An increasing number of companies are telling their staff to work from home at least some of the time, confirming previous reports that, for many, “hybrid working” could become “the norm” post lockdown. HSBC moved 1,200 staff in Britain to permanent working from home contracts last month – many of them willingly – in an effort to cut costs, despite a study finding that working from home is less productive (not to mention the impact on staff socialisation). The latest companies to take this approach are Google and KPMG. The Guardian has the story.
Accounting and consultancy group KPMG has told its 16,000 U.K. staff that they will have to work only an average of two days in the office each week from next month, as the firm revealed its plans for a post-pandemic hybrid working model.
Under the new initiative, which the company has called the “four-day fortnight”, staff will spend the remaining days working either from home or at client sites.
In addition, over the summer, staff will also be given an extra 2.5 hours off each week “to give people time away from work and to re-energise”.
All staff will be given an extra day off on June 21st, the date the Government plans to end all social distancing restrictions – which many see as marking the end of the pandemic.
The new KPMG working arrangements were unveiled as Google said it expected 20% of its staff to work from home permanently in the future. The search engine group said it anticipated 60% of workers being office-based, 20% working in new office locations and 20% staying at home.
Those proposals are in stark contrast to the approach taken by investment bank Goldman Sachs. On Tuesday, Goldman moved in the opposite direction, telling its U.S. and U.K. bankers to prepare to return to offices next month.
Jon Holt, Chief Executive at KPMG UK, said: “We trust our people. Our new way of working will empower them and enable them to design their own working week. The pandemic has proven it’s not about where you work, but how you work.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Almost all of the U.K.’s 50 biggest employers say that they do not plan to bring staff back to the office full-time, according to BBC News.
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If the intended end result of this legislation is the total devastation of the hospitality sector I would argue that the government are on to an absolute winner.
Employees will become unmanageable and customers will soon vote with their feet.
I see a bright future for unlicensed private drinking establishments, otherwise shebeens, which saw spectacular growth during the illegal lockdowns.
People just won’t comply with this though will they? Not when it’s their livelihoods on the line. And who’s going to go round enforcing this nonsense? I call BS on this one. And as for direct harassment of staff from punters, management have always been on top of this and dealt with it accordingly. You tell the customer to behave or they get out. Bouncers on the door are a bonus. I’ve known loads of people get barred over the years. But eavesdropping on someone’s conversation, finding it offensive then grassing them up? Nah. As you say, landlords would lose custom, word would spread and it just wouldn’t be worth the knock-on effect to business.
Whereas in the old days, most pubs were mixed customers with relatively spacious and calm surroundings (the better to chat up the opposite sex!), nowerdays they are either empty or crushed. How does a bar manager monitor what is said (or claimed to have been said by a disgruntled employee) in a crouded bar or at a remote corner of any bar; it cannot be done.
Mogwai seems to think it is only loud drunken ravings that would be caught by the proposed legislation whereas it could be any remark heard or claimed to have been heard by any member of staff.
Why do so many comments suggest this is only a problem for the hospitality sector? The proposed legislation does not say that. I used to be a Director of a Company which sent employees overseas for business. How could we counter a complaint from one of them who claimed to have been offended by a remark while thousands of miles away from the office? Those who were underperforming or just a nuisance could have had us running round in circles with legislation like this.
Why only that sector. What about employers with any engagement with the npublic, suppliers or customers in any country who might say something a difficult member of staff decides they don’t like. You can imagine a salesman who is missing his / her targets reporting alleged offensive language and starting a complaint against their employer as a way of thwarting dismissal.
I agree there are wider implications beyond the hospitality sector and of course this legislation could and will be used by all aggrieved employees which was a point I made in my original comment.
What next? Airline captains being liable for the tone of all conversations onboard their planes? Bus drivers being responsible for pissed up comments shouted down the aisles?
The most frightening explanation for this latest moron festival is that they are orders from global HQ and a further step the long march towards totalitarianism and agenda 2030. Sterilise and destroy the social hubs and gathering places.
If not, and they are genuinely aiming to protect *pub* workers from lairy and off-colour conversations *in a pub* by making their employers legally liable for other people’s speech, then they really do in biological and anatomical terms have shit for brains.
Either way these politicians are highly dangerous and are increasingly becoming our enemy with each passing day.
“The most frightening explanation for this latest moron festival is that they are orders from global HQ and a further step the long march towards totalitarianism and agenda 2030. Sterilise and destroy the social hubs and gathering places.”
“Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) in 1912 warned the English: “change your hearts or you will lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them”. Once that disaster occurred, however, he recognised that something terrible would happen: “when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England”.
From an article in The Critic by James Curl 19 January, 2021.
One of the first things that alerted me to the reality of the Scamdemic in 2020 was the assault on our pubs and I remain convinced that this determination to destroy pubs is ongoing. In fact to the Davos Deviants the destruction of pubs is intrinsic to their planning and it is not hard to see why.
The situation has been bad for years. You have to keep an eye out the whole time to make sure some mocha-choco-latte-frappéccino-drinking woke-ist scumbag is covertly filming you on his Samsung Galaxy these days! The destruction of pubs has been going since the 1980s. There are very few landlord-owned and -run pubs these days. Even the breweries often no longer own them.
We’ve been in the era of corporate, managed ‘supermarket pubs’ for at least 20 years: oversized, soulless, plastic palaces where children run riot and parents can ask drinkers to tone down their language in front of their little Tristans and Tabithas, while they get loudly p***ed with other mummies and daddies!
The deliberate decimation of the hospitality sector has been about driving people apart. Masking in indoor environments finished the job, as people could no longer talk to one another. When I first moved to London, I found a pub, swiftly got to know people and had a substantial base of friends within weeks.
Politicisation of lockdowns and destruction of hospitality means that (having left London shortly before the lockdowns began) I have no friends where I live. I’m averse to going out, not because I’m scared of phantom viruses, but because I can’t face building a base for myself again (which I had begun to do, pre-lockdown) only for the Government, Ferguson, Michie and Whitty to take it all away from me when the WHO declare an avian flu lockdown immediately after signing the upcoming pandemic treaty. I worry it’ll be 2024 in order to bollix DeSantis’ or Trump’s run for US President.
We’re going to enter a new era of ‘speakeasies’: unlicensed, underground drinking dens where phones and cameras are surrendered on entry. Everything legal and ‘normal’ is being driven underground.
“… critics fear the change will have far-reaching consequences for free speech.”
That is obviously the intention.
Why anyone trusts Kemi Badenoch is beyond me. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of every draconian government policy since lockdowns started in March 2020.
Monday 27th February 11am to 12pm
Yellow FREEDOM Boards
Junction A329 &
A322 Downshire Way
Bracknell RG12 7AA
Stand in the Park
Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Bars, and the like, will simply stop employing women and snowflakes
Worker Protection Bill.
Surely some mistake:
Woker Protection Bill.
All readers should make careful note that what may seem as accidents or drafting or the result of politicised civil servants actually represents the will of Ministers. Only by such understanding can we recognise where the responsibility lays.
If it was otherwise, Ministers would robustly ensure the legislation never reached even a proposal to Cabinet, let alone being presented for a First Reading in Parliament. If backj bench MPs were sufficiently in disagreement with it they would, long ago, have objected and caused a row.
The truth is there is hardly a conservative in the Conservative Party, none opposite them and none at all with any determination. Vote for a party not currently represented in Parliament.
My MP is Northern Ireland Minister, no replies to any of my questions regarding the woke & WEF agenda legislation. Tells me everything I need to know about where responsibility lies for implementing this bull dung.
How absurd is it that government concerns itself with garbage like this at a time when we are having to fork out 80 quid a week for gas and electricity, and all the other major problems, like mass illegal immigration, knife and gun crime, and while another young person losses their life to a knife stuck in their throat, their government bussies itself wondering what people might be saying inside a pub. Is this really the proper role of government? NOPE. It is NOT.
Hear, hear.
Trying not to laugh. Could you imagine the UK Keystone Cops policing this? Inept is too kind a word for these tattooed clowns
in fancy dress costumes.
We don’t have a Conservative Government.
We have one branch of the left-wing, authoritarian, eco-nutter, Westminster Uni Party. And when they’re kicked out of Office, we’ll get another branch of the same party …… unless and until we destroy one of the branches.
The CON branch will be easier to destroy than the Labour one.
Kemi Badenoch has no more influence in the Bill in question than I have. Her Party role like Redwood, Baker, Mogg, Patel, and latterly Lee Andersen, is to keep the Tory centre Right vote on side for electoral purposes. These people have carved themselves a niche in the Party structure but at the end of the day the Party drift to the Left continues as it has for the last 30 years. If any of these jokers were true Conservatives they would not be in this wretched Party.