Is working from home the best plan for the future?

THE chickens have come home to roost for office staff who thought they had won the lottery when told to work from home during the pandemic. There are moves to install surveillance in homes to ensure they comply with company rules. Workers initially welcomed being at home and the savings on commuting. But what was a novelty is likely to become their worst nightmare thanks to this gross invasion of privacy. Their homes will become a company offshoot.

KEN HOBBINS, Birmingham.

AT SECONDARY school in the 1970s, teachers told us computers would soon enable people to work from home, negating the need to travel to, and maintain, offices. Our social lives were predicted to flourish thanks to shorter working hours. Now the situation is upon us, I am bemused at the hand-wringing. This has been on the horizon for years, but office blocks continued to be built with all the infrastructure that goes with them. Now no one is sure what to do with the empty buildings. Surely it wasn’t hard to see what would eventually happen, with or without a pandemic.

Mrs S. WEBB, Maidstone, Kent.

SOME employers plan to make working from home permanent for employees, aiming for lower operating costs and greater profits by reducing office space. Sorry, but if my employers want me to permanently allocate a room in my house for work, they can pay rent on it.

M. LAWSON, Port Erin, Isle of Man.

CALLING on workers to return to the office, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: ‘You can’t beat the spontaneity, team building and culture that you create in a firm from people spending physical time together.’ My experience of office working was the opposite, due to back-biting, conniving and malicious rumours. The day I retired was one of the happiest times of my life.

GILL LAWRENCE, Bletchley, Bucks.