Re: Will they go to work?
This is kind of buggy in the game. But what I can say is that it's not your game that is broken, it just is like this. Normally, when you play another family, your sims will not loose any performance in school or at work, but neither will they gain any. I guess this if fine, although it would be awesome if townies slowly gained skills and got promotions :P
The problem is that when you switch family, they're not at work or in school. This causes performance loss as they arrive late even if you send them there as soon as you enter the game.
What I usually try to do is switch families during times I know that at least the most of them are not at work. For example Saturday morning 🙂 Then I won't experience this glitch.
Here's the official bug-thread about it: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/OPEN-Rotational-play-causes-Sims-to-no-longer-be-at-work/td-p/4472802/page/4
It's quite an old thread and does not follow the bug template, so if you would like to help out, maybe you could fill in the template and write about your bug, and one of the Heroes will merge the old thread with your reported bug. (if you post the link above in the compose box in the template it might be easier for them to find it)
https://answers.ea.com/t5/forums/postpage/board-id/The-Sims-4-Bugs
