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.
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.
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.
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.
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