Beware the unholy alliance that wants to make working from home the norm

Since lockdown began, it has sometimes felt as if every columnist and politician, every corporate strategist and trendy academic has propounded a single, apparently unchallengeable truth: that working from home is unquestionably better. The internet has destroyed the logic of the office. All those years people spent trudging into work were a ridiculous imposition that not only left employees less productive, but required companies to maintain costly and unnecessary premises. All we hear about is the better work-life balance enjoyed by (often) upper-middle class professionals during lockdown, the money saved on commuting, the time freed up from the endless rotation of pointless meetings.

I have heard a very different view from friends in their twenties and thirties. Many of them feel cut off from colleagues, performing work with no real idea of the wider corporate context, and none of the informal feedback that is so useful for progression at that age. Technology has kept things ticking over, but there are fewer opportunities to take initiative or impress senior staff. The loss of a physical separation between work and home is keenly felt, as is any culture of collaboration or innovation beyond what is permitted by prearranged Zoom calls. Working from home is less appealing if you face a choice between doing so in your dingy flatshare or moving back in with your

What of the companies that reject the fashionable mantra that home working is better and instead think it ‘breeds silo thinking and tribalism’?

parents, perhaps for many months. Clearly we aren’t returning to normal any time soon; few businesses will use the responsibility the Prime Minister has now conferred on them to bring their staff back to the office in full.

Even if they were inclined to do so, there are immense practical problems if they want to be “Covid secure”. But nor should we swallow the sometimes thoughtless narrative of the homeworking lobby. They seem determined to turn what was once a privilege into an entitlement. There have even been suggestions that the Government should enshrine a “right” to home working into law.

But what of the “right” (if we must talk in those terms) to office working? What of those companies that reject the fashionable mantra that home working is better, and instead think it “breeds silo thinking and tribalism”, as the entrepreneur Luke Johnson put it the other day? What if they ask their staff to come back, and the staff refuse? Will the authorities stand by them?

Or will the need to “consult” with employees the Government is insisting on mean firms will be trapped with a system they know is suboptimal?

I am not denying that some people may perform better at home, or that some companies may be right to dispense with expensive fripperies such as canteens or “thinking pods”.

The retreat from the office may even have the benefit of disempowering increasingly imperial, and increasingly woke, HR departments.

But there is a danger here: that an alliance of corporate interests and established professionals will, under the cover of increasing employees’ choice to work as they please, destroy the ability to meaningfully choose. And much else besides.