essentially a pay cut.
It’s a disgrace, the statement to employees was a short paragraph with no explanation as the reasons why.
6 months previously a internal report was released showing INCREASED productivity from WFH during covid so it isn’t for productivity gains going back in.
I was hired on basis the job would be WFH, people have planned there lives around this, Lloyds isn’t set up for it, they have large antiquated offices that are only in big cities.
I work with people in the company all over the UK and the world, I do hard technical work and do overtime without charging in order to get deadlines done.
Now I will sit on teams in the office instead of sitting on teams at home, I won’t be able to concentrate nearly as well in a busy and loud office with people on calls left and right to me, my productivity will go down.
At a time when this is a huge step backwards in the industry we are going to loose emerging talent who will go elsewhere, im considering leaving solely on this issue.
The reason Lloyds was so attractive to me was the culture, agile and forward thinking attitude to working now im ashamed to work there.
They need to give back all the recently won awards they received on future ways of working.
Financial Services (at least here in Edinburgh) is quite a close group, with many people moving between companies and getting to know everyone. Lots of Lloyds staff are already planning on leaving off the back off this. Within hours of the announcement I knew of colleagues who’d been contacted asking if there were any positions going at the company I work for.
Convenient this is happening when other banks have started to layoff office staff… Maybe I’m cynical but I’d wager the real reason for this is get staff to quit so Lloyds can trick them out of getting a redundancy payout..
Arbitrarily, adding the expenses and time of a daily commute to everyone is absolutely guaranteed to improve team spirit, productivity, and morale.
All so I can sit on teams calls with people at the other end of the country all day. Yep, absolutely an improvement over WFH.
This will become the norm…big business waiting for recession to kick in and unemployment to rise, when this does happen and there is a wider pool for recruitment and less reliance on employees – there will be one almighty push to get folks back into the office…it’s coming
Next headline “Lloyd’s suddenly has hundreds of job vacancies.” Businesses that keep up with modern trends will be the ones who survive, places like luddite Lloyd’s here will have to catch up eventually if they want to keep going.
Meanwhile, although my company can be shit, they are hiring nationally for my role, and we have all personally been told that they are actually looking to get rid of our main office building. As it’s better for business continuity (we’ve had issues in the past with outages etc)
They have noticed a 35% drop in absences and an increase in productivity.
We have revamped our systems to work better from home
We have had our business grow by about 150 members of staff, and we are at the point now where we physically wouldn’t all fit in the office
Just wanted to make the point that not every business is acting in this method
Starting from September so plenty of time to find a new job.
You have to wonder whether companies pull these stunts on purpose to avoid paying redundancies.
Seems like an easy way to make redundancies without the payout.
Big brain move by Lloyds.
That comment section is full of Boomers/manager types.
Lloyds may find themselves struggling to retain or hire skilled staff if other companies are able to offer better work life balance/flexibility
If you prefer to work in an office (your preference not mine), then see if there are vacancies at Lloyds.
I saved a ton of money not coming into the office plus I don’t have the mental stress of commuting into the office
Ah, the good old ‘if staff aren’t being micro managed, and are just as, or more productive, why do we need all those managers/layers’
Get them back in or we are rumbled!
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
My job can’t be done remotely so I have no horse in this race. I can see that some industries do thrive on collaborative working so one or two days doesn’t seem like a big ask to me.
For a fun way to disprove the marketed value of your own property portfolio you should…
*OR* How to spot an artificially inflated property value in 1 easy step.
It’s managements need to justify their existence. That’s all there is to it.
All this talk about propping up commercial rents is bull. That ship has long since sailed. There isn’t some meeting with all the big organisations deciding to move together on this issue.
The stupid thing is that none of the offices are set up for teams meetings. You need small private rooms not big open plan offices
I work for Lloyds. Let me just clarify: we are not upset or angry because we have to go into the office twice a week. Let’s talk about a few things here:
– Culture & communication
– Office space
– Work & life balance
– Costs
Culture and communication: Lloyds received awards foe being one of the most flexible employer. Charlie Nunn and the senior leadership’s been boasting on about how well we’ve done wfh. People’s morale and overall performance skyrocketed notwithstanding the improvement to colleagues’ mental health. We were told these past 3 years the exact opposite of what was thrown at us in a distasteful communication. We were trusted to make our own decision of whether or not we should go into the office. I’m a developer and I need quiet time to write and test code. This cannot be done effectively in the office.
Office space: There are two offices in London due to closures / refurbishment for hundreds of people. These past years you were lucky to find a corner in the cafeteria to work. The dining facilities are working at around 10% capacity so everyone needs to either pack their lunch or go to Pret. One of the reasons we were given is to collaborate better. There are not available collaboration spaces for most people due to shortage. Teams are located across the UK and we were hired with that in mind. I joined 12 years ago and moved to remote Wiltshire which was absolutely fine. I still commuted to the office when it was required but I had the executive decision to do so. Trust is one of the values of the bank and they just spat on it.
Work life balance: like many of my peers my work life balance improved. I manage to spend more time with my daughters, take them to and pick them up from school. In exchange I’ve always worked over my contracted hours. I never minded doing it because I enjoy my work and this was a way from me to pay back for the flexibility. Now my wife or I will have to quit our job or magic up some money for child care costs. Again for the past 3 years most of us worked remotely / in a hybrid way with no problems.
Costs: Cost of living crisis, commuting costs do I have to say more? Our childcare costs hundreds of pounds a month.
The communication came out of the blue and was worded rather distasteful with no factual reason as to why we are being ordered back to the office. Productivity and moral was up. The comms has thousands of comments (80% of which are negative) and two of my direct reports openly told me that they were looking for new opportunities. I’ll also add that Lloyds does not provide a competitive wage but the perks were worth it. They are also getting rid off compressed work arrangements. The unions were not consulted, some new C-suit dinosaurs recently joined.
Personally I don’t see the attraction of permanent working from home. Did it for a year and at the end of that year I felt like a complete outsider. New job is either in the office or visiting sites with the occasional day WFH when needed. Feels a much more fulfilling role.
As to the arguments of WFH vs Remote – I don’t doubt people can be more productive individually but the trade off is teams across businesses becoming a lot more siloed.
At the 100% remote job, working on a new product launch it was clear a lot of teams weren’t working towards the same end goal which resulted in a massively disjointed customer experience. Intuition tells me if more junior people from those different teams had been having “water cooler chats” they probably would have realised things weren’t aligning much earlier. Sure better communication & management could mitigate this but this was one of the top companies in the world known for getting product launches right.
For a few years, we had a glimpse of a possible way of working that suited everyone… of you wanted to go in great if not great. I think there is a clear devide…extroverts that font like home working and the older generation that think they did it one way so that’s the only way…versus those happier at home and often a younger demographic.
Unfortunately, for those of us that would prefer to wfh the older demographic tend to hold the positions of power so after a while they default back to what they know.
I knew this wfh stuff wouldn’t last. I just feel sorry for the women especially and parents in general who are losing the flexibility Lloyd’s offered and those that trusted the job adverts that stated they were remote workers and now face commutes of many hours.
It’s easy to say that you should look for other work, but companies like lloyds tend to have many staff there who have been there for many years, decades, etc. So, to simply leave isn’t easy.
32 comments
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/lZPqu
Why?
>”[C]ard swipe data” [will be] used to monitor their return.
…
>[I]n cases where staff are unwilling to increase the number of days they spend in the office, managers may have “more formal conversation[s]” about the requirements and expectations of their role, according to the note.
Ooof!
It’s not the 2 days in the office that staff have much of a problem with. It’s the carefully worded reference to the removal of compressed hours. This article nearly completely missed this point. Loads of people work their full time hours but compressed into a 9 day fortnight or whatever.
This was always going to happen. The idea that anything would change after Covid was a pipe dream.
Shame. Lloyds obviously like leasing and heating an office for no reason.
There’s substantial investment in office real estate that can undermine banks, investors, and pension funds if vacated. Never mind the restaurants, taxis etc that cater to office workers. Our cities and towns are built for commuters to head there for work.
I’m not a fan and prefer WFH. However the above is an extremely strong lobby and vested groups that will resist changes.
This would not be an issue pre covid due to the number of more local offices that were open. These have been closed forcing more in central city locations which are expensive to commute to while the work benefit is non existent. It’s either a way to reidce staff count without redundancy payments or pressure from the government to save pret
I hate how we as a workforce have just rolled over and accepted reasons such as collaboration and being able to braid each other’s hair in person as legitimate reasons to sacrifice our time and money to commute into the building to do the exact same job you can do on your laptop at home.
All of this of course peddled by C-suite types (some of whom won’t give you the time of day in communal staff areas) who have been told by building management or business owners that they need to maximise office use to avoid a sunk cost on their lease.
All operating under the overarching goal of controlling the working class so that the already rich and wealthy can horde even more wealth they carefully curated by exploiting silly little things ordinary people need like money to buy food and housing.
Really really sucks that we are going in this direction. My employer wants everyone to be in the office 3 days a week with word that they wish to increase this to 4 in the future.
Will staff get a payrise in line with the increased cost to rent in high cost of living areas/transport costs?
Because for many this is essentially a pay cut.
It’s a disgrace, the statement to employees was a short paragraph with no explanation as the reasons why.
6 months previously a internal report was released showing INCREASED productivity from WFH during covid so it isn’t for productivity gains going back in.
I was hired on basis the job would be WFH, people have planned there lives around this, Lloyds isn’t set up for it, they have large antiquated offices that are only in big cities.
I work with people in the company all over the UK and the world, I do hard technical work and do overtime without charging in order to get deadlines done.
Now I will sit on teams in the office instead of sitting on teams at home, I won’t be able to concentrate nearly as well in a busy and loud office with people on calls left and right to me, my productivity will go down.
At a time when this is a huge step backwards in the industry we are going to loose emerging talent who will go elsewhere, im considering leaving solely on this issue.
The reason Lloyds was so attractive to me was the culture, agile and forward thinking attitude to working now im ashamed to work there.
They need to give back all the recently won awards they received on future ways of working.
Financial Services (at least here in Edinburgh) is quite a close group, with many people moving between companies and getting to know everyone. Lots of Lloyds staff are already planning on leaving off the back off this. Within hours of the announcement I knew of colleagues who’d been contacted asking if there were any positions going at the company I work for.
Convenient this is happening when other banks have started to layoff office staff… Maybe I’m cynical but I’d wager the real reason for this is get staff to quit so Lloyds can trick them out of getting a redundancy payout..
Arbitrarily, adding the expenses and time of a daily commute to everyone is absolutely guaranteed to improve team spirit, productivity, and morale.
All so I can sit on teams calls with people at the other end of the country all day. Yep, absolutely an improvement over WFH.
This will become the norm…big business waiting for recession to kick in and unemployment to rise, when this does happen and there is a wider pool for recruitment and less reliance on employees – there will be one almighty push to get folks back into the office…it’s coming
Next headline “Lloyd’s suddenly has hundreds of job vacancies.” Businesses that keep up with modern trends will be the ones who survive, places like luddite Lloyd’s here will have to catch up eventually if they want to keep going.
Meanwhile, although my company can be shit, they are hiring nationally for my role, and we have all personally been told that they are actually looking to get rid of our main office building. As it’s better for business continuity (we’ve had issues in the past with outages etc)
They have noticed a 35% drop in absences and an increase in productivity.
We have revamped our systems to work better from home
We have had our business grow by about 150 members of staff, and we are at the point now where we physically wouldn’t all fit in the office
Just wanted to make the point that not every business is acting in this method
Starting from September so plenty of time to find a new job.
You have to wonder whether companies pull these stunts on purpose to avoid paying redundancies.
Seems like an easy way to make redundancies without the payout.
Big brain move by Lloyds.
That comment section is full of Boomers/manager types.
Lloyds may find themselves struggling to retain or hire skilled staff if other companies are able to offer better work life balance/flexibility
If you prefer to work in an office (your preference not mine), then see if there are vacancies at Lloyds.
I saved a ton of money not coming into the office plus I don’t have the mental stress of commuting into the office
Ah, the good old ‘if staff aren’t being micro managed, and are just as, or more productive, why do we need all those managers/layers’
Get them back in or we are rumbled!
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
My job can’t be done remotely so I have no horse in this race. I can see that some industries do thrive on collaborative working so one or two days doesn’t seem like a big ask to me.
For a fun way to disprove the marketed value of your own property portfolio you should…
*OR* How to spot an artificially inflated property value in 1 easy step.
It’s managements need to justify their existence. That’s all there is to it.
All this talk about propping up commercial rents is bull. That ship has long since sailed. There isn’t some meeting with all the big organisations deciding to move together on this issue.
The stupid thing is that none of the offices are set up for teams meetings. You need small private rooms not big open plan offices
I work for Lloyds. Let me just clarify: we are not upset or angry because we have to go into the office twice a week. Let’s talk about a few things here:
– Culture & communication
– Office space
– Work & life balance
– Costs
Culture and communication: Lloyds received awards foe being one of the most flexible employer. Charlie Nunn and the senior leadership’s been boasting on about how well we’ve done wfh. People’s morale and overall performance skyrocketed notwithstanding the improvement to colleagues’ mental health. We were told these past 3 years the exact opposite of what was thrown at us in a distasteful communication. We were trusted to make our own decision of whether or not we should go into the office. I’m a developer and I need quiet time to write and test code. This cannot be done effectively in the office.
Office space: There are two offices in London due to closures / refurbishment for hundreds of people. These past years you were lucky to find a corner in the cafeteria to work. The dining facilities are working at around 10% capacity so everyone needs to either pack their lunch or go to Pret. One of the reasons we were given is to collaborate better. There are not available collaboration spaces for most people due to shortage. Teams are located across the UK and we were hired with that in mind. I joined 12 years ago and moved to remote Wiltshire which was absolutely fine. I still commuted to the office when it was required but I had the executive decision to do so. Trust is one of the values of the bank and they just spat on it.
Work life balance: like many of my peers my work life balance improved. I manage to spend more time with my daughters, take them to and pick them up from school. In exchange I’ve always worked over my contracted hours. I never minded doing it because I enjoy my work and this was a way from me to pay back for the flexibility. Now my wife or I will have to quit our job or magic up some money for child care costs. Again for the past 3 years most of us worked remotely / in a hybrid way with no problems.
Costs: Cost of living crisis, commuting costs do I have to say more? Our childcare costs hundreds of pounds a month.
The communication came out of the blue and was worded rather distasteful with no factual reason as to why we are being ordered back to the office. Productivity and moral was up. The comms has thousands of comments (80% of which are negative) and two of my direct reports openly told me that they were looking for new opportunities. I’ll also add that Lloyds does not provide a competitive wage but the perks were worth it. They are also getting rid off compressed work arrangements. The unions were not consulted, some new C-suit dinosaurs recently joined.
Personally I don’t see the attraction of permanent working from home. Did it for a year and at the end of that year I felt like a complete outsider. New job is either in the office or visiting sites with the occasional day WFH when needed. Feels a much more fulfilling role.
As to the arguments of WFH vs Remote – I don’t doubt people can be more productive individually but the trade off is teams across businesses becoming a lot more siloed.
At the 100% remote job, working on a new product launch it was clear a lot of teams weren’t working towards the same end goal which resulted in a massively disjointed customer experience. Intuition tells me if more junior people from those different teams had been having “water cooler chats” they probably would have realised things weren’t aligning much earlier. Sure better communication & management could mitigate this but this was one of the top companies in the world known for getting product launches right.
For a few years, we had a glimpse of a possible way of working that suited everyone… of you wanted to go in great if not great. I think there is a clear devide…extroverts that font like home working and the older generation that think they did it one way so that’s the only way…versus those happier at home and often a younger demographic.
Unfortunately, for those of us that would prefer to wfh the older demographic tend to hold the positions of power so after a while they default back to what they know.
I knew this wfh stuff wouldn’t last. I just feel sorry for the women especially and parents in general who are losing the flexibility Lloyd’s offered and those that trusted the job adverts that stated they were remote workers and now face commutes of many hours.
It’s easy to say that you should look for other work, but companies like lloyds tend to have many staff there who have been there for many years, decades, etc. So, to simply leave isn’t easy.