The office staff at Frasers Group will never again work from home on Fridays. This is because an update said that some people “didn’t see Friday as a working day.”
The update from the head of work of the retail group, David Al-Mudallal, was seen by The Sun. It said that there were “so many examples” of people not being reachable when they should have been.
So-called “Fraser Fridays” were started as a flexible way to work in 2020.
A company rep said that the company understood that some people worked better in an office.
The representative told a well-known website that “working together” was “crucial to how we show respect.”
“We all agree that we’re at our best in the office when we work together,” she said.
Mr. Al-Mudallal was said to have told staff that some of their online entertainment profiles “showed that they don’t think of Friday as a working day.”
He also said that Friday had become a “day of the week that doesn’t work.”
Mike Ashley, the founder of Sports Direct and a very rich person in retail, owns Frasers Group, which is made up of brands like House of Fraser and Evans Cycles.
In May, Mr. Ashley gave his soon-to-be son-in-law, Michael Murray, the day-to-day running of his retail business.
It is thought that managers at Frasers Group have been judging how productive their employees are on Fridays since the beginning of the flexible working plan and have decided to call people back to the office.
Since the COVID pandemic restrictions were lifted, it has become more common for people to work in ways that are flexible and cross-over. For example, some people get to work some days at home and others at the office.
Still, organisations compare how they see new ways of working with how they used to do things. In April of this year, Airbnb decided to let its employees work from anywhere for as long as they wanted. Last year, the manager of Goldman Sachs called remote work “another norm” and called it a “deviation” all in all.
A review of directors has shown that for some representatives, working from home for part of the week has become the norm.
The Chartered Institute of Management discovered in February that more than 80% of firms had embraced cross-breed working – the highest rate since the pandemic.
The group said that firms should use crossover fill-in because it is “best practise.”
In April, Ben Willmott, the head of public arrangement at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that mixed-work arrangements let companies cast a wider net while trying to make up for skills gaps. It can also improve efficiency and work-life balance.
But he also said that there could be problems with cross-generational working, such as the possibility of “a two-level labour force,” with a divide between people who have a lot of flexibility and people who can’t work from home.
The UK government said in September 2021 that it might want to give workers the option to ask for flexible working from the start of a new job. It is now looking at more than 1,600 responses to a meeting that ended in December of last year.
