I'm back, back, BACK - to the living room

Picture: Microsoft

It’s not often that I return to work from a holiday and not feel a pang of regret. Or, at least, exhale a grumpy “frnrhhhrrr” as the morning alarm intrudes my first morning back after a final blissful night of not-working sleep. This time I didn't fall back into slumber and therefore waking an hour later with a lot of agitated F-wordery in the manner of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings And A Funeral. No, this time, none of that. My two-week staycation did the job perfectly, and I returned to work yesterday relaxed and refreshed, as holidays are supposed to render you. Well, I say "returned to work" but, er, not back at work, as in the place of. That, once more, is as it has been since early April - the living room. And it will continue to be for the foreseeable future, despite Boris Johnson advising Britain to “cautiously” go back to work from the beginning of this month.

My company - very wisely - is, like many others, neither encouraging the mass return to office life nor extensively facilitating it, for now. Plans are being drawn up to make it happen when the time is right, but on the basis that productivity-wise, we're all doing alright from home and have been since March, so there's no immediate requirement to bring everyone back in. Not that doing so would be straightforward. When I started my new job in April, the whole lockdown thing was still only envisaged as temporary. Coronavirus deaths were low - England had recorded just 403 by 5th April -  but with exponential leaps of 5, 14, 25, 70 and 188 in the week leading up to it. The total UK death toll is now over 46,000, with 311,641 cases reported. Deaths are down, but the number of cases is rising. With that in mind, Boris and his ministers would still love us back in our offices, eating in local restaurants or buying lunch at sandwich shops, spending money again on suits and business shirts, and getting them dry cleaned in the same vicinity, thus stimulating the sub-economies that exist around places of work, especially in cities.

However, the appetite amongst both employers and employees to restart commuting, and therefore mingling with The Virus, is decidedly low. Analysis by The Guardian found that working-from-home would remain the norm for many big companies at least until September - a month later than the 1 August date Boris had set to get people back into the workplace. Some companies, like Google and the NatWest Group, have even said that home working would remain in place until next year. For many employees, the kitchen, spare room or, if they’re lucky, home office, will remain the de facto place of work for the foreseeable future. Some companies are even reinforcing the WFH culture, providing employees with subsidised desks, office chairs and Bluetooth headsets. Others, though, are trying to lure staff back into the office by offering free food and drink, and other perks. Investment bank JP Morgan has installed thermal cameras and stationed a nurse in the lobby of its Canary Wharf office. The accountancies PwC and EY as well as the banks Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays are all working on the principle that limited returns to office working will take place in September. But it’s still all very tentative. All major employers, with substantial amounts of office real estate, still have to get their heads around social distancing. In order to reopen, shops and restaurants have had to go to extraordinary lengths to put down direction arrows on floors, install plastic screens or simply provide staff with PPE. Offices have the added complexity of how to transport hundreds of employees to office floors by lift, even if the general government wisdom is that employees sitting amongst each other for eight hours a day should be safe.

Getting to your desk is one thing, but getting to the front door is another thing entirely. Commuting by public transport has not - and is unlikely to - returned to pre-pandemic levels. Our street serves testament to this, normally being used as a free car park for the local Zone 4 railway station a five minute walk away. Even taking August into account, parking is still freely available to us residents. People, clearly, are not going back to work. In the City of London, more than half a million people usually work in the financial district, almost exclusively travelling by public transport, but, according to the Institute of Directors, there isn’t likely to be a “mad rush back to the office” this month, according to its chief economist, Tej Parikh, who told The Guardian that this reluctance was down to public transport and childcare concerns. “Adjusting workspaces can take time, and isn’t without costs,” he added. Simply put, the summer holiday months just aren’t the time for offices to staff up again (assuming they’re not making people redundant). But clearly some companies are looking even further than than the summer.

My own experience of working during the pandemic has been defined somewhat by the fact that I started work at my company three weeks after the UK officially went into lockdown. Apart from my boss and his boss (with whom I met for my interview), and one other team member, I’ve never spent any time in the physical company of the myriad people I now work and interact with on a daily basis. In a past life, I actually embraced working from home: I could get things done (not easy in an office shared with boisterous sales people). But it’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be. Getting up, travelling on the Tube, grabbing a coffee and then firing up the laptop, before reversing the whole process several hours later has its benefits. Distance, mainly. An opportunity to separate work from home.

I’ve been in the workforce for 34 years and operated out of a variety of environments and team situations. But for younger employees, especially those on the first rungs of their career, being forced into whatever work-from-home set-up they’ve had to adopt - which includes bedrooms and shared kitchens - they’re missing out on the office. Even the annoying things, like your desk neighbour’s toxic Cup-a-Soup, loud phone conversations or inane football banter (actually, that’s alright). Not even The Sound Of Colleagues website, with its background sound effects of real offices, can recreate the experience.

A few weeks ago The Times interviewed Generation Zers about how they were coping at home, and found many to have enjoyed the freedom of sitting in your pyjamas all day long, with no ghastly commute to cope with, but have increasingly found that they were missing out on networking and socialising - yes, including the running commentary from across the desk on their colleague’s romantic travails. One very wise 24-year-old even noted that he was losing out on the benefit of sitting alongside older, more experienced colleagues. “Video conferencing will never be the same as meeting,” he said.

In some respects, the pandemic has occurred at the worst time for everyone. As April and May came around, we enjoyed glorious weather in the UK, and while June and July were oddly less good, summer’s continuance with the sort of hot sunshine we’ve been having so far this August, is clearly not going to chase people back into the office, even if the lure of professional-quality air conditioning is quite a draw. Of the UK’s 15 million people who’ve been working from home throughout the crisis, more than two-thirds - according to the Office for National Statistics - worry that going back to workplaces carries too much risk. “The overwhelming majority of British people work in offices, the London School of Economics’ Professor Tony Travers told The Times recently, adding that services now accounts for 80% of British GDP.

However, a recent study by Morgan Stanley found that only 34% of Britons have so far returned to work since Boris ended the “work from home, if you can” guidance. and announced that people could return to their place of work at their employers' “discretion”. Morgan Stanley found that three-quarters of Germans, Italians and Spanish had already returned, with as many as 83% of French office staff back (though there's no clarity on whether they immediately buggered off again to enjoy les grandes vacances). British office workers seem to be even more stubborn: nearly half of office staff are still working from home five days a week, with just a quarter returning on a part-time basis. Perhaps a lack of official clarity is partly to blame. Just two days after Johnson gave his guidance, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said: “People who can work from home should continue to do so". In London, public transport is still operating at only 25% of normal passenger traffic, a telling figure despite some evidence of arterial roads creeping back to their usual congestion.

All this raises the question of whether things will ever return to normal. Maybe they won’t, or at least, we won't return to 9-to-5, Monday to Friday office working. The functional need for workplace distancing and the social adjustment that millions of workers have, abruptly, had to make since March, could change the working culture forever. But we will still need some place to physically attend, even if it’s for weekly team meetings, or collaborative sessions that can’t be done over Zoom or Google Hangouts. Furthermore, many workers will, over time, simply grow tired of their working from their home environment, and desire the alternative that an office provides (which also means not suffering the vagaries of iffy broadband). Tech giants like Apple and Google have continued to invest in vast architectural wet dreams in which to house their workers, with the former’s chief executive, Tim Cook, even insisting that “Nothing yet replaces human interaction” and dismissed the idea of his people never again not working in physical proximity to each other. The problem is, no one at the moment wants to be in physical proximity to anyone who doesn’t reside in their ‘bubble’. Unless they’re crowding out Bournemouth Beach. When they’re supposed to be working from home.