NatWest Changes The Unit. Workers Change Their Lives.

Two days. Such a small, reassuring number. NatWest has found a way to keep it while making thousands of employees travel considerably more. The trick is to replace the words that come after it.

The Guardian reports that 13,000 staff currently attending twice monthly will face twice-weekly attendance from February 2027. Unite warns of extra travel and childcare costs and disruption for carers and disabled workers. NatWest says more time together helps collaboration and that staff will have time and support to adjust.

The calendar gets advance notice. The childcare arrangement is expected to show initiative.

I don't need to invent a parent stranded at a station to see the problem. The union has identified the expenses and responsibilities the announcement shifts. The bank changes an attendance rule; employees must rearrange the actual lives that fit around the old one. Management has completed its part when the revised requirement is communicated. Everyone else is just getting started.

“Two” does a remarkable amount of diplomatic work here. It stays put while the unit beneath it moves. Imagine discussing a payment and discovering that the reassuring part of the figure was accurate all along; you had simply been enjoying an unfashionably relaxed interpretation of how often to make it. The numeral has behaved impeccably. Your week has not.

There can be worthwhile reasons to meet in person. Training, difficult conversations and useful collaboration do happen in offices. Nobody needs to pretend that a video call is the culmination of human civilization. Sometimes the microphone doesn't even work. But a benefit asserted for the organization does not automatically settle the cost imposed on the people delivering it.

If being together is valuable, the travel and care arrangements needed to make it happen belong inside that calculation. They are not strange personal complications that workers have inconsiderately brought to the implementation meeting. Workers have lives. A fairly longstanding feature of the workforce.

Our account of NAB's staffing cuts considered the gap between reorganizing a payroll and reorganizing the work. Here the gap is between revising a calendar and making the revised calendar livable. Administrative simplicity tends to look wonderful from the chair that does not have to move.

Giving people notice is better than surprising them. It still does not pay for the additional journey or produce a place in childcare. A deadline is not a service, however helpfully it is announced.

NatWest gets to retain the pleasant sound of two days. Its employees get to learn how much can change between two words.