Feeding the squirrel

Picture: Microsoft

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

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

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

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

Picture: TFL

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

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

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

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

Picture: WeWork

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

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

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

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

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