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.