Offices across the UK are reporting their highest attendance since the 2020 Pandemic as employees shun working from home to embrace an environment with air conditioning.
"We're seeing our best June for in-office working and sickness absences," said one head of HR. "Usually when it's a bit sunny we get lots of fortuitous tummy-bugs and non-specific illnesses. However, now the mercury's crept into the high-20's, people seem a lot more ready to get on with the tasks at hand so long as they can do them in a climate-controlled building."
Many companies are struggling to cope with the influx of people, having reduced their number of desks and office space in the expectation hybrid working would remain commonplace. "It's full to bursting out there," one company director told us. "So we've had to take a page out of the NHS's books and set people up at temporary workstations in corridors. Most are ok with it so long as they're within six feet of an air vent. We'd tried everything for bringing people back from their homes: Team-building sessions, discounted coffee, relaxed clothing rules on a Friday; it turns out all we needed was climate change to keep doing what it's doing."
With temperatures set to peak over the weekend, requests for overtime are also at an all-time high. "At this rate, we're going to run out of jobs to do and have people reorganising the stationary cupboard. If it doesn't cool down and staff don't get back to their kitchen tables and doing chores in parallel to working, we may have to consider redundancies, or hoping that all this close-proximity working causes another outbreak of something and a need to send everyone home."
image from pixabay
