Finally, top firms are getting staff back to the office

You may not miss the commute but, says a startling new book, if we’re to beat today’s loneliness epidemic, your office gossip and banter with the barista could be lifesavers

A STRING of top firms last night revealed their staff were pouring back into the office, with others saying they are considering plans to lure workers from their homes.

In a significant boost to the campaign to entice more office workers into city centres, many companies said they had recorded an uptick in employees getting back to their desks.

The news comes in a new Daily Mail audit of 30 FTSE 100 and top firms, representing more than 150,000 employees.

High street chain Boots was among those recording a steady rise in attendance, with around a third of its office staff now back at their desks at least a few days a week. No cases of Covid-19 have been recorded among this cohort.

In a further boost the boss of recruitment giant Hays vowed there would be no ‘ turning our back on the office’.

Alistair Cox last night said fulltime remote working was unlikely to become ‘a permanent thing’.

But he also predicted offices will be closed as companies assess whether to switch permanently to a ‘hybrid’ model, where home and office working are balanced.

Yesterday it emerged Capita, one of the UK’s biggest employers, will become the first major British firm to pull out of city and town centres by closing nearly 100 offices. The Government contractor – which collects the BBC licence fee and runs the London congestion charge – is set to close more than a third of its 250 offices across Britain; its 45,000 UK staff will continue to work from home.

The news will be a major blow to Boris Johnson’s back to work campaign, which is to be launched this week.

Yesterday it also emerged that BP is planning to sell its central London headquarters as part of a permanent shift in working patterns.

The developments will heighten fears for city centre businesses, from sandwich shops and pubs to dry cleaners and hairdressers, which rely on footfall from offices.

Last week CBI boss Dame Carolyn Fairbairn said working from home had turned some commercial centres into ‘ghost towns’. But in a glimmer of hope, several firms surveyed by the Mail said either workers were starting to trickle back or that plans were being drawnup for bigger increases.

Many said numbers returning will rest on the Government’s success at getting children back to school this week.

Auditing giant PricewaterhouseCoopers said around a third of its 24,700 office workers were now spending at least some time at their desks and that this was increasing. And insurance giant Aviva expects numbers at desks to double in the coming weeks.

Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘The Government has to lead the way and tell civil servants and companies “get back to work”.’

Derek Ray-Hill, from Cities Restart – a venture being launched next month to get people back to work, said: ‘Business leaders need to put on a mask, wash their hands and get back to work. They can’t keep waiting for someone else to take the lead.’

It comes after figures last week revealed only 17 per cent of staff have returned to work in the 63 biggest cities.

Capita and BP did not respond to requests for comment.

September 2019 and I am in a chic cafe when brittany arrives. Long-limbed and athletic, her smile widens as she sees me. ‘Hey, love your dress,’ she says. At £30 an hour I’d expect no less. For brittany, 23, is the ‘friend’ I have rented from a company called rent-A-Friend.

Founded by an entrepreneur who had seen the concept take off in Japan, and now operating in dozens of countries including the UK, its website has more than 620,000 platonic friends for hire.

As we chat, at times I forget I am paying for brittany’s company. but just as the meter on our encounter begins to run out, she ramps up the charm. Smile permafixed, banter upped, she gamely joins me in trying on hats in a shop. Apparently, they really suit me — although presumably she would tell me that whether it was true or not.

It’s a sign of our times that a growing economy has emerged to service those who feel alone. even before the coronavirus pandemic triggered a ‘ social recession’ with its restrictions on gatherings, one in eight brits did not have a single close friend they could rely on, up from one in ten just five years before.

three- quarters did not know their neighbours’ names; the problem had become so significant that, in 2018, the then prime minister, theresa may, appointed a minister for Loneliness.

the rise of remote working — before the pandemic made home-working the norm, it was already estimated that, by 2023, more than 40 per cent of the workforce would be working remotely the majority of the time — risks making loneliness significantly worse.

Data from other countries is similarly troubling. In Japan, crimes committed by people over the age of 65 have quadrupled

over the past two decades — with many believed to be choosing prison to escape their isolation by committing minor offences such as shoplifting.

Yet the youngest among us are the loneliest. In the UK, three in five 18to-34-year- olds say they are lonely often or sometimes and, in the wake of Covid-19, that is likely to be significantly higher. We are in the midst of a global loneliness crisis and none of us is immune.

Indeed, loneliness is making us physically ill. The research shows that it is worse for our health than not exercising, and twice as harmful as being obese, and as bad for our physical health as a 15- a- day cigarette habit. Which also makes it an economic crisis. even prior to Covid-19 in the UK, employers were losing £800 million a year because of loneliness-related sick days.

Why? The chemical presence of loneliness in the body — the stress hormones it sends coursing through our veins — is essentially identical to the ‘fight or flight’ reaction when we feel under attack. Our bodies are not designed to be

repeatedly lonely. By keeping us in sustained ‘high alert’, loneliness over time damages our immune system and leaves us more susceptible to illnesses, including the common cold and the flu.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

THIS state of affairs didn’t emerge overnight. Smartphones and, in particular, social media have played an integral role: stealing our attention away from those around us and fuelling our worst instincts even during lockdown.

Alongside the local online groups in which neighbours who had never spoken before shared advice, racist attacks escalated on social media and counsellors told me of a spike in clients feeling lonely because their partners were even more consumed by their phones.

Just having a smartphone with us changes the way we interact: researchers found that strangers smile significantly less at each other when they have their smartphones with them.

Moreover, the danger is that the more we adopt a contactless lifestyle, the less naturally adept we become at connecting in person. Already, before the pandemic, we could bypass the server and order a Big Mac on a giant screen, avoid a conversation with a bookseller by having our reading matter recommended by Amazon’s algorithm, and order restaurant meals to our homes via delivery apps. Is it not inevitable that we feel lonelier even if surrounded by people?

By 2050, almost 70 per cent of people will be living in cities. Yet when confronted with all those people our response is often to withdraw — whether by covering our ears with headphones or burying ourselves in our phones.

The speed of life does not help. Urban walking speeds average ten per cent higher than they were in the Nineties, and the wealthier a city the faster our pace — time is money. Texting on the go, it’s easy not to notice others.

Meanwhile, our cities are being designed to keep ‘undesirables’ out: ‘seats’ in bus stations barely wide enough to perch on, pink lights to highlight uneven skin are installed as an ‘ anti- loitering strategy’ targeting vain teenagers.

However, we all pay the price. That sloping bus-shelter seat is not just inhospitable to ‘loiterers’, it makes it harder for the person with a walking stick to take the bus to go shopping or meet friends.

But it is not just our physical environment that is making us feel lonely. A decade ago, if you needed to discuss something with a colleague you would probably have walked over to their desk.

A 2018 global study found that employees typically spent nearly half their entire day sending emails and messages, often to people a few desks away. Remote working exacerbates feelings of isolation: office gossip, laughter and small talk were just some of the things people missed during lockdown.

We are in the midst of the most significant reorganisation of work since the Industrial Revolution, with power increasingly ceded to technology. That has allowed increasing numbers of workers not just to be watched — warehouse workers wearing scanners to track how fast they are moving — but also constantly rated.

Uber driver Hasheem explained to me why, counter-intuitively, a job which appeared to demand so much interaction felt so isolating: ‘As I can’t risk offending a passenger because of how they might rate me, most of the time I am silent.’

In response to our loneliness, a new business model sees community itself as a product it can sell: commercial co-working spaces with names such as Work.Life, Second Home and WeWork. The trouble is that community is not something one can buy. People have to invest time and participate if it is to thrive.

TALK TO YOUR BARISTA

If We are to come together, we all have significant roles to play. Some of this is about each of us taking small steps that may not seem much, at first glance.

In 2013, sociologists investigated whether ‘micro-interactions’ had a quantifiable effect on people’s wellbeing.

Staking out a coffee shop, they recruited arriving customers to take part in an experiment: half were instructed to make friendly small talk with the barista, while the other half were told to ‘ avoid unnecessary conversation’. Though the interaction lasted just 30 seconds, the ‘friendly’ group reported higher levels of happiness.

Given how important face-to-face interactions are, as we seek to rebuild our post-Covid-19 world, we need to acknowledge the important role entrepreneurialism can play here. Many local businesses that contribute to community — often independent shops and cafes — are under existential threat.

If there were ever a time to take up former Sainsbury’s supermarket chief Justin King’s call for a halving of business rates for high street stores — a campaign the Daily Mail has been supporting — it is now.

We each must do our part. We need to support our local cafes, even if that means paying a little more. We need to commit to shopping, at least some of the time, in local stores