Unto the promised land...possibly

© Simon Poulter 2021

As day trips go, last Thursday's wasn't the most scenic. Nor was it the most productive. But it was liberating beyond all measure. The occasion was the briefest of visits to my official place of work, for the first time since I was actually employed to work there, exactly 12 months ago today. The reason for visiting was to finally collect my security badge, allowing me - when needs require it - to go into the office and work there. 

You see, I have a tactical need, every couple of weeks, to work somewhere other than the increasingly knackered sofa that has been my workplace exclusively for the last year. Day after day, e-mail after e-mail, Teams meeting after Teams meeting, I have sat on that sofa like some condemned breakfast TV presenter, with a make-do arrangement enhanced only by the acquisition of a hybrid coffee table with a pop-up desk element. It’s hardly been an adequate solution, and God knows what attrition has been caused to my spine, let alone to my general health (itself a topic of lengthier consideration another time). But it has worked. In fact, it has all worked.

In these last 12 months, I’ve contributed to my company’s quarterly financial results, two product launches, an advertising campaign launch and even an IPO. And all from that dilapidated settee (which, I swear, has sunk by a good inch from having my carcass weighing it down for the entire working week). It would be false, though, to pretend that liberation is fully in sight. A return to five-days-a-week office working may never happen. My company, wisely, has adopted a policy of continued work-from-home for most, and is certainly not encouraging a resumption of full occupation on the floors of its HQ. Generally, the mood music is clearly a discouragement of office working for now, sensibly, given that we’re not out of the woods yet. 

In his press conference yesterday, Boris Johnson was typically chipper, looking forward to supping a pint in a pub which, for some, is the sum total of their liberation ambition. For others, it’s hugging an elderly relative again, or even seeing a relative for the first time in months. I’m up for all of that, with the added goal of getting into the swimming pool again next Monday for the first time since December. But beyond that, I’m strangely covetous of anyone who’s been able to continue going to work during the lockdown. Indeed, it’s got to the point where I can’t watch Line Of Duty's Steve Arnott in the AC-12 office without thinking what a lucky git he is (even if the BBC's production team has notably socially distanced everyone). 

Picture: BBC

Last week’s briefest of excursions into Central London, visiting a place of work I’d only previously been in the once (and that was for my job interview), felt like a tantalising experience of freedom. I know we all eventually get to loathe the daily commute - and I know I probably will, once some semblance of full normality comes back - but my somewhat humdrum train journey last Thursday, with a short walk to the company's building, made me feel like Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Apollo 11 lander. More liberation was to come as, after collecting my badge, I bought lunch from the nearby Pret A Manger and sat in the mild midday sunshine, like every other office worker would do, before heading back to the Underground station for the journey home. I was only out of the house for a matter of four hours, but it left me near-giddy with satisfaction. 

Entire sitcoms, films even, have been made about commuting and office life, but on this one Thursday it had become an unrivalled and welcome novelty. I shouldn’t, though, get my hopes up too high. “This virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future,” Professor Chris Whitty said, cheeringly, during yesterday’s Downing Street presser. And he’s right. The ‘direction of travel’ for some time has been that we may be wearing masks and socially distancing for a long time to come. The vaccine rollout has been remarkable - I’m looking forward to my second jab next Saturday - but for all the upbeat talk of economic life reopening again, we’re still a long way off 100% vaccinations, and other aspects of normality, like foreign travel. Boris, yesterday, defiantly maintained faith in his “roadmap”, adding that he saw nothing in the the present data that made the government think it would deviate from it. But that's not without gloomy predictions from SAGE experts which have cast doubt on any return to full normality by 21 June, with further evidence suggesting that any premature relaxation of the lockdown rules could spark a fourth wave of the virus.

Business has been mixed on where it stands on the return to normality and, in particular, office working. In February, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called working from a home “an aberration” and vowed to correct it “as quickly as possible.” Others in the finance sector have echoed this sentiment, citing the need for collaboration that can only be achieved by sitting side by side in an office. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is going in a hybrid direction, adopting a flexible approach that would enable its 22,000 staff in the UK to divide their time between office and home working once restrictions are lifted. Employees will also have better flexibility in choosing how their working days are structured, with the ability to choose start and end times, and even work more hours from Monday to Thursday so that they can knock off early on a Friday. Such revolution reflects the fact that many companies and their leaders have come to realise, over the course of this last year, just how much working culture resembled battery farming at times. For every CEO who wants to see staff back at their desks, there are plenty who see it fraught with risk, resigning themselves to the fact that the sight of desk-bound employees, sitting cheek-by-jowl has long expired.

You could even say that more forward-thinking executives have seen the light, concluding that WFH has worked for a year, and many employees have said that a commute that constitutes little more than bedroom-to-kitchen-to-home-office has been a boon to wellbeing, especially for people previously juggling their work travel with things like the school run. Not surprisingly, technology leaders have been most open to the continuation of remote working, despite being the most likely to preside over working cultures that benefit the most from face-to-face collaboration. Some, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have even started talking up the possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality technologies. This, though, is reflective of the somewhat idealistic thinking in Silicon Valley. 

The reality, I suspect, is going to be somewhere between these poles: the liberation has only just begun, and even then, only slightly. What you and I might remember of going to work from before the pandemic may, yet, remain a distant memory. On the other hand, as organisations like mine discover that projects we’re working on might benefit from being able to shout across a desk at someone, we might start increasingly find ourselves swiping in and out of a formal workplace, sitting on an actual chair at an actual desk. From this end of the last 12 months, I know what I’m looking forward to.

Just another housebound Monday

© Simon Poulter 2021

And, so, another month rolls around, and another Monday, too. Like last Monday, and the 40-odd Mondays before that, I’m back on the sofa for another day of e-mail, instant messages and Teams meetings. At best, the most I’ll move is to the kitchen and back, for coffee, lunch, an afternoon bucket of tea, before, early evening, hopping on the exercise bike for half an hour of grunting at whatever early evening kick-off the Premier League has contrived to offer, and in a vague attempt at keeping the inevitable cardiovascular event at bay. For tomorrow, and the days after that, repeat as prescribed, at least until 12 April when, Boris promised us last week, my local swimming pool might reopen, if we all behave ourselves until then.

Despite Johnson presenting his 60-page ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown last Monday, we are still in it. We’re not exactly under house arrest, but even a quick dash to Caffé Nero feels like something from The Great Escape involving a vaulting horse and dislodged earth released surreptitiously down the trouser leg. As we enter the third month of the latest lockdown, and almost the anniversary of the first, reflecting on the routines of these last 12 dystopian months only leaves one longing for the traditions of working somewhere other than where you live. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

I miss being out and about early on a crisp spring morning; I miss the process of deciding what to wear to the office; I miss the vagaries of London commuting and the hour’s buffer between home and work life, work life and home, and a chance to listen to music or read a book; I miss that first Starbucks on the way into the office, and the prospect of a quick pint on the way home. I miss normality, and long for it to replace the new normality imposed upon us. But...

I started my current job on 6 April last year, so I have never known what office life is like at my new company. Apart from my interview, I’ve never even set foot in the building. What I will eventually encounter, fully, for the first time, remains to be seen: while we’ve all been away, my company has been adapting its office space to the new normal. Our CEO recently wrote an op-ed for The Times in which he asked whether the office of the future will ever be the same as it was before, a location around which productivity and collaboration is concentrated, rather than a collection of colleagues working together but meeting physically when required. He observed that 60% of employees’ time is spent on individual activities, while the remaining time is spent working in teams, activities that could still require an office, which by turn would not necessarily require the same amount of floor plan as pre-COVID. While not dismissing the idea of offices altogether, he mooted the idea that a single, Central London location where everyone hubbed together might not even be still valid, with a distributed, regional network of smaller properties possible to drive greater diversity, inclusion and even talent attraction. 

Wherever we work, and however we work, we still need to return to work in some form of how it was. The question is when, rather than if. Last week, Boris, speaking to a Network Rail conference (by video, natch) dismissed concerns that WFH would remain the new norm by gleefully predicting a return to mass commuting within a “few short months”. We would, he said, be “consumed once again” by our desire for social contact. Clearly, judging by the panicked look on the face of his health secretary and the deputy chief medical officer on Friday, ahead of a weekend of spring-like weather, we are already doing quite well in satisfying that desire without the virus being in anything like retreat. The prime minister is, however, clearly, walking a tightrope here (and not a zipline): he needs everyone to Stay Home. Save Lives. Protect The NHS.™, but also desperately needs the economy flowing again. City centres need the sandwich shops and pubs open again. But, perhaps equally as importantly, we need the release of normality to ease the mental health crisis looming of a nation confined to barracks. Just look at the full parks at the first sign of the mercury rising: it’s not civil disobedience (even if a few provocative camera angles in the Daily Mail shock-horror the world into thinking everyone is out giving a massive “up yours” to restrictions). Somewhere between illusion and reality lies the truth. 

The more I think of it, all of the ‘gates’ in Boris’s timetable seem eons away. Even next week’s ridiculous reopening of schools (why can’t they be allowed to stay closed until after Easter, or at least until teachers have all been vaccinated?). But while there will be a social tsunami of pub beer gardens overflowing just as soon as they can, working practices might not, despite Johnson’s conviction that “the British people will be consumed once again with their desire for the genuine face-to-face meeting that makes all the difference to the deal or whatever it is.” 

Once workers have been given a taste of flexible working, they won’t want to go back. When one of my former companies brought in mandatory three-days-a-week working from a designated ‘hub’, there was uproar, especially as desks were being deliberately limited (thus hinting at games of musical chairs first thing in the morning, with the losers ending up on the redundancy list). My last company went the other way - office spaces were there if you needed them, but there were no hard expectation to use them. That, though, was a Silicon Valley software company, a company steeped in digital technology, and obsessed with myriad online collaboration tools that actually became overwhelming to use. For me, personally, I still work best when I can walk over to someone’s desk, or stop them at the coffee machine, or poke my head around the door of their office, when I’ve got something to ask.

Picture: HSBC

I guess it depends on the business. Technology companies - especially those with a collaborative model - will be more adept at remote working via digital tools. Other industries won’t. Goldman Sachs’ chief executive David Soloman has branded remote working as an “aberration” and is urging his staff to come back to its offices as quickly as possible. Soloman actually saw more in common at his bank with tech companies, branding its work recently as an ”innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture”. Working from home was not, he said “a new normal”, adding that he was “a big believer in personal connectivity”. Contrast that with HSBC, which last week said that it would be cutting its office space by 40%. But even that, though, might be at odds with the Canary Wharf estate where HSBC has it's corporate headquarters.

This morning, Canary Wharf's head of strategy, Howard Dawber, told Radio 4's Today programme that he expects the start of a return to the office as early as 29 March, with a 100% return by June when all of the ancillary services around the financial district, like pubs, restaurants and hairdressers, are allowed to open again. I'm not so sure: the area in Paddington where my office is located offers all that, but I don't see any sort of wholesale return from remote working. “We've got about five or six thousand staff working on the wharf at the moment,” Dawber said. “We expect over the next few months a gradual increase there - obviously the government's advice is still to work from home and I think everyone is sticking to that.” But he added: “Where the technology makes it possible to work from home, I think the processes and attitudes of businesses have caught up now to the point where I think it's going to be more socially acceptable to take the occasional day working from home.”

Dawber's point is that he expects working from home to return to an occasional choice - “one day a week or a couple of days a month” - adding that WFH has generated its own fatigue. “When the sun was shining and people were perhaps enjoying a more flexible environment, there was a sense it was going to be a short-term process and we would get through it and return to work.” But now, he says, people are missing the opportunity collaborate and socialise in person. That may be true, but WFH has worked, almost exclusively and the virus will still be out there when the Government's all-clear is eventually sounded. Companies will still, I suspect, have to convince their employees. 

For every one of us desperate to step outside the front door to work again, there are those who will not be comfortable until there is solid evidence that it is safe to do so. Working from home does, at least, provide that refuge. Even as the vaccine rollout makes progress, and the R number gradually comes down, the resistance in some parts of northern England presented on Friday by Professor Jonathan Van-Tam underlined the need for patience. There is still plenty of unknown ahead, too. The “direction of travel” might look promising, but variants of the virus keep showing up. Even though the mantra is that COVID-19 will be a disease that we eventually manage, like flu or measles, it’s not there yet, and we can’t truthfully say when that might occur.

Boris, in his comments last week, was typically effusive when predicting the return of vibrant city centres as people came back to working there. But this, it must be stressed, was no more than a prediction. Despite the Mail headlines, people have, generally, observed the stay-at-home message. In fact, the more you think of it, the more ‘normality’ has shifted. Just count the number of white delivery vans that pass your house on any given day, seven days of the week; how much has urban and suburban traffic increased due to home supermarket deliveries? Buses and trains are, now, only being used by those workers who have no alternative but going out to work, but even then, for the most part, public transport use is well down (despite those horror story scenes of Tube trains packed with construction workers crossing London).

I can easily imagine my local high street bouncing back. The supermarkets have rarely shown much difference throughout lockdown, but with the prevalence of coffee chains and independent cafes interspersed with charity shops, you can easily see these local economies bouncing back, supported by those hanging on to working from home. But what about city centres? Where my nominal office is, there’s a cluster of other corporate towers, all supported by the usual plethora of lunchtime takeaway outlets (and even trendy caravans serving artisan food). The large gym on the same site, plus swankier restaurants and an upmarket hotel would, presumably, all have been barren for the last year or so. Which of these enterprises will return to anything like they were before is hard to predict. Pre-COVID, central London was already slackening off on a Friday. One black cab driver once told me that he no longer bothered coming in on the final day of the working week, such was the shift to ‘casual Fridays’ where a more socially agreeable WFH practice was allowed by employees. So you can imagine what a hybrid model will be like.

Picture: Microsoft

For now, however, all this is academic. The government’s instruction to work from home “if you can” remains in place until at least 21 June, when it will be reviewed, and even then, offices are likely to be reconfigured to accommodate social distancing and the sort of hygiene rules that are now commonplace in supermarkets and garden centres. The sector to keep an eye open on will be the civil service. Once public workers are told to return to the office, the private sector might follow suit. It might depend on how well prepared they are and, equally, how well they’re listening to their employees. Incredibly, the pandemic has returned significant power to employees to depict not just where they work, but how they work.

However, as much as the attention on working culture over the last 11 months or so has been on WFH, Zoom calls, your colleagues’ book collection, cats video-bombing meetings and the ubiquitous battle cry of “You’re on mute!”, we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. Only 36% of working adults were working exclusively from home last week, according to the Office for National Statistics, and that level is still the highest since June last year, so clearly not everyone. That also needs to be tempered by the fact that 18% of workers aren’t going in because they’re on furlough, with a more alarming 22% of businesses saying that they had “paused” trading. Clearly there is going to be a shift as people return to work, but there’s some debate over just how intense that return will be. 

Before COVID, commuting in London was a litmus test for office occupancy: for most of August, those not on holiday could guarantee a seat on the train, but come September, and the great return, trains became packed again, and the customary British reserve (i.e. the passive-aggressiveness that emerges as entitled City traders and lawyers join the 07.57 to Waterloo - "could you move down please!"). With talk today of a hike in season ticket prices, and rail companies talking of great holes in their finances that might need to be mitigated by flexible arrangements that don’t rely on five-day commuting, we may have witnessed a subtle but significant shift in the way the entire nation goes to work. Not that anything is going to change for the next three months at least. I’m still stuck on the sofa. At least you  know where to find me.

Who's Zooming who?

Without doubt the story of last week had nothing to do with COVID-19, for once, but was about a Zoom call that went viral. By Friday evening, everyone had heard of Jackie Weaver, the heroic chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, who had presided over a meeting of Handforth Parish Council and ended up thwarting an attempted coup d'état. 

The chaotic session - which took place in December - found itself onto social media last week, and before you knew it, was being replayed every hour on Sky News and the BBC's rolling news channel, and even found itself on the world stage via CNN. Sitcom writers burst forth to say that the Handforth meeting was more comical than anything they could have devised. Even Reece Sheersmith, who created The League of Gentlemen and its hilariously surreal depiction of life in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, and on which you could easily have thought the stroppy burghers of Handforth were based. But, by yesterday, more tales had emerged of similarly dysfunctional public assemblies taking place on Zoom, which struck me as significant - not the fact that local administration is chaotic or being conducted online, but the prominence of the meeting platform itself: Zoom. 

In less than a decade Zoom has gone from a typical Silicon Valley startup to the de facto generic noun for online meetings, supplanting Skype and Apple’s FaceTime in the process - and pretty much in just this last year. To the chagrin of Microsoft and its Teams application and Cisco’s WebEx, everything is now “a Zoom call”. I had never heard of the platform until a couple of years ago, when the PR agency I was working with at my last company recommended that we switch to it from the company-mandated WebEx. It wasn’t entirely clear what the USP was, but it seemed more reliable as well as less rigid for participants at multiple companies and their own unique IT environments.

Picture: Zoom

It is clear, though, that throughout the last year of lockdown that the company founded by former Cisco engineering executive Eric Yuan (pictured right) in 2011 has come into its own. So much so that easily the smartest career move I’ve ever seen is that of a former colleague who joined Zoom last April as a international marketeer, just as the company's usage was going nuclear. 

By last spring, everyone and everything seemed to be taking place via Zoom. Even the business of government during the COVID-19 crisis, when Boris Johnson - confined to quarters by his own bout of the virus - was seen to hold a crucial meeting, during which the Zoom meeting ID was clearly visible. This prompted inevitable questions about the platform's security: to some, it came as a surprise that Her Majesty’s Government was, effectively, using the same app as families doing quiz nights and birthday drinks. This wasn’t the only occurrence of concerns about Zoom’s privacy, with the emergence of ‘Zoombombing’, whereby it was discovered that nefarious scrotes could hack into a Zoom meeting and bother it with explicit images. This was on top of more innocent Zoombombs when barely clothed flatmates accidentally walked through kitchens, along with children bouncing into meetings and cats leaping in front of webcams.

There is no doubt that Zoom, more than any other video communications platform before, has played an unprecedented role in creating a new and strange normality over the last year, taking the place of restaurants, pubs, living rooms and kitchen dining tables in enabling some form of social life, as well as keeping the business meeting culture going. It has played host to school lessons, church services, stag parties and blind dates. Even Britain’s Houses of Parliament have adopted a Zoom-based technology to facilitate business in the Commons, enabling up to 120 MPs to join any particular session while only 50 are allowed to be physically present in the chamber due to social distancing measures. Italy’s biggest ever mafia trial - the mass prosecution of 355 Calabrian ’NDrangheta suspects - is currently being conducted in a special courtroom in Lamezia Terme, with defendants in jails dotted across the country facing their accusers via Zoom.

Thanks to Zoom and its rivals we have all, in the last year, spent more time in strangers’ houses than ever before. I joined my current company in April and have only ever spent time with my new colleagues via laptop's webcam. And, yet, I know what my colleagues’ kitchens look like, their bedrooms even and what books they read (or purport to read, given the craze of artfully arranging bookshelves to showcase one’s literary tastes). We’ve even succumbed to insecurities about what we look like on Zoom: working from home used to mean rolling out of bed and sitting at the kitchen table in pyjamas and the first T-shirt that came to hand, until people realised that a meeting on Zoom placed dress code under even greater scrutiny than if you were actually in the office. 

This has led to fashion and beauty magazines running vacuous features about the perils of spending so much time on video calls. Ofcom has estimated that since the pandemic began we're spending 40% of our working weeks in online meetings. ‘Zoom face’ is, apparently, a thing, that we're now hyper-conscious of how we look down the barrel of a webcam, and that having it look up your nostrils and displaying the contents at the other end on a high-definition stream may not be the most attractive thing in the world. Scientists working for Unilever has even claimed that the blue light emitted by laptop screens is putting us at UV risk, and that five working days a week spent on video calls has the same impact on our skin as as 25 unprotected minutes in the midday sun. There are, too, more physical debilitations from the constant round of video conferences that now, as spines grow weary from being hunched over laptops on home furniture that wasn’t designed for nine-hour working days, and eyes that have become sore and tired from LED screens.

Our pain is Zoom’s gain. As the pandemic took hold last spring, daily downloads of the app increased by 30-times, year-on-year. Zoom became the United States’ most downloaded iPhone app for much of 2020. Recent figures put daily usage at some 350 million - up from just 10 million at Christmas 2019. Every financial quarter since the coronavirus emerged, the company has seen its quarterly revenue grow by enormous orders of magnitude as much, at one point, as 355% in a year. The explosion in use even appeared to catch the San Jose, California-based company by surprise, with its international head of partner marketing, Derek Pando, telling advertising industry magazine The Drum that it was, early on, like being in “a war room”. “We didn't know where it was going next and we didn't know how bad it was going to be. We were constantly trying to shift our resources to try to support people that were using and relying on Zoom,” he said.

The big shift for Zoom was its breakout from being just a rival to business communications apps like Webex and Skype. Until COVID-19 hit, most Zoom users were businesses and, even if home users had experience of using Zoom at work, it meant learning-as-you-go for families. Grannies, aunts, uncles and teenagers alike all had to quickly learn Zoom etiquette and dealing with Internet latency and not all talking at once. Everyone become their own television director, learning the simple art of framing to avoid the alarming sight of someone’s enormous, looming forehead. There was also the lesson - sometimes learned painfully - of knowing when to have the microphone on and when to have it off, not just to preserve bandwidth, but also to save fellow participants from the sound effects human bodies generate of their own volition.

Zoom has arguably been the technology success story of the pandemic. But as vaccine programmes start to take effect, questions are inevitably being raised as to how it will fare when things return to some form of normality (it's share price even took a hit when the Pfizer jab was announced in November). The company is hopeful that remote working will remain in place, continuing to prove a boon to corporate use. Certainly at this stage it’s still unclear just how and when business life will return to in-office working - even if it ever will. Office workers will, I’m sure, be eager to get back to their previous routines, even the arduous urban commutes. along with the social aspects of being in the same workspace as others. What’s not known, however, is just what measures companies will have to put in place, all the while COVID-19 is still out there, and 100% vaccination has not been achieved. One likelihood is that a hybrid model will be adopted. Home life, on the other hand, will be different. Hardly anyone you or I know is exactly happy about being barred from seeing loved ones and friends in the flesh, but with the virus showing signs of being countered by vaccines and lockdowns, and with the days already starting to grow longer, you get the sense that it won’t be long before we can step out from behind the webcam and see people in the flesh, even touch them.

Realistically, the biggest threat to Zoom’s future will be from the companies that it managed to eclipse in a record space of time. Microsoft, Cisco, Google and even Facebook have not stood still when it comes innovating their own video platforms, and will not have been best pleased by the ten-year-old upstart stealing their thunder. Microsoft, in particular, stands to benefit more than others, given the ubiquity of its Office software and packages like Word and Powerpoint, and the corporate licences that companies buy to provide employees with the complete suite, which also includes Teams. All of Zoom's rivals have added new features, such as background noise cancellation to make working from a crowded home that much less perilous. Teams even added ’Together Mode’, designed to give multiple users the sense of all sitting in the same environment, though in reality it makes a group of colleagues look more like participants in the opening title sequence of The Muppet Show. Time will tell, then, whether the innovation arms race in video conferencing will continue to be as vital, as the world gets back to normal. 

Other workplace collaboration tools with video calling, like Slack (which has just been acquired by Salesforce) are also gaining ground, and its likely that all the players in this market will have also reached peak usage over the last year, limiting further growth. Zoom will have heard these arguments before, and will argue that it already successfully penetrated a crowded market when it launched in 2011. It’s just that the coronavirus has given it an unprecedented bump.

Picture: Zoom

We may - thankfully - be soon seeing the back of quiz nights and laptop dinner parties, but in the business world there’s enough uncertainty about future working practices that it’s fair to say that Zoom and its rivals are here to stay. And until computing intelligence develops to such an advanced degree that software will be able to detect when a call participant is about to speak, we will still be hearing the words “You’re on mute!” for a long time to come.

Dress-down Monday: what to wear when you're WFH

So, to bring you up to speed, we were first told by Boris to work from home “if we can”. Then it was “go back to work, if you can”. Now it’s back to the kitchen table/spare room/sofa once more, “if we can”. Blink, and you may have missed the middle instruction. I didn't, but then, the company I work for has very sensibly adopted a WFH strategy from the outset of the pandemic, and that's fine by me. In fact, throughout this coronavirus-riven last six months I have only worked from home. I've only set foot in my nominal place of work once, and that was for the interview that landed me the job in the first place. Since then, my office has been, initially, the kitchen table, and then, when my bony arse and the dining table chairs decided they were incompatible for the better part of nine hours a day, the front room took over. The sofa and a £5 IKEA coffee table (you know the ones - all white, 55x55cm, made entirely from MDF) became my workspace. The thing is, it has all just worked. What has been weird is that in six months I haven't worn anything resembling formal clothing once. In fact, if memory serves (and that's now getting hazy), the last time I wore my bespoke three-piece suit - bought for a wedding last year - was that job interview, save one family quiz night when I thought, "for a laugh", wearing it would make me - as co-host - look like a game show presenter. It didn't. 

Over the course of these six months I have also lost almost 20 kilos in weight, rendering most of my pre-lockdown work attire ridiculous. Shirts done up would make me look like an ex-con released after serving a very long sentence, and worn tieless, are now so capacious that to leave even one button undone exposes so much chest wig I'd resemble a yacht-dwelling Mediterranean arms dealer. Suits are now so oversized, shapeless and beyond salvage that I wouldn't even pass muster in a Talking Heads tribute act. All this is just as well as I haven't, really, been required to look like anything over the last half-year. On my daily round of Skype meetings, my colleagues have presented a variety of WFH dress styles, from those who - and fair play to them - wear a formal work shirt every day as it helps them get into part, to a multitude of T-shirts (including one today bearing the name of Metallica). All is fine. None of it leaves anyone thought less professional; the work gets done, we move on.

Now, I appreciate that all these descriptions are of the waist up, but if people are wearing their joggers or, in my case during the warmest months of the year, shorts, no-one cares, or should do. So let’s bring in here Ayesha Vardag, Britain’s self-styled “top divorce lawyer” and "the Diva of Divorce", according to TIME magazine, who has issued instructions to staff at her eponymous law firm on what to wear, presumably while physically in the office. In fact, Vardag - in a leaked e-mail reported in The Times and other newspapers - has driven down into some considerable specifics: “I don’t mind cravats, formal waistcoats,” she said, giving a nod to a form of modernity not seen since Bertie Wooster was living in fear of his Aunt Agatha. However, V-neck sweaters and “woolly vests” (i.e. the tank tops and sleeveless cardigans I am also prone to wearing when the weather turns cooler) are also out. I will admit to have worn a black V-neck under my suit for a number of years, ever since Gianluca Vialli brought Italian fashion to Chelsea in the mid-90s, though my appropriation of the style was more out of hiding my gut than trying to look like Luca… Anyway, “Super-tight trousers” are also on Vardag's verboten list, as are shoes with too pointy a toe. 

Pronouncing that lawyers should “look like a pro, not a pretty young thing”, Vardag also turned her attention to female members of staff, noting that women “can still of course be discreetly sexy and colourful and flamboyant at the same time according to your preference”. Women at the firm should “never be tacky or tarty and at the same time never be drab. It’s a delicate balance which most of you know instinctively. The naked look, with lots of flesh, is not OK.” To this Vardag added that she favoured “a Chanel/Dior/Armani look”, including “elegant” shoes, “not flip flops.” Well, duh. Woe betide anyone, either, who failed to maintain their hair, instructing that it “should always be squeaky clean and should at least appear natural”. “Brush your hair!!!,” the memo continued. “Check the mirror before you come out in the morning! Do not look as if you were dragged through a hedge backwards! Consider putting it up if it’s very long.” And for anyone who might be struggling in the Barnet department, Vardag offered her own help: “A chignon [no, me neither…] packs a lot of power punch. I can show you how to tie a scarf and set a chignon if you like. I’m that old.”

“It’s a Savile Row look we’re espousing,” Vardag's missive outlines. “Generally, double cuffs and cufflinks can transform the quality you project. Go for fewer items in your wardrobe, of quality.” In defence, Emma Gill, one of Vardags’ partners at the firm, told The Times that “as a top law firm, our clients demand high standards of professionalism and this is reflected in our dress code policy. While this is embraced by staff, the occasional reminder is in order to make sure we maintain our high standards.” Well, OK. While we’ve all be frothing about the long-term impact of the coronavirus on working practices - and whether we’ll ever return to the nine-to-five, Monday to Friday - little attention has actually been paid to the somewhat ludicrous proposition that mixed-pattern working could mean suits for some, three days a week, jogging bottoms and T-shirts on two days a week. Or not at all. In fact, no one really knows what will happen long term. The government and it’s Olympic-strength flip-flopping on everything might not help, either. 

Years ago, when I worked in the Netherlands, my then-company instigated a ‘dress-down Friday’ at its Amsterdam headquarters in the hope of instigating a more casual atmosphere for the final day of the working week. This, for some of my male Dutch colleagues of a certain age and background, meant wearing trousers in a variety of alarming hues (in fact, of a vibrancy even Michael Portillo in his railway journey documentaries, in which he wears ever-more shocking pastels, would reject for being ‘too much’). For others, it meant adopting the less adventurous American week-round office style, namely chinos and the ubiquitous button-down shirt. At my last company - a Silicon Valley-headquartered software business - de rigeur officewear consisted exclusively of jeans (the expensive-looking indigo kind, not the oil-stained, ragged-at-the-knee variety) for men matched with a double-cuff smart shirt and a blazer of some sort. Those wearing it thought they were edgy software sales types, but when everyone is dressed the same, it's no less a uniform than bankers all in pinstripes. 

This did serve to remind me of the French word for a suit: “costume”. Because that, in essence, is what all of these practices are. Whether you’re wearing a two-piece suit, blazer and jeans, or a tweed jacket with mustard-yellow jumbo cords, it is still nothing more than conformity. For that matter, we could all turn up dressed as Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds and it would matter very little. The fact remains that I actually look forward to the day when I can put on a smart suit and shirt, and lace up one of the pairs of formal shoes I’ve got gathering dust in a wardrobe. And I’m not in any way someone who likes to conform like that. I guess, though, it does come down to your personal style, but also the type of work you do. But it also depends on what your employer actually expects. Only 55% of workplaces have a dress code, according to the website Salary.com, and very few companies outline their expectations when onboarding new employees.

For many workers, it's trial and occasionally error. Many's the newbie who turns up on Day 1 wearing collar and tie or an expensive designer suit, only to discover they stand out amongst an office crowded by more casual business attire. When I worked in Silicon Valley I was told that wearing anything other than the local camouflage would stand me out as a 'suit'. So, jeans and whatever it was for two years. "If you work in law, regularly meet with executives, or otherwise hold a high-level position, you might be asked to come dressed 'business formal' or in 'boardroom attire'," advises lifestyle guru Jacqueline Curtis in a post on moneycrashers.com. "This is the highest level of professional dress". She recommends tailored suits in dark, neutral colours for men, a white shirt with a high-quality tie in "muted" neutral colours. "No novelty ties," she points out, instantly flagging the obscenities worn by The Fast Show's resident office "laugh", Colin Hunt. "Shoes should be closed-toe oxfords in brown or black, not loafers," she adds. So, what about my preferred brown suede numbers? Women are advised to follow a similar conservatism - skirt or trouser suits in neutral colours, closed-toe heels in similar non-startling hues.

Reading Curtis's advice, however, I recognise how few professions require such office attire these days. Even bank dealing rooms. The norm seems to be "business professional" which seems to sit somewhere between conservative and casual, and is more broadly open to interpretation. And then, if you're lucky, you'll work in an environment where it - mostly - really doesn't matter how you dress, as long as you don't cause offence or look like you've turned up in your decorating outfit. The bottom line, says Curtis, is to "err on the side of caution", especially when new in an organisation. Keep it “clean, tailored, and professional” is her advice. I suppose, then, the best guide is to simply understand your stakeholders, those you work with, those you work for and those you would, in normal times, encounter from outside your organisation. 

However, these aren't normal times. Your guess is as good as mine as to when they will be normal once again, by which time I'll have lost even more weight, and frankly will look ridiculous in anything I might have worn even six months ago. Which means taking out another mortgage on a new wardrobe that does fit, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it, eh? For now, I'll continue to dress appropriately, safe in the knowledge that the only people who can see what I wear below the waist Monday to Friday are my family, occasionally fellow customers at Waitrose during a lunchtime run, and the postman. Oh, and the cat, but her opinion really doesn't count.

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'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.

Are we ready to return to the office?

Picture: BBC

It is now six weeks since the UK went into lockdown and from a working perspective, everything is going well. On Thursday I’ll celebrate the first full month in my new job, one in which I have so far met only three colleagues in person - one, a few years ago, and my boss and his boss during my interview in February. Now I think of it, they were probably the last non-family members I had any real proximity to before everything came to a halt (delivery drivers dropping food at the front door, and the neighbours across the road clapping on a Thursday night don't count).

Since I came on onboard at the company everything has been done virtually, from my induction to the ramp-up of tasks and projects with my various internal “stakeholders”. As you can imagine, working for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, the IT has worked perfectly. The Skype calls, even when subject to the vagaries of home broadband (from another supplier, I have to confess) have proven almost as good as being in the same room as colleagues, and even though you don’t have to see the whites of their eyes - face facts, a good old phone call is just as good - it is strangely reassuring to see co-workers in their home habitats, like everyone else ignoring workplace dress codes and not worrying (too much) about hair roots showing.

This has raised the inevitable question: will we ever need to return to the office? In one of my former companies, working out of one of a select number of ‘hub’ locations for at least three days a week was deemed mandatory. In another, an incoming CFO once told me that the policy of proactively encouraging remote working in the firm’s vast and extremely spaced out US workforce (done partly to save costs and partly to encourage more socially sustainable working) might have to be reversed, and we should return to everyone working in the same place. For colleagues based out of homes as diversely remote as rural Massachusetts, the Nevada desert and, I believe, a part of Oregon that barely had electricity, this was clearly going to be a step too far. As word spread of a possible return to centralised working, CVs became refreshed rather sharpish. Now, anyone lucky enough to have an office job (or, indeed, still have a job), has been told to work from home. So, should it stay that way?

For a start, social distancing and the lockdown have probably been a minor boon to corporate balance sheets, as the overheads of running office spaces have shifted to their homeworking employees, who are still paying for their normal household broadband and their utilities. A story in The Times on Saturday reported that Her Majesty’s Taxperson had seen a spike in homeworkers claiming tax relief on things like office chairs and printer ink, personal costs they’re now having to bear that would have otherwise been met by employers. As someone who, now, sits at a kitchen table on a vintage wooden chair which, while exceedingly characterful, is about as comfortable as an 11th century village church pew, the thought of ordering one of those nice, springy ‘David Brent’ chairs does sound like music to my benumbed rump, especially if I could claim 20% of the cost back.

Picture: Microsoft

If, then, it’s been proven so easy to have the corporate workforce work from their kitchens, living rooms and home offices, the old concept of hundreds of people amassed across the floors of corporate campuses seems strange to go back to. There are still cultural advantages to everyone working under the same roof, but the apparent success with which some sections of the workforce have switched to homeworking calls into acute question what long-term need there will be for great sheds full of desks. That, though being openly debated in the media, is still for the long-term. The noises coming out of yesterday's No.10 press conference were quite clear, that any easing of the lockdown won't happen soon as the government's five-point criteria for easing seem unlikely to be met, all the while the risk of a second and worse peak of COVID-19 is high. Despite this, a partial return to office working is being considered by the government, with defence secretary Ben Wallace this morning telling Sky News that there are "options".

Boris Johnson’s frankly remarkable recovery from the virus has no doubt injected some new vim into the Government’s plan for getting Britain back to work and restarting the economy. One theory is that any easing of lockdown might first allow construction workers back to building sites (though how two-metre social distancing would be maintained there remains to be seen). And then there are offices. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is believed to be looking at a number of proposals for the limited reopening of offices, including a ban on ‘hot desking’, canteens remaining shut, strict rules on communal spaces, and desks and workstations spread out to a minimum two-metre distance (adding another half a metre to the current average separation). There is even talk of a ban on pens being shared by coworkers.

But, then, how do you move several thousand people about office buildings? Who would be brave enough to press the lift buttons, let alone share a lift safely with others all trying to get to their desks for the requisite start time? Most office lifts I've been in at clocking-on time have been stuffed to the gills (and there's always one individual who has to squeeze on just as the doors are closing). Some have suggested staggered working even over seven days, rather than five, with shift systems enabling different employees in on alternating days. That might sound practical, but what would it actually achieve? And, still, for those people who have been instructed not to leave the house for 12 weeks “at least” due to health conditions, a return to the office may not be on the cards at all: it has been suggested that the government and its health and scientific advisers think that the most at-risk in society will have to remain in lockdown for up to a year, or however long it takes to produce a viable vaccine.

Even if we could go back to the office would we want to? A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times yesterday revealed that just 25% of adults felt safe about returning to work, a figure compounded by the continued opposition by a sizeable percentage of the nation to schools returning to normal. This would impact those who, even if they could wouldn’t be able to return to work while supervising home schooling. And, then, even if people were OK about going back, how would they get there? The insane scenes of overcrowded Tube trains in the early weeks of the crisis, as Tube services were cut but demand remained high, will weigh heavily on the minds of anyone remotely paranoid about claustrophobia brought on by the contagion.

For the foreseeable future, then, many offices will remain empty or at least sparse. This, the Financial Times discussed last week, will lead to corporate finance chiefs looking at their own bricks and mortar, glass and steel, to lower costs. “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” Jes Staley of Barclays told the paper. “Maybe we don't need all the offices that we currently have around the world,” suggested another banker, while another said that his bank was already thinking about a new location strategy that wasn’t so city-centric. Tom Stringer, a corporate real estate manager in the US with the accounting firm BDO, also told the FT that: “In six weeks we’ve taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America and moved them to kitchens and living rooms and it’s been pretty seamless,” he said. “People are getting used to it. The stray dog or the kid wandering into the conference call is now accepted in corporate and governmental America.”

The story has replicated itself across multiple business sectors where office-based working is commonplace. Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising industry veteran who now runs S4 Capital, told the Financial Times that he spends around £35 million on business property in a year. “I’d much rather invest that in people than expensive offices,” he said, adding stoically that he has found the new normal of working from home to be “energising”. However, as the lockdown goes on, others are getting stir crazy. The kitchen coffee machine is no substitute for a quick trip to Starbucks, the fridge no replacement for a lunchtime dash to Pret. There are those, too, who cherish the morning and evening commutes as opportunities to place a buffer between home and work life, to catch up on books or podcasts, or simply to spend an hour each way staring out of the train window and contemplating. This is hardly facilitated by a daily routine that mostly revolves around moving between the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the toilet and occasionally the living room.

Picture: Cisco

Skype, Zoom, Teams, WebEx and all the rest are, undoubtedly, great tools to be able see and hear your colleagues as if they were in the room with you. And it’s been well known for a while what a fortune these platforms save in terms of travel costs, not to mention CO2 emissions. But they do have their limitations. On Saturday we went up to a local golf course that has generously opened its fairways to the public to use for exercise, and I realised just how narrow a vista I’d grown used to during the lockdown. It may not have been a Mediterranean beach or the Lake District, but to see the widescreen panorama of blue sky and grass was enough to widen the stage beyond my laptop screen and the framework of our conservatory. I suppose it reminded me of the loss of freedom caused by the lockdown. That, in an office, I could just get out of my chair and walk over to someone’s desk to ask a question. To do that now - and bear in mind that I’m still getting to know the vast majority of people I work with - you have to intrude with instant messages, e-mail and, if it’s urgent, a phone call. Most if not all of my new colleagues have been wonderfully tolerant of such impertinence, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t last. The bunker spirit appears to be strong, at least with whom I work. But having waited a long time to return to employment, I’m now at that stage of thinking when it would be nice to put on a suit and shoes and get stressed again about which train service SWR has cancelled today. No amount of looking up colleagues’ nostrils via poorly-adjusted laptop webcams can compensate for the social energy you only experience when you are a part of the ‘white collar masses’ assembled in a corporate office. Because there's more to the workday than simply completing tasks.

For now, the lockdown continues to be a great national experiment. The technology has not fallen over, and people are, for the most part, getting on with working from home. Even if the occasional dog barks during a Skype call, or a bored teenager drifts past the camera during a Zoom meeting, it seems hard to imagine that this would continue forever. People do, believe it or not, like to think of their colleagues as a second family, and even welcome being away from their main brood for a few hours each day - irrespective of whether it is conducive to productivity or not.

"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.