Are you a working-from-home winner or loser?

Miranda Levy reports

Lockdown has sparked a working-from-home revolution, with 74 per cent of organisations planning to shift some employees to remote work permanently.

While some are thrilled at swapping the commute and expensive coffees for a 9-5 without leaving the house, others are less happy. Loneliness, longer hours and even ‘Zoom fatigue’ have been cited, with some experts calling it a ‘people crisis’.

I’ve saved so much money on Starbucks coffees,’ says a friend. ‘Train fares, lunch, dry-cleaning, shopping at lunchtime. When you add it up, it’s significant. Plus, I can roll out of bed, stay in gym gear and just accessorise my top half for Zoom calls. My commute is a walk upstairs.’

Welcome to the low-maintenance world of WFH. Since lockdown was announced, those of us in office jobs have been working from our houses and our flats. And it seems increasingly likely that, for many, this relocation is going to stick.

‘The Covid lockdown was the biggest experiment in home working we’ve ever had,’ says Peter Cheese, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the industry body for HR professionals, which also advises on new work trends. ‘Now we are moving into the next phase. The earliest many companies are returning to office-based working is the autumn, or even 2021. We know things are not just going to “snap back” to where they were before.’

Amazon staff won’t be back in the office until October; Google, January 2021. Several big companies have indicated that WFH will be a ‘permanent shift’: investment bank UBS says a third of its 70,000 could go remote for good, Facebook has firm plans for half its 42,000 workforce (3,000 of whom are in the UK) to be home-based within 10 years.

Stung by lockdown, many firms are closing, and recession looms. But those of us still clinging on to our jobs are having to adapt. A survey of senior finance leaders by American research company Gartner found that 74 per cent of organisations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 per cent of the entire US workforce will work from home at least a couple of times a week. BC (Before Coronavirus), that number was in the low single digits. Where 2008 was a financial crisis, says Cheese, this is a ‘people’ crisis.

At first glance, the world of WFH seems a merry one. According to a survey for the Business Clean Air Taskforce (a corporate coalition including Philips, Uber and the Canary Wharf Group), almost nine out of 10 Britons who have worked from home in lockdown would like to continue in some way. They enjoy not having to fight their way through the rush hour and having more time to spend with their families. These sentiments had already been flagged by American tech company Buffer, which last year conducted a State of Remote Work survey. In its ‘Pros’ list, 40 per cent of respondents cited appreciating ‘a flexible schedule’, a third enjoyed ‘working from anywhere’ and 14 per cent ‘time with family’.

There is also an argument that working from home increases productivity. Research conducted before the pandemic by the Harvard Business Review found that workers at the US Patent and Trade Office improved their productivity by 4.4 per cent. Another paper, by Stanford University, studied 1,000 employees at a Chinese travel agency. One of its authors, Professor Nicholas Bloom, found that remote work increased job satisfaction and cut by half the number of people leaving. On the back of his 2015 findings, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, WFH was vaunted as the way forward by employment experts, long before the lockdown made it a necessity.

The CIPD’S Peter Cheese sees WFH largely as a good thing. ‘We now have a cultural shift that has been needed for a long time,’ he says. ‘Work was based on old paradigms and rules, such as presenteeism. The rigidness of the office culture may have held us back.’

Julien Codorniou, vice president of Workplace for Facebook, agrees. ‘Covid has accelerated the digital transformation that was already taking place,’ he says. ‘Thanks to technology, we are turning companies into communities. Technology reduces distance – for example, I am now talking to you from Narbonne in the south of France.’

As a nation, we are Zooming, Microsoft Teaming or using Facebook’s own software, Workplace. If you weren’t tech-savvy before, you really have to be now; you’re probably even thinking about upgrading to a faster Wi-fi. ‘As far as our company is concerned, the technology of home-working extends the pool of talent into hundreds of millions,’ says Codorniou. ‘We can now hire developers from outside California – even from countries that don’t have a Facebook office.’ He believes WFH ‘makes a level playing field. You no longer have to sit next to the CEO to be noticed. There will be a new generation of talent.’

Many new start-ups are remote from their very inception. Hermione Ireland is the managing director of Académie du Vin Library, which publishes books on wine. ‘We are a young company of barely a year old, run entirely virtually, apart from a big meeting once a month,’ she says. ‘This is obviously helpful because our overheads are low. But our model also allows employees from outside London to be part of the business.’ The creative people like it because they prefer to work in isolation, says Ireland. ‘But the more extroverted sales people are also enjoying the opportunities of video conferencing.’

But not everyone finds that WFH can work, either as a booster of morale, or as a long-term strategy. Says Diana (not her real name): ‘I recently worked in a start-up, one of those let’s-do-things-differently, pay-people-nothing-but-give-themfree-pizza businesses springing up everywhere. We were cramped together long hours under the eye of a controlling micromanager of a boss,’ she says. After pressure from the team she allowed a working-fromhome policy. ‘It started well, but then numbers crept up,’ she says. ‘People started emailing to say they weren’t coming in that day, which only added more pressure on the ones that had.’ Resentment started growing. ‘There were so many times absentees were conveniently offline when work s—t hit the fan and it was their responsibility to sort. It wasn’t a happy ship but WFH didn’t make it any happier.’ It came to a head when the boss walked in one morning and found that threequarters of the office hadn’t turned up. ‘Suddenly WFH policy was knocked on the head and we were back, cooped up together and feeling worse than before.’

Larger companies have also had this experience. IBM was an early adopter of working from home: in 2009, a report boasted that ‘40 per cent of IBM’S some 386,000 employees in 173 countries have no office at all’. (The company also saved $2 billion on office space.) But then, in March 2017, IBM started to reverse the policy. Commentators mentioned that productivity might have improved, but not ‘collaborative efficiency’, for example, the speed at which a group solves a problem. Writing in The Atlantic magazine in 2017, business journalist Jerry Useem explained, ‘Collaboration requires

‘The rigidness of the office culture may have held us back’

communication. And the communications technology offering the fastest, cheapest, and highest-bandwidth connection is – for the moment, anyway – still the office.’ He quoted a prescient 1977 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which found that, among scientists and engineers, the further apart their desks, the less likely they were to communicate. Thus were the problems of social distancing predicted.

Working outside the office brings up further significant challenges. For example, in the ‘old days’, much store was set by the ‘learning on the job’ element, where one picked up things through osmosis: listening to the conversations of senior colleagues – or those in different departments. ‘It’s true that WFH can force people into “silos” where they work alone, and only use the skills required by their leader,’ says Cheese. He agrees that ‘tacit learning’ and ‘spontaneous learning moments’ may suffer. ‘Managers will have to find a way to share their skills in different ways,’ he says. ‘For example, I know of a company that leaves Zoom on all day, so people can lift their heads up and ask a question, as if they were in an office.’

Alison Pay is the managing director of Mental Health at Work, a company that provides training and consultancy to improve workplace emotional support via education and skills development. She agrees that isolation is a significant issue, especially for junior staff. ‘It starts with recruitment,’ she says. ‘It’s hard enough getting a new person up to speed with the language and acronyms of a new office. Companies really need to think about this: how to create an environment where younger members of the team can feel confident enough to ask about their senior colleagues’ roles.’

The social aspect is also really important: how do you replicate that ‘water-cooler’ conversation, wonders Cheese. And it’s true: so much of the nuts and bolts of work life is conducted as the kettle is boiling, or when you catch your boss by the lift or offer solace to a crying colleague in the loos. ‘Something is definitely lost by the lack of face-to-face contact,’ says Pay. Her company tries to replicate office banter in a weekly ‘Stand-up’ on Teams, where staff check on how they’re all doing. ‘We schedule it in everyone’s calendar, so that no one can claim they are too busy,’ she says. ‘It’s not a panacea, but it’s helpful.

‘On the whole, lockdown has not been kind to our mental health,’ she continues. ‘Our sister company, The Mental Health Foundation, did a survey in early May: right in the heart of lockdown. Sixty-six per cent of people reported stress related to their jobs.’ A closer look at the survey shows that WFH has contributed to this: 22 per cent of respondents said they did not have a space to work, and 23 per cent reported working an extra 28 to 35 hours a month (on the same pay). As the working day becomes less of a time-tabled event, punctuated by a commute, we are continuing with projects that would normally wait until the next day.

This ‘boundary-less’ working is a common theme, and it particularly affects women. On many levels, WFH helps female employees, because they can work more flexibly – look after children if they have them, and pick up tasks later in the evening if it suits them. But it also means longer hours. New lockdown-specific research from the World Economic Forum warned of greater stress on women as primary caregivers during the current pandemic than on men. Even though both sexes are WFH, mothers are doing 12 hours a week more housework on average than fathers. Academics at the University of Sussex said the impact of school closures had also exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities, with 70 per cent of women saying they were now completely or mostly responsible for homeschooling.

Among the WFH ‘Cons’ in Buffer’s State of Remote Work survey were ‘loneliness’ (19 per cent) and ‘unplugging from work’ (22 per

‘It wasn’t a happy ship but WFH didn’t make it happier’

cent). Ten per cent of respondents cited ‘distractions from home’. Because not everyone has a study or a spare room: imagine being in a 20-something flat-share where your bedroom also doubles up as your office? That surely cannot be good for mental health, specifically ‘winding down’ before sleep.

‘There is an assumption that working from home is OK for highly paid “white collar” executives,’ says Cheese. ‘It’s not necessarily the case for everyone.’ Alison Pay is also concerned for those who come from underprivileged or abusive home environments, for whom weekdays in the office were a salvation. ‘These living arrangements are definitely a precursor to mentalhealth issues,’ she says.

Cheese talks about ‘compassionate management’, which means that when bosses ask ‘how are you?’ they actually listen to the answer. Consideration also needs to be given to those employees who are nervous about getting on public transport again. ‘This is going to be a real issue, and it needs to be treated with sensitivity,’ says Pay. ‘People are going to become anxious and less productive if they start worrying about their journey home mid-afternoon. If their boss puts his or her foot down, they might start taking time off, or even looking for another job.’

For those still permitted to work from home, video-conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Teams have come as a revelation. But, again, they bring problems not associated with real-life, face-to-face meetings. ‘Study after study has proved that it’s harder to read visual clues on a video call,’ says Pay. ‘Managers need to create an environment of openness, where it’s OK to ask questions. Has everyone understood? Does anything need further clarification?’ Plus, not everyone enjoys a window into their home even briefly, let alone having Zoom running all day long. We haven’t all had the time or money to fill our bookcases with Russian classics. There is even talk of ‘Zoom fatigue’: we were on our screens enough BC – now we talk through them, with images that freeze when the boss is saying something important, and mute settings that mysteriously fail at inopportune moments.

Even those who were previously ‘sold’ on WFH as ‘the answer’ are recalibrating. Take Stanford’s Professor Nicholas Bloom, who five years ago was extolling the virtues of WFH, as seen in his Chinese case study. It seems that actually having to experience home-working himself has changed his mind. On 30 March this year, he said, ‘Everyone assumes that I would be gushing over the global rollout of working from home. Unfortunately not. We are working at home alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice, and no in-office days. This will create a productivity disaster for firms.’

He went on to detail how the youngest of his four kids would burst into the room while he was in the middle of a conference call. ‘I fear this collapse in office face-time will lead to a slump in innovation. The new ideas we are losing today could show up in fewer new products in 2021 and beyond, lowering longrun growth.’ It’s also going to cost companies a significant amount to instal social-distancing measures in their offices, especially if the area of their workplace is small. ‘Again, employers will need to be flexible in how and where they work,’ says Pay.

Not all the experts are pessimistic about the prospect of WFH, however. ‘Good businesses and responsible employers will offer their staff a choice with more flexible arrangements,’ says Cheese. ‘Flexibility means allowing people to work part-time, or different hours: shifting the dynamic. It should no longer just be a case of the boss telling people what to do. If you empower your staff with choice, they will stay with you for longer.’ (As long as bosses hold back on the urge to micromanage: Pay tells of a company that told its workers: ‘You cannot unload the dishwasher while working from home.’) Besides, says Pay, ‘There is no onesize-fits-all solution. It depends on the company, the individual, their environment, and the type of work they are doing.’

Whether or not we combine transatlantic conference calls with the ironing, in one form or another, WFH is going to be a permanent fixture. Cheese exuberantly quotes Churchill: ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.’ He then reminds us how JFK told us: ‘When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.’

Julien Codorniou of Facebook agrees. ‘Companies need to grab the positive potential of WFH,’ he says. ‘The trend is here to stay. There is no way back.’

‘One company told workers not to unload the dishwasher’