I just need to vent, and would welcome any advice.
My husband works part time for a social housing company in a small customer service team, primarily answering calls and emails. Last Tuesday I broke my arm, on Wednesday he had been asked to work from home because of some system issues thing in the office, but on Thursday they wanted him in to train a new starter (he works in a team of 4, and 3 have left/are leaving, which is a whole other issue I won't get into). His manager text him this 10 minutes after he'd finished. He told them that he needed to work from home because I needed help. This was completely true, we have a dog who obviously needs to go on walks, and I currently can't even put socks on by myself. For the first couple of days after my accident I was either in excruciating pain, or completely knocked out, and I needed help just getting dressed.
He ended up arguing with his manager for about an hour before eventually saying they could either have him working from home or he was calling in sick, but either way he was being at home because I needed help and that's his priority. The next day his manager completely ignored him, and then on Friday told him that he'd be having a meeting with him and HR this week to discuss his decision and the fact that they all need to “compromise” to meet the needs of the business. My husband said that was fine, and that he was compromising by working from home when he could easily have asked for emergency leave. There was also a shitty comment about how they'd pushed back the start date for the new person “at great cost”, like we're meant to feel bad his shitty company lost some money.
There's a longer back story here as well. He worked from home through all of lockdown, during which time the business actually moved to a different office. Once lockdown ended, they wanted him working out of this new office. He did it for a while, but he's autistic, and the new office is further away from home and in a big open building that's not in that great of a condition. He really struggled with the noise and the over-stimulation from the commute, and just generally from the culture-shock of having worked in our quiet little box room for so long. He was off sick quite a lot, got all kinds of aids and techniques, and eventually was prescribed beta-blockers, but still really struggled. We spent ages arguing with them about letting him work from home, or at least doing an extended phased return to help him adjust to being back in an office, but they weren't having it. They kept insisting that he needed to be in the office because they were encouraging tenants to come in person to get help, and this was 'part of his role'.
It's been about a year since that whole debacle and so far they've basically had about 3 tenants a week show up, and 90% of them have been turned away and told they need to call because the person they need to speak to is mobile or working from home still. He's also got stats to show that he's far more productive when working from home because he isn't wandering off and going to calm down every ten mins like he has to in the office. Oh and he went through occupational health about it all, who said he absolutely should be working from home full time, and if that wasn't possible, at a minimum he should have a six month period of gradually increasing time spent in the office to help him adapt, but his work ignored that. He ended up doing two weeks of mixed home and office work before being back in full time.
It's all just so frustrating, we both feel like he's completely in the right, but they treat him like he's trying to get out of work when in reality he's trying everything he can to keep working because he loves the job (but not the company) so much. He's back in the office tomorrow and has this meeting on Thursday. I could honestly do with him at home still to be honest because I still have a lot of pain and am basically exhausted all the time. I can't get the dog's harness on by myself to walk him, and cooking anything more complicated than toast is really challenging to do one handed.
Sorry for war and peace, I'm just so fed up of his shitty work and the effect it's having on him, if anyone has any advice of what to say in this meeting, or just in general, I'd appreciate it. Thank you for reading my ramblings if you've made it this far!
My fucking arm hurts.
ETA: we're in the UK, just for reference.