The Daily Telegraph - Features
Of course staff want to work from home, we want a life
Not all work is fulfilling; not all work is flexible; not all work is the meaning of life
Long before the pandemic, while stuck in traffic, a cabbie casually explained to me: “Thursdays are the new Fridays.” His theory was that you could go out and get drunk on a Thursday night and be hungover at work the next day and that was fine. Women, he told me, had had enough of their blokes being useless on a Saturday and not looking after the kids.
It made a certain kind of sense and now post-pandemic, it appears to be even more true. Fridays are not for work. There are the TWaTs who only go into the office Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and now worryingly many children are skipping school on Fridays too. Apparently the average number of pupils who are not in school compared to midweek “without good reason” is up 21 per cent on Fridays.
I am not going to rehash arguments about lockdown and the shutting down of schools here, but clearly we are going through a post-pandemic crisis, one that will not resolve itself by merely telling everyone to get back to school or to work. The desire to get back to normal involves a certain denial and a refusal to learn many of the lessons of lockdown: not all work is office work; not all work is fulfilling; not all work is flexible; not all work is the meaning of life. Not every part of the school day is necessary; not all of it is about “learning”; not all children like it.
Indeed, I know of lots of teenagers who, once they realised that they could go online and learn in an hour what would often take a day in school, saw little reason to go back. Mostly they did so for social reasons, but some refused. University students also realised, while they were locked inside halls of residence, that their actual tuition was two hours a week of Zoom. Some workers found that without the commute, they could achieve a lot more at home. Some, on the other hand, felt isolated with no one to bounce ideas off and became demotivated.
Yet, I would argue that even before all this, there was an ongoing reassessment of that mysterious idea of the “work/life balance”. Much of this was driven by women of my generation who instead of having it all, did it all. The woman with the breast pump expressing milk in the staff loo is, to me, symbolic of that time. If younger generations have decided they want more time with their children and less time at work, who can blame them? Children don’t really care about quality time – that was the myth we comforted ourselves with – they care about the quantity of time.
During lockdown, it was again mostly women who were somehow expected to both work and home-school their kids. School was revealed as primarily childcare. Is it any wonder that children themselves implicitly understood that? If parents are at home, then why shouldn’t they be?
Punitive measures aimed at both adults and children are constant. Too many of us are not at work: we are too fat, too depressed, too anxious or we have some undiagnosed illness that gets us a sick note. Rishi Sunak says he is on “a moral mission” to get the workshy back to work by removing their benefits. Disability groups are mortified by this.
Post-Covid, some 2.8 million are out of work because of long-term sickness. Something is going badly wrong here, I don’t doubt that, but the proffered solutions are themselves unworkable. If poor mental health is stopping those who should be employed from getting jobs, let’s not forget that we already have 1.8 million on a waiting list for treatment for mental-health issues.
If mothers are finding it difficult to manage then that is because we are seeing a huge drop in childcare provision pre-Covid. Since 2019, in the South East, the nursery and childminder sector has lost 2,332 providers. In the North East, there has been a 27 per cent drop.
Is it any wonder that many have unofficially taken to doing four-day weeks? Circumstances have led them there and shouting at workers about productivity is not enough. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are all trialling four-day weeks. Some companies require 40 hours worked in that time, some far less. Even Japan – notorious for “death by overwork” – is trying it, to get people to spend more time outside work and push up their declining birth rate. Of course, all this can only be viable in certain jobs and it is difficult for small businesses, but this surely is the future.
So much of the discussion about work assumes that we are all salarymen in offices and can work until we are 70. This is just not the case. Work is part of life but not all of it. The bosses may not like flexible working, but wherever it can happen, it is happening. Nothing is stopping self-important workaholics from doing their 14-hour days. Go for it guys! The rest of us, it seems, have looked at the work/life balance conundrum and, surreptitiously maybe, have chosen life.
We all see them: those annoying pop-up boxes that appear on our screens, asking us to consent to websites’ privacy and digital cookie policies.
You probably don’t read them, instead frantically hurrying the messages away by clicking “yes, I accept” without a second thought.
In fact, it appears actually engaging with the jargon is so rare that free wine goes unclaimed for months, buried deep in the jargon.
It emerged last week that Tax Policy Associates, a think tank, had since February hidden a clause in its website privacy policy offering a complimentary bottle of “good wine” to the first person to notice it. But it wasn’t until this month that somebody stepped forward to claim the prize.
“We know nobody reads this, because we added in February that we’d send a bottle of good wine to the first person to contact us, and it was only in May that we got a response,” a sentence in the non-profit organisation’s updated privacy policy now reads.
The think tank’s founder, Dan Neidle, says the experiment involving a £30 bottle of 2014 Château de Sales Pomerol was a personal, “childish protest” against regulations that dictate all businesses have to have a privacy policy when “no one reads it”.
“I had an email out of the blue from a chap named Arthur,” explains Neidle. “He was writing a privacy policy for his own website, and so was researching other ones. It shows that no one reads this stuff. A normal person doesn’t have the slightest reason to do so.”
All firms that process and store customer information, such as names and email addresses, must provide an online privacy policy as part of their obligations under the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Those who fail to comply face the prospect of hefty fines and reputational damage.
But adhering to the directives is often an onerous task for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and charities.
As the complexity has risen, so too has the time such companies spend on ensuring they conform with the regulations, which is up by 46 per cent over the past year alone, according to research from data and analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet.
Meanwhile, a 2021 study by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) saw two in five of its members describe data protection as the “most burdensome regulation” to grapple with.
These regulations create a “disproportionate effect” for companies with “fewer resources to devote to compliance than their larger counterparts,” says Tina McKenzie, policy chair at the FSB.
Neidle points out that even small, community coffee shops need to have privacy policies to comply with GDPR. He argues the solution is to simplify – by reverting to standard privacy conditions that “apply as a default to small businesses that don’t handle client data”. These shouldn’t require cookie policies and would help businesses save money and “save consumers from annoying clicking,” he says.
McKenzie, for her part, acknowledges data protection laws are a “vital” part of life in the 21st century. However, their “complex” and “sensitive” nature means small businesses often need greater support and understanding from regulatory bodies not only to ensure compliance but also to “reduce the financial and time costs of doing so,” she says.
Regulators should be “proportionate” in enforcing these rules, McKenzie adds, focusing on “education and support”.
“Having reams of text required by law, which, in practice, very few people actually read, undermines the consumer protection we all want to have in place,” she says.
In effect, stringent requirements can distract entrepreneurs from important priorities like growing their businesses and generating jobs for their local communities.
“Starting a business isn’t about just doing the fun stuff – there’s a lot of compliance that can’t be ignored – but this all contributes to the long hours and sense of feeling like you’re taking on the world when trying to build traction and momentum,” says Gareth Jones, CEO of small business and coworking experts Town Square Spaces Ltd.
On the consumer end, there’s precious little appetite to sift through tens of thousands of words of policy, regardless of what it costs businesses to produce them. Not only are they hugely complex, they’re also getting longer.
A 2021 study by De Montfort University found that the average length of privacy policies had increased from just over 1,000 words in 2000 to more than 4,000 words in 2021.
Dr Isabel Wagner, an associate professor in computer science who conducted the research, found that their average word count increased following the European Union’s implementation of GDPR in 2018 and again in 2020, when California adopted its own privacy policies.
“As a researcher who works on privacy, I find myself agreeing to privacy policies but not reading them,” she told the New Scientist in 2022, admitting her study of some 50,000 texts was triggered by a recognition of her own habits.
The apparent absurdity of the situation has prompted calls for adjustments. McKenzie agrees there is a need for a “rethink on how the system works” so that legislation is “easier for everyone to navigate”.
This should be done in a way that preserves the “data adequacy we need to keep business flowing between the UK and other international jurisdictions with their own sets of rules,” she says.
Austin Walters, director of website design firm Triplesnap Technologies, recommends that regulators take a tiered approach that simplifies requirements for smaller businesses that don’t handle highly sensitive data.
“Simplifying legal jargon and making policies more accessible could increase consumer trust and understanding without compromising data security, ultimately improving user interaction with these important documents,” he says.
Andrew Wilson-Bushell, an associate at the law firm Simkins LLP, says firms should ensure they’re only providing customers with information they genuinely need to engage with. But, lengthy and unloved as they are, privacy policies do have an important purpose, he acknowledges.
“The exercise of writing the privacy policy requires a business to understand its use of personal data, and map that out in a comprehensible way. That might often feel like overkill – until a serious data breach occurs.”
Neidle remains sceptical about the demands GDPR has placed on smaller businesses. “It just seems crazy to me that my local coffee shop has to deal with the same rules as Facebook does,” he says.
‘It seems crazy that my local coffee shop has to deal with the same rules as Facebook’