Not working from home

Next week I will reach the landmark of having spent 35 years working in an office. Except, obviously, I haven’t. For the last 16 months – the entire time I have been employed by my company – I’ve been working from home. Like everyone else employed to work in an office.

Actually, my anniversary is something of a fraud. In my previous job I worked from home more than I did company premises (partly due to relentless business travel); in the previous company it was mandated that we had to work at a designated corporate site for at least three days a week (mainly, we suspected, so control-freak bigwigs could keep an eye on us); further back still, my job evolved while in-post from five-days-a-week in-office attendance to only going in when it made sense. That was just in the space of five years. 

For some, technology and different company cultures have made working from home nothing that special, but I appreciate that over the last year or so it has been brand new for many. My fiancée, for example, is a primary school teacher and at one point in the pandemic found herself going into school in the morning to teach key workers’ children in person, and then coming home at lunchtime to carry on lessons via Zoom. I think she actually liked it, but would be the first to admit that that classroom provides a tactile engagement you can’t replicate over webcam. 

Office workers, on the other hand, may have found the culture shift to ‘WFH’ a different matter entirely, to the extent that it has been a sub-narrative of the entire Covid drama. In essence, it has marked the nominal end of ‘9 to 5’ and complaints about Tube delays and overcrowded carriages as worklife became conducted in pyjamas and gym gear. City centres became apocalyptic wastelands, devoid of people and their cash being spent in sandwich shops, coffee bars, shirt shops and dry cleaners. Even Marks & Spencer has cut back on formal workwear, completely eradicating suits from some of its branches in favour of the ‘smart casual’ uniform of the blazer-and-chinos combo (ten years ago M&S was selling five million men’s suits a year. Last year it sold only two million).

WFH may have been a change for office workers who’d never before been facilitated to do it, but many people - freelancers, for example - have only ever worked from their kitchens and are quite happy with the arrangement. But, while I might be self-impressed by my own forthcoming gold carriage clock moment, ever since IT departments started handing out access via VPN (which, apparently, doesn’t have anything to do with underwear), working from home while still connected to the corporate environment has been pretty commonplace. I can go back 25 years to the first time I brought home a laptop and hooked up to my work e-mail using a very slow phone line. It was a revolution in my living room, at a stroke untethering me from the generational convention of ’going into the office’ and all that entails.

Picture: BBC

Covid unpicked that convention, and a working environment and its dynamics so brilliantly captured by Ricky Gervais in The Office and films like Horrible Bosses, The Devil Wears Prada and Office Space. I’d forgotten about most of all that the other day when I made a trial run to my own office - for the first time. It was partly out of curiosity to see what it looks like and partly out of desperation to escape the knackered sofa that has been my workplace since April last year, with me increasingly sinking into its un-upholstered depths. It was a Wednesday but could have been a Sunday, such was the lack of anyone else on my floor. In fairness, it was August and officially the office was still closed to all but essential attendance, but it served as a reminder that throughout the pandemic WFH has pretty much worked, and that enabling people to sit in their gym wear and have time to do the school run has not been to the detriment of productivity. 

Personally, I’m ready to return - to the impromptu coffee machine conversations, the sight of people other than the postman, to the commute and the lunchtime trek to Pret for a boxed salad eaten with a pointless - literally - bamboo fork. I’m ready to escape the Teams meeting regime and the view out of the living room window and the hedge beyond it, the cat and Sky News’ presenter rosta for company  And I am desperate to spend my working days sitting on a proper desk chair once more. 

It’s still anyone’s guess as to what occupancy will be like when our office opens next week, and here lies the new reality. There will be colleagues who have joined us since lockdown last week and who have never been in the office. Some younger employees, especially those who joined from university, will have never been in an office working environment at all, and have spent the last 18 months perched on beds in houseshares or sat opposite flatmates at dining tables. Office veterans like me will attest to the professional and social development benefits of being in a vibrant workplace, where decision making is quicker when you can just walk over to someone's desk. On the other hand, living just yards away from your laptop has improved work-life balance beyond all recognition. So hats off, then, to my employer’s very clear message that the notion of presence is over. In-office attendance will be largely down to a combination of personal choice, functional need and management expectations. Even the idea of a formal start and finish time has been relaxed, enabling those with childcare responsibilities to manage that before travelling in and again later in the day. 

Our formal reopening on Monday – two days before my supposed anniversary – will not be a wholesale return to the office life we may have known, but a dipping of toes in the water. Gone will be the expectation of everyone clocking on at 8.30, thus requiring hordes of deskbound staff to cram into the same Tube trains at exactly the same time. Gone will be the expectation that you even have to be in every day of the working week. In fact, it’s all about working out what’s best for you.

It won’t, however, be for everyone. A recent survey of American office workers by accountancy giant PwC found that WFH enthusiasm has risen throughout the pandemic, and that 41% of workers questioned in August wanted to remain at home full-time, a 12% increase from January. Even with July’s ‘Freedom Day’, Google mobility data - which tracks people’s location history - suggested that British workplace presence is just 40% of pre-pandemic figures (compared to 30% in the US and Germany).

Opinion in different business sectors appears divided over whether the return to the office should be made formal: technology giants like Apple, Amazon and Facebook have said that they would not expect employees back at their offices until January, while City firms in London have expressed a different view. Goldman Sachs’ chief executive, David Soloman has described WFH as an “aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible”, adding that it was “not a new normal”. Other financial services companies have adopted a hybrid approach, viewing the office as “collaborative spaces”, according to insurer Aviva, best used for creativity and innovation rather than rows of battery hens doing their e-mail. BT has said that WFH will not last forever, with the company’s HR director writing an official blog post yesterday stating that with the end of the school holidays it was time to return to the office: “Our offices will be the place our graduates and apprentices learn from more senior colleagues,” Alison Wilcox wrote, adding that BT’s sites also played a part in their “surrounding micro and local economies”.

The elephant in the Marie Celeste-like room, of course, is that COVID-19 hasn’t gone away. Employees at city locations will still need to commute, with public transport the prevailing choice. That means dealing with Covidiot anxiety, and the psychological stare-outs between the masked and the maskless on trains and buses. Office managers, too, will have made provisions by implementing polite conventions about wearing masks in lifts and providing socially-distanced desks. This might be mitigated by progressive policies not requiring mandatory in-office attendance, but as we head into the traditional cold and flu season, along with the start of the school term and an exponential increase in ’normality’, there’s nothing to stop the return to office life being thwarted by the Delta variant or other mutations. Some large corporate concerns have been understandably concerned about the legal risks of bringing people back to the office while the coronavirus is still on the lose, fearing the threat of legal challenges on health and safety grounds. 

There has also been evidence of in-office policies having some impact on loyalty. A survey of American workers revealed that 40% would consider changing companies if they had full-time office working imposed on them. Another thorny issue might be companies cutting pay for those who prefer to work from home full time - civil servants in the UK are facing the prospect of their London Weighting being removed, though this raises the argument that while the benefit hasn’t been necessary to cover the cost of commuting, someone has to pay for all that broadband and electricity that has been consumed by people working from home.

The months ahead, I suspect, will be more tentative than definitive. Time and personal confidence might be the determining factors as to whether a gradual return to the office is a trickle or a flood, or exactly how a hybrid approach manifests itself. While politicians push the idea of normality and freedom, it’s still too early to say exactly what “normal” is going to be. I had a taste of it last week with my day trip to an office, but despite the everyday regularity of sitting in front of a laptop, it was still an odd novelty, despite being a setting that I have known - mostly - my entire working life.