Alright for some...

And so another bank holiday comes around - the second of three this month - which means yet another four-day week for those who nominally work 9 to 5, to use a patently anachronistic term. For some, however, today means the start of a three-day week. No, we haven’t suddenly returned to the industrial chaos of the 1970s, but the progressive shortening of the working week - for some - and intended to make life sweeter for those who benefit from a bit more free time. Alright for some, then, and of no benefit to those who earn by the hour...

In many workplaces, a relaxation of the five-day grindstone has been happening in one form or another for a number of years. When I moved to Amsterdam in 1999 the company I joined had established a ‘Dress Down Friday’, which basically meant male Dutch executives exchanged their dull grey suits and ties for button-down Oxford shirts and those ridiculous red (or orange) spongebag trousers popular amongst Faragists. From one perspective it marked a truncation of the working week, but the reality was that in many other parts of industry, it had always been common for men - and it was always men - to slip off to an 18-hole meeting room for an afternoon of essential “networking”, while those of us non-golfist drones from Sector 7G carried on the toil.

To some extent, and in some professions, the idea of a working ‘week’ has long been amorphous. In all the years I’ve worked in corporate communications, mobile phones and e-mail have meant 24/7 connectivity. News and crises rarely respect the conventions of a weekend. The creep of working from home - a digitally-enabled capability available long before Covid came along - has, though, changed the patterns of working days previously dictated to my office hours and commuting. 

When we emerged from lockdowns we started to witness the emergence of the ‘TWAT’ - people who only went into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. This resulted in pubs and bars near offices thronging on the third of those three days, in the way that Friday nights used to be. But not for all. Even with the World Health Organisation last week declaring the Covid “global health emergency” officially over, 44% of the UK’s workforce is still classed as WFH for all or part of the time, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

The move from office desk to kitchen table has been a boon for many, liberating them from the relentless slog, frustrations and expense of commuting. A godsend, in particular, for family life, especially those with childcare responsibilities. However, it has also been a boon for the leisure sector. Golf courses have seen a notable increase in weekday afternoon usage. A Stanford University study in the US last August found that, with the use of mobile phone geolocation data near 3,400 golf courses, there were almost 300% more people at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon than three years before. Data in this country has also suggested a more leisurely approach to working hours: contactless payments company SumUp reported that midweek spending on hair and beauty treatments grew last year by 5% - and notably 10% higher in Liverpool, for reasons not explained. Gyms have also reported being busier during the middle of the day, rather than at the traditional peak times of early evenings and weekends.

So does this suggest The Great Shirk at work?  Not necessarily. There is no doubt that companies are taking a more relaxed approach to working hours - something that was impossible to police, realistically, during lockdown (despite dystopian talk of firms installing keystroke-tracking software on corporate laptops to see monitor home working productivity).

As, currently, a man of enforced leisure, thanks to being made redundant at the end of March, it’s been noticeable in many of the discussions I’ve had with potential employers that the topic of work-life-balance is high on their list of selling points. At my last company I was contracted to work between 8.30am and 5.30pm Monday to Thursday, with an hour off on Friday afternoons, but such was the nature of what I did that I rarely worked those hours - sometimes less, sometimes considerably more. I had a boss who took the progressive view that the most important thing was for the work to get done, and done to everyone’s satisfaction. When you’re responsible for the reputation of a Eur 44 billion company, you can’t afford to be slack. But there was an acknowledgement that we weren’t in a workhouse.

Picture: Microsoft

If anything, working without being conditioned by ‘office hours’ has made people more efficient in how they structure their working day. That, though, hasn’t stopped some companies becoming increasingly insistent on returning to in-office attendance, with chief executives like Amazon’s Andy Jassy stating that in-person working enhances engagement. Others, like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, have complained that performance and productivity has not been the same since before the pandemic due to WFH.

Some have taken drastic action: insurance giant Aviva’s CEO Amanda Blanc has made getting staff back into the office part of her senior managers’ bonuses (a less pass-ag version of that Victorian pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his one-man crusade when Cabinet Office minister, leaving official notes on desks inscribed: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish, Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg MP”). Blanc’s approach may have worked - with most employees back in Aviva’s offices for at least part of the week.

Other businesses have taken a more incentivised approach. PwC has been luring staff back to the office with one-off £1,000 bonuses, while others have introduced Silicon Valley-style perks like free food and snacks. There is also evidence that more companies are urging a return to in-office working for at least part of the week to get collaboration and engagement going. Some bosses have even expressed the view that home working can harm career development. I can see that: I joined my last company at the start of the 2020 lockdown, and didn’t see the inside of the office until August 2021. It would not be until last year before people were returning in significant numbers, which meant that my internal network development was done through virtual means - e-mail and video calls, mainly, when they could be scheduled. 

It does, of course, depend on what industry you’re in. Bank CEOs have, in particular, been the most vocal about encouraging - or instructing - staff back into the offices (at Canary Wharf, the eastern annexe to the City of London, commuter traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels). In other sectors, however, WFH continues, albeit in many places as a “hybrid” model, a somewhat loose concept in which there’s no prescription as to when you come into the office. One company I recently interviewed with adopted a “flexible-hybrid working model” at the beginning of last year, applying what it said was lessons learned from remote working during the pandemic, while impressing upon its employees the need for collaboration through both co-location and remote working. “We’ve better understood the benefits that remote working can bring - improved work/life balance, less time spent commuting, greater inclusivity and involvement” for its people, its head of HR has said, calling out the benefit of giving staff more focused time free from distractions.

But with the pandemic well behind us, many companies are still trying to work out the best approach. It has meant a complete rethink of property portfolios, with corporates downsizing office space and moving to smaller headquarters, leveraging the cost efficiencies that come from discarding gargantuan corporate citadels. For many, though, its providing a more ‘optional’ approach to providing venues for collaboration when it is needed, and enabling solitude when that is best for concentration.

Picture: WeWork

However, some companies appear to be ripping up the rule books of the working week altogether. Another benefit of the pandemic, and the somewhat apocryphal ‘Great Resign’ (as people supposedly reassessed their lives), is that companies have had to rethink how they attract and retain talent. In the tech industry it was the offer of free snacks and lunches to keep engineers tied to their coding stations, and all those other Silicon Valley cliches of playrooms and ‘fun’ distractions to take the edge of the intensity of software development. 

The latest thing is the four-day week. With the summer approaching (as indicated by the relentless rain), employers are introducing significantly shorter Fridays, with some cancelling afternoon working altogether. “Pressure for a four-day week has been building and it’s resulting in companies looking at different ways of doing business,” Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, recently told The Times. ‘Summer hours’, he said, were being applied as a means of raising morale (probably essential with pay rises in short supply amid the cost of living crisis). “Seasonal hours give companies the opportunity to experiment with shorter working hours in a much smaller time period so workers can adjust and get used to it,” Ryle added.

According to The Times, L’Oréal allows staff to knock-off at 3pm on a Friday, with full half-days available at brands like Cadbury and Nike. It’s not new, though: Kellogg’s have been offering summer hours for 20 years, saying that they believe it allows staff to “recharge and unwind”, benefitting mental and physical wellbeing, as well as productivity and motivation.

Have we, then, become entitled since being given “permission” to work in our trackies from sofas, with no requirement to endure overcrowded, expensive trains, transport strikes and congested streets? Possibly, but there’s no denying that almost instantly Covid transformed the accepted norms of working (it would be horrendously arrogant to lump into that statement the key workers who went into their workplaces throughout lockdown or, simply because of the nature of their jobs, had no choice to work from home).

Certainly, the world of work has changed out of all recognition to that in which I started out in 37 years ago. WFH for me has been a convenience, but not my preference. I actually like getting out of the house for the day, and work infinitely better when in a traditional environment. During lockdowns I even experienced commute envy as my wife, a primary school teacher, was going out every day. Even if her commute only lasted 15 minutes, she was getting to see more than the hedge outside our front window that was my vista while I perched on the sofa doing Teams meetings. But I don’t share the more draconian views of WFH-sceptic CEOs.

That said, at this stage of my unemployment, I’d be happy to have any job, regardless of its mandated hours or where it is conducted. And if any employers are reading this, I’ve managed to make it to the midst of middle age without yet swinging a golf stick in anger. And have no intention of doing so, either.

Feeding the squirrel

Picture: Microsoft

Tomorrow is, apparently, ‘Thirsty Thursday’. Such is the shift of old Monday-Friday working patterns that, since the notional return to offices in the last month, Thursdays have become the new Fridays as workers cram pubs for a convivial livener before heading home to start the weekend a day early (since the once former end to the working week has now become de facto WFH). 

The pattern is borne out further by Transport for London data from a couple of Thursdays ago which recorded one of the busiest days this year at Tube stations in the City of London, with more than 90,000 individual exits through the gates at Bank and Monument. Canary Wharf , serving the City’s spillover financial district, recorded 80,000 barrier activations on the same day. My own office has been considerably busier on Thursdays over the last month in which, finally, I’ve been going in regularly since workplaces started opening up again (and I don’t think it’s the draw of an after-work pint nearby that is bringing teams together on the same day). There is, though, no mandatory requirement at my company to be in a designated office on any day of the week, which is a massive tick for progressive, flexible employment brought about by the pandemic. Perhaps it’s the sector I work in, telecoms, and influenced by the global technology industry, which appears to have adopted flexible working en masse. 

The London Chamber of Commerce & Industry recently reported that 83% of businesses that could work from home were expecting staff to do so on at least one day a week, which ultimately means that numbers are unlikely to return to anything like pre-pandemic levels. What is clear is that patterns are at least showing a discernible rise in people on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with offices - in London at least - up to 20% busier on  those days. Regardless of the professional sector, the evidence is that things are creeping getting back to normal, or at least a version of normal. I wouldn’t say that from anything more than the anecdotal observation of commuting on two or three days, but even when I do, apart from overground trains in south-west London being somewhat full between 7 and 8am (a mixture of workers and private school pupils), once I switch to the Tube for my journey into Paddington, carriages are a lot quieter. 

Passenger numbers in London remain down on pre-pandemic levels, even if the City is receiving more workers again. In and around the West End, central London is suffering the double-whammy of both commuters and tourists staying away, defying national trends. Footfall across UK cities increased by 17% between June and August, according to a Centre For Cities report, but London only saw a 9% increase, and didn't improve by any great margin last month when things were supposed to be getting back to some kind of normal. The end of furlough, the Centre said, added another challenge.

Picture: TFL

Businesses that rely on office workers in London are managing to paint a rosy picture of the apparent recovery: “The Square Mile is buzzing again,” the City of London Corporation’s Catherine McGuinness recently told The Times, noting how the hospitality sector propped up by all the banks and investment houses in the City is enjoying some return to good times. “Getting City employees back to the workplace is vital to street-level recovery after many months of difficult trading,” she added. “While the virus may not have gone, we are learning to live with it, and are beginning to see a renewed, vibrant and thriving City ecosystem.”

The City, however, is not London, and London is not the UK, clearly, but some of this commentary provides a useful barometer for the post-COVID recovery. But the cold hard truth is that we’ve all become so used to working from home (if we work in a sector that enables it, of course), that we’re unlikely to go back to the traditional 9-to-5. Work-life balance, which was always an issue before the pandemic, has been thrust into the spotlight, as companies acknowledge that modern, digital working is so relentless. Few of us are truly off duty, thanks to smartphones and cloud-based apps that allow us to connect to corporate e-mail on any kind of Internet connection. That is only if you allow it to.

My own experience of the last month canvassing my fellow office returnees has delivered a mixed picture. Some colleagues say they were more productive at home, enjoying being uninterrupted by office bantz, unsolicited conversations and that person who doesn’t realise that using a headset only makes them louder. I, on the other hand, have found the office more productive, perhaps a result of having spent 35 years in these environments. I have enjoyed the separation of home and work, even regarding the occasional perils of commuting in London as a small price to pay for a couple of hours a day to read a book or tune out.

What is nice, though, is to have the choice. One thing is consistent across both types of colleagues: hybrid working has made them more content, more trusted and even more valued, which might be something particular to my employer. Some, however, aren’t so forward looking: recruitment company boss James Cox branded job candidates asking about WFH policies to be “lazy, spoilt and entitled”. “I’ve done this job for 15 years,” the 35-year-old railed on LinkedIn. “Before COVID I had never heard anyone ever say to me that they want to work from home.” And so he ranted further: “You want to work from home so you don’t have to get dressed at 6am? So you can save money on travel? So that you can watch Loose Women on your lunch break? Working from home so that you can feed the squirrels at 11am in the garden!” Unsurprisingly, Cox has been royally trolled for his comments, with one HR manager branding them “possibly the most offensive, small-minded” post she’d ever seen.

Picture: WeWork

Regardless of CoxI’s archaic opinions, clearly the tide has shifted the employees’ way. New employment reforms will allow new recruits to request the right to work at home, a change particularly aimed at women, the disabled, parents and carers to better balance  professional and personal commitments.

If there’s an incentive to get people back into offices, it might be a healthier lifestyle (unless employers adopt the Silicon Valley fad for free snacks). Researchers from University College London last week revealed that travelling to a place of work has benefits for mental health, fitness and work-life balance, not to mention the waistline. According to UCL neuroscientists, nearly half of 3,000 people they surveyed said that being in the office put them in a better work mindset, improved productivity and made a positive difference to their work through face-to-face collaboration. “The commute delineates boundaries between home and work life and can be used to switch one off and transition to the other, UCL professor Joseph Devlin said. “Just going to work generates more diverse experiences than working from home, especially through interactions with other people.” Half of those surveyed said they snacked more when working at home, with 43% saying they were much more easily distracted by things like home shopping deliveries, household chores, pets and even taking longer lunch breaks. More significantly, over half reported the benefits of a change of scenery - something I’ll attest to having been forced to spend 18 months looking out of the living room window with a high hedge beyond it and…er…that’s it. 

More concerning, perhaps, is that continued WFH has the potential to hit people in the wallet in the long run. While commuters have all pocketed the benefits of not paying exorbitant travel costs to get to work, government data shows that, pre-pandemic, people who worked from home were far less likely to get a promotion or a bonus compared with their office-based colleagues, a drop-off of as much as 38%. Before COVID-19, WFJ employees were paid almost 7% less. Another pitfall being talked about is that the move to hybrid working, or even freedom to choose the working model that suits best, could be the thin end of a wedge, with companies also making job location more flexible, leading to fears of companies off-shoring positions to cheaper employment markets.

One month in to my own return to office life, it’s still too soon to conclude what the future holds. We could, of course, face another winter of COVID and lockdowns, or we could, as a society, learn to live with it, accepting the grave risks that come from sharing commuter carriages and desk space. It’s a dilemma for someone like me who, despite being double-jabbed, is considerably clinically vulnerable (and just last week received a jolly e-mail from Sajid Javid reminding me of the fact). The frustration is that I have loved going back to an office, of dressing that little bit smarter, of seeing a bit more of the world as I travel about. Even my anxiety caused by maskless morons on the train and Tube has eased to some extent. 

Perhaps my third jab, when it comes, will ease my anxiety further. It’s just that weighing up the odds of being out ‘there’ with that thing still on the lose, cannot be equated with the old risks of just catching a cold. And that is a proper conundrum for my own mental wellbeing to try and resolve.

The Great British Standoff

So welcome back to the working week. Another Monday, and I’m back on the living room sofa (sat upright, I should point out), my preferred location from which to work from home. This has been my office since lockdown began, all those months ago. Indeed, apart from a first couple of weeks in my new job, which began in April, perched at the kitchen table (until I discovered that my arse isn't compatible with sitting on a vintage wooden chair for any length of time...) worklife has revolved around our lounge.

There has been no office banter, no coffee machine updates on house conveyancing dramas, no awkward encounters in the work gym with the last person in the world you’d expect to find there, none of it. Indeed, until July’s restrictions on going outside were lifted on people like me with underlying health conditions, my world vista was mostly limited to the TV in the corner and the bay window, with our street beyond it. Do I miss commuting? Well, yes, of course I do. Probably. We all complain about it, we all moan about the train delays and traffic jams, and even before the coronavirus came along, I used to dread winter commuting, when you could time to the precise minute the onset of a heavy cold linked to that ungracious twat across the Tube carriage who sneezed or coughed without covering up. 

Getting up, going to the office, being amongst people for eight hours or so, doing your thing, and then coming home again has been an integral part of my entire working life, all 34 years of it so far (in fact, tomorrow marks the anniversary of me starting my first job in 1986). Sitting at a laptop and taking conference calls in the same room as the family kicks back to watch Selling Sunset still feels like pulling a sickie, even if I’ve probably been more industrious at home without workplace distractions. My wellbeing, however, seems to have taken a backseat in the latest chapter of the COVID crisis, with the British government pitting itself against a reluctant nation by calling on workers to get back to the office. 

Last week Boris Johnson launched his own version of wartime slogans activating the Land Army by effectively saying it was everyone’s civic duty to go back to offices, the subtext being that office workers were desperately needed to revitalise the micro-economies that exist around city centres (the sandwich shops, cafes and coffee outlets, barbers, shirt shops and so on). While Johnson’s call is understandable, it shouldn’t be forgotten that he, himself, had a near-perilous brush with the coronavirus not that long ago, in a workplace outbreak that also managed to take out Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock, the government's chief medical adviser, Chris Witty, and other members of the COVID war cabinet. So, er, Boris - forgive me or anyone for being reluctant to getting back into the same room as those from outside my bubble, or whatever is this week’s advice.

People are, though, gradually emerging from their kitchens and spare bedroom offices. According to the Office for National Statistics, those working exclusively from home almost halved from a peak of 38% in June to 20% at the end of August. In London, Tube and bus journeys have been creeping up too, though not that far. Either way, Britain still lags behind other European countries in returning to city offices. According to Morgan Stanley, more than two-thirds of office workers in France, Germany, Spain and Italy were back at their desks, whereas only a third of British workers had returned. 

There is, then, something of a standoff, between a government desperate to plug a widening economic sinkhole and a public that has grown used to working from home, though it should be stressed that we’re mostly talking about office workers here. Still, when you consider the carnage COVID-19 has wreaked across the service sector, with daily redundancy figures in the thousands being chalked up by the likes of Pret a Manger and Costa Coffee, it’s clear just how Britain’s generational shift from industry to service economy is bearing the brunt of the coronavirus impact. The question is, will it ever return to how it once was?

At the start of the pandemic, companies were quick to mobilise home working if it was possible to do so. IT systems were made more robust to cope with everyone operating remotely and, for the most part, it worked. Five months in to WFH, in my case, and I don’t know any different. Skype has universally replaced round-the-table team meetings, WhatsApp has supplanted some of the office banter, and rather than gaining weight through a lack of getting up and going to work, I’ve managed to shift a couple of stone. Whether I’m missing the “fizz and excitement that you get in a really good workplace,” as former health secretary Jeremy Hunt described it last week on Sky News, is another thing entirely. I remember some fizz at my first PR agency, but that was usually on a Friday afternoon when the Ab Fabbers in the consumer account team would crack open a bottle of Bolly on a Friday afternoon.

I am, though, possibly skirting the real issue here. Paranoia about catching COVID on the Tube is understandable, but for the government - and Boris Johnson - to hector us back to the office is a bit rich. Public trust in our elected leaders is at an all-time low, thanks to everything from the Cummings-in-Durham episode to the school exam U-turns. Running a country during any crisis, let alone something as existential as now, is not easy, and no one wants to be an armchair general. But people need to be confident to return to the office, and that, simply is lacking. 

I’ll grant Boris & Co that the lifting of lockdown in July was an ace in the hole: I felt able to visit a supermarket for the first time since March, just by wearing a mask. I could go out for coffee and even afford myself a little quiet contemplation, as I used to. More recently, I’ve been able to get back into the swimming pool, albeit with COVID-safe procedures, but still nourishing my mental wellbeing as much as helping diminish my waistline further. But this, I recognise, only exists within a radius of less than five minutes’ walk from the front door. To go further afield - to work - is still not viable. I’m still in a medically vulnerable group, and my office requires public transport to reach. I could drive, but where would I park and why would I add to London’s traffic? Cycling, the healthy option, would require a four-hour round trip (and a bike I can't currently get hold of), and walking - the other helpful piece of government advice - would be an eight-hour round trip. Or, roughly, the same amount of time I’d actually spend in the office.

Thankfully, I work for one of the many companies in Britain not in a rush to impose a return to office regularity. Indeed, I benefit from an employer which, Adam Marshall, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, has said engages in a “mature conversation” with its employees. He has also said that city centres may never see a return to pre-crisis levels of activity, a point reflected by a Cardiff University survey that found that half of UK workers want to work at home permanently, while 90% want to do so “from time to time”. Such surveys have been consistently similar over the course of the last few months. Mixed government messages won’t help, either. Understandably, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, needs the recession ended quickly to pay for the mind-boggling sums being spent on furlough schemes and all the rest. Hancock, the health secretary, is still coping with virus outbreaks and a steep rise in new infections reported over the weekend that saw the number of daily recorded cases rise to almost 3,000 yesterday, 1,000 more than Saturday.

But let's not distract from the wider point of this post, that commuting to the office is, for many people, still not something they're prepared to do. In a few months, COVID has changed a national stereotype, once depicted by films of bowler-hatted men - and I emphasise the gender here - disgorging from trains at Waterloo Station. We even read of a trend in the housing market, as those able to buy a house right now, moving out to remote parts of the country (assuming they have broadband) where they plan to work from home more often than not. House prices have even surged as a result.

I appreciate that this might be a very London-centric point of view, but city centres across the UK have replicated, in varying degrees, the downturn in economic activity in the capital's centre. For now, and possibly forever, commuting has changed for London's eight million people (and anything up to a further million outside of Greater London who travel in for work). For all the incentives (such as news and financial information giant Bloomberg  paying its staff an extra £55 a day to come into the office), and all the provisions of hand sanitiser, there has been an unprecedented shift over the last few months, with home working now the preferred default. Why put up with the vagaries of South West Railway when you can be at work barely seconds after cleaning your teeth at home? Your laptop's connected, you're conference calling like a demon throughout the day, and you're managing to do everything you did before, just without the cross-desk banter and the ability to pop your head around the boss's door to check something. 

Offices used to be defined by facility: a place for productivity via desktop PCs, printers and photocopiers, a communal space for meetings and interaction. A revolution has just taken place this year, and there's a danger that Boris might be tilting at windmills expecting it to be reversed. As columnist Clare Foges writes The Times today: "The work-from-home genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and it won’t go back in again." I don't think she's wrong.

"I'll be working from home today..."

Picture: Microsoft

There was a time when “I’m working from home” was a euphemism for “It’s Friday, it’s a lovely day, and I’m off to the park”. Not me, though, quite obviously. But then we went through a phase of “flexible working”, where technology, corporate economics, a pinch of concern for the environment, and an enlightened approach to work/life balance made the option of working from home a desirable company policy. Companies needing to downsize their palatial corporate offices in pricey parts of capital cities found that by encouraging, enabling or merely tolerating people to make use of their own home broadband connections, if you threw in a laptop and a mobile phone, employees could be engaged, connected and productive, while happy that they’d won back an extra hour or two’s work that they would have otherwise spent on the commute.

It should, however, be noted that this apparent utopia is not for everyone. For a start, you can never work from home if that home is cluttered and full of other people. Including pets. Especially cute ones, like cats, which hog your attention without reciprocating the love. Secondly, hogging a table at Caffè Nero while occasionally ordering a basic Americano and topping up the free tap water is both cheapskate and equally not conducive to productivity, because you'll be staring out the window or at other customers, especially those annoying you with a FaceTime conversation sans headphones. The advice, then, is that you should only work from home if you have a quiet, dedicated space in which to work, as if you were in the office. This point assumes two things: one, that you are suitably well off to own a house with a spare room for such an environment, and two, your job allows for it.

Picture: Slack

Now the Covid-19 coronavirus is taking a hold, more and more companies - especially in the US and particularly in California's Silicon Valley - are telling their employees to work from home in a bid to prevent the contagion from wreaking havoc on corporate campuses. These companies and, indeed, employees, are then the lucky ones. Collaboration technologies like video conferencing and workplace social media apps will enable them to function almost like normal. I speak, here, from personal experience of companies where ‘virtual’ working means that only rarely do you sit in the same space as your teammates. In Silicon Valley, for example, where insane property prices spread workers far and wide into the region's ever-expanding hinterland, avoiding the clogged freeways by not having to commute every day is enormously popular. At my last company, when visiting the HQ in San Jose, there was very little pattern to who would be occupying a desk from one day to the next, such was the spread of people throughout the region, from family members living in rural areas south of the city, to younger colleagues living in San Francisco, more than 50 miles to the north.

Closing down such campuses, then, in the face of Covid-19, might well be beneficial in limiting the spread of the virus, while at the same time enabling the giants of technology to continue functioning. That is, of course, unless functions like R&D and engineering are reliant on workspaces, labs and face-to-face collaboration. Here in the UK, we’ve not yet reached the stage of companies telling their employees to work from home, but it will surely come. Clearly, digital technologies have evolved to the extent that productivity and collaboration is almost like the real thing. And companies cutting down on the insane waste of unnecessary business travel is surely sensible, for the environment, for costs and the individual wellbeing of the employees concerned. However - medical advice encouraging homeworking is all well and good if employees can ‘telework’, to use an arcane expression, but plenty will not.

Bus drivers, supermarket workers, warehouse employees, delivery drivers - the list is endless - don't have the luxury of firing up a laptop while still in their pyjamas. Other companies, who don't yet have widespread teleworking practices, won't suddenly be able to dish out laptops or tablets just like that, especially if it requires a fundamental rethink of IT strategy (including concerns about cybersecurity). Which begs the question (and I’m no medical expert), if some employers adopt homeworking while others can't, will that mean Covid-19 still spreads amongst those who can't stay at home and continue working? And are we condemning those who will still have to take trains and buses to their places of work, or who work in jobs where interaction with the public is unavoidable to exposure to the virus and all its potential consequences? I don't want to be flippant here, and suggest that we're heading for some zombie nightmare, with the streets filled with the sick and Ocado drivers wearing full hazmat suits, but I am struggling to get my head around what the increasingly dystopian world is looking like with this virus. It's bad enough that people have been panic buying toilet paper for a condition not known to have any unpleasant symptoms in the lower reaches of the alimentary canal.

What we do know, it would seem, is that it will get worse. The British government's deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jenny Harries, told Sky News this morning that the UK should be bracing for a major increase in Covid-19 infections over the next couple of weeks. "We will see many thousands of people infected by coronavirus," she told Kay Burley. "That’s what we’re seeing in other countries and the important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections." That will probably involve people staying at home for seven days, even with relatively minor symptoms like a runny nose, all with the intention of minimising the epidemic's expected peak (if Italy is anything to go by), and drive the coronavirus into the summer when it could ease up in milder weather.

A shift - even if temporary and only partial in terms of the national workforce - to greater homeworking might well have some impact on the spread of the virus, especially it eases the horror of overcrowded trains and buses at peak hours. "Everyone who can work from home should work from home," William Hanage of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Bosto told The Guardian yesterday. "The most important thing is that even if it won’t protect you entirely, it will delay you getting infected. And if we can 'flatten the curve' we will avoid the worst consequences for healthcare services." That won't come as much comfort for those who still have to get out there. In that respect, it's not unreasonable to conclude that we'll be creating two classes of people - those who can work from home and those who can't. And godspeed to those in that second camp.