Working from home: beware unintended consequences
Oxford Dictionaries has expanded its usual Word of the Year to include a string of Covidlinked terms – including “WFH”, or working from home. But will a 2020 necessity now become a long-lasting trend? “Employment experts have been inundated with questions from companies... trying to work out the longterm implications of operating with a mix of remote and office working – or, in some instances, ditching the office altogether,” said Jill Treanor in The Sunday Times. There are productivity, tax and health and safety issues to worry about. But if British workers get their way, the future is certainly hybrid. A recent Deloitte survey found that nearly 75% of those asked want to spend more time working remotely – “ten percentage points higher than on the Continent”. That chimes with the view of Sir Dave Ramsden, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, that “the shift may be more pronounced here than in other countries”.
“The status quo is a powerful drug,” said Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. It may take a generation for the WFH culture to take hold completely. Yet a big driver is that the pandemic “has forced employers to embrace the technology required to run dispersed workforces”, said Sarah O’Connor in the Financial Times. Companies that spent five years trying to get people to adopt Microsoft Teams reported a “60-fold adoption” in a week.
Still, perhaps we should be careful what we wish for. This year’s “mass experiment” has triggered a “prickling sense of unease” that jobs done from home in Britain could easily be done more cheaply offshore. “This confluence of globalisation and casualisation could have big consequences, especially for younger and lower-skilled white-collar workers,” said O’Connor. Unlike the decline of manufacturing, it will happen quietly. “But it will be no less painful for that.”