Where have all the workers gone?

© Simon Poulter 2018

I’m looking out on the Westway, that grim stretch of tarmac and concrete eulogised, somewhat, by The Clash as a totem of the West London they emerged from. It’s 8am on a Friday morning and something is strange: there’s hardly any traffic coming into the capital, despite what should be bumper-to-bumper rush hour. It may be the last day of August, but that’s not to say people aren’t back at work as, if the Tube is anything to go by this week, they are. It is, though, the last day of the school holidays, which might mean frantic parents are shipping bored teenagers out to Thorpe Park or Chessington World of Adventures for one last outing in the dog days of the summer holiday.

Taxi drivers have commented on this Friday phenomenon: one told me that he doesn’t bother coming in to London on Fridays as there’s just so little business. He blamed flexible working (or, in other words, “working from home”). In fact, so many of us are commuting only as far as the sofa or home office on a Friday that cabbies feel it’s just not worth the trouble. Now, I’m sure this is just an extreme view, but if I look at how my current employer has, to a point, tolerated home working, it may not be a surprise.

When I started my career, 32 years ago, there was no such thing for most industries. Journalism was a little different, as with a typewriter most freelancers worked at home and either brought their copy in by hand or posted it. But then came the digital revolution. I remember borrowing an early laptop my first magazine had purloined in 1987: for the 30 minutes that the battery lasted, it was quite a novelty sitting out in the garden bashing out album reviews. It was, however, the mobile phone that truly transformed workplace mobility. Suddenly you were in when you were out (something I loathed as I always considered the mobile ringing to be an interruption. Mind you, I had the same opinion when someone called me on my deskphone, too...). Today we have all of these devices in one - our smartphone. There is seemingly no productivity activity you can’t do on one. And with us bound to our phones like life support systems, we are never going to be able to switch off.

Commuting is hardly one of the most enjoyable duties, and on Britain’s overcrowded, delayed, strike-hit, standing-room-only trains, it is positively purgatorial. Which is what alarms me about the sight of people on public transport with their laptops, tablets and phones, feverishly working away on e-mails, presentations and reports. It begs the question - do they have unreasonable bosses, expecting them to be connected 24/7, constantly in crisis mode as ludicrously short deadlines keep coming up? Or are people simply spacing their days out to suit their own working style? (Another theory is that workers spend so much of their office time and IT resources on Facebook that they need the extra hours to do their work…).

Picture: TFL

The University of the West of England has just published a study which found that increasing numbers of commuters are now using their travel time to and from work to deal with the mountains of e-mail that corporate life, in particular, generates. This should not surprise: next time you’re on a train before 9am, look around and count how many are stooped over their mobiles. Some will be playing Candy Crush, sure, but others - and I’d suggest those with the most furrowed brows - will be frantically catching up with the overnight missives from other timezones…or insomniac bosses.

So, asks the university’s report, should all this pro bono e-mail be considered part of an employee’s contracted hours? When I used to commute daily from Amsterdam to Eindhoven in a former life, Philips paid for me to have a first class seat on the four-hour round trip, providing me with the perfect environment to work and even leave the office early to carry on working on the train home. It never occurred to me that this was ‘free’ work - it was just work, and I was able to do it in a convenient way, even without (in those days) onboard WiFi. The bigger issue, however, is how much work continues when you get home. In my line of work (PR), there are inevitable periods of ‘wartime’ when there’s a crisis to attend to, or a major launch that simply needs the hours put in, which could be done in the soul-destroying environment of an empty office at night, or in the comfort of home with warm food and a cold beer to assist.

Problems, however, begin when wartime becomes permanent, and expectations arise of being constantly ‘on’, day and night, at weekends and during holidays (I was once on a conference call where one of the participants had taken his laptop on holiday and we could all audibly hear the sounds of a busy Côte d'Azur in the midst of the August grande vacances). Here is where flexible working needs to be just that. Work/life balance is something major modern employers like to promote as part of their commitment to employee wellbeing, but how many proactively enforce it? Workplace stress and mental health issues have definitely seen a marked increase in the era of e-mail and digital connectivity, and far too many companies pay only lip service to enabling employees to keep their work life and home life in correct balance.

So step up accountancy firm PwC which has launched a scheme for new recruits in which they can specify (well, “suggest”) the hours they would like to work per week. The idea is to try and attract employees who may not - or cannot - be tied to the traditional 9-to-5 workday. PWC says that the scheme is in response to their own study which found that almost half of respondents would prioritise flexible hours when looking for the ideal on.

"People assume that to work at a big firm they need to follow traditional working patterns. We want to make it clear that this isn't the case,” says PwC's chief people officer, Laura Hinton. “In order to recruit the best people, we recognise that we need to offer greater flexibility, different working options and a route back in for those looking to restart their careers." Flexible working hours are not only good for staff, Hinton says, but also the economy, business and society. “We're likely to see a rise in people transitioning in and out of work throughout their careers and those organisations who responsibly support their people to do this will ultimately gain a competitive advantage”.

Which neatly brings me to some news of my own: today is my last day as an employee of Nokia, and I’m leaving after almost eight years at Nokia and the acquired Alcatel-Lucent combined. It’s been an amazing journey, taking in the ups and downs of corporate life, changes of CEOs and other executives, a lot of not commenting on rumours or speculation, and some major shifts in technology, as 4G/LTE arrived, the cloud and virtualisation began to replace hardware, and 5G popped its head above the parapet. And now it’s almost here for real. And, yes, working in corporate communications during this time has meant a lot of e-mails and conference calls around the clock, and at weekends, too. I’ll admit, it goes with the territory, but on the other hand, the tools are there and, to a greater or lesser agree, the freedom, too, to manage your own time appropriately.

I’ll have news next week of where I go next (and trust me, I’m extremely excited at the prospect). Strangely, it will involve technology that enables companies and their employees to work flexibly. And I’m sure they’ll practice what they preach.