Boardrooms are elevating leisure above enterprise and expansion

Bosses must stop colluding with the new workingfrom-home culture – it’s bad for business acumen

Flights are getting cancelled because of staff shortages. Vacancies are becoming impossible to fill because so many people have taken early retirement. Shelves are starting to empty because there is no one to stack them, and restaurants are closing early because there is no one to fire up the stoves in the kitchens or wait on the tables.

It should be obvious to just about everyone by now that the country is grinding to a halt as fewer and fewer people are working as hard as they used to – and certainly not enough to keep the economy going.

Against that backdrop, you might expect the heads of Britain’s biggest companies to be leading by example, demanding more of their staff, and pushing for people to be back at their desks. But hold on. M&S has just appointed a chief executive who not only shares the job with someone else, but also only works a four-day week.

Many others are in thrall to overmighty HR departments that prioritise work-life balance over growing the business, and making money for shareholders. A few entrepreneurs such as James Dyson and Elon Musk are pushing back against that, but very few major companies are willing to do so. Eventually they will get crushed by hungrier, more ambitious start-ups – but there will be a lot of pain for customers and shareholders before that happens.

It works out as £14,432 a week. Or £3,600 per day. Or indeed £450 per hour assuming she puts in eight hours a day in the office, or at least at the laptop perched on the end of her kitchen table. No one would question that Katie Bickerstaffe is well-paid in her new role as co-chief executive of M&S. But the most striking thing about her appointment last week, apart from the fact that she is the first woman to lead the company, is that she will only work a four-day week. While her CO-CEO Stuart Machin will lead the company on a normal Monday to Friday, Bickerstaffe has opted for a shorter working week.

That might be fashionable, but it is very hard to believe it is exactly what M&S needs at this point in its history.

It is not as if the chain, with its odd mix of over-priced food and slightly dowdy clothes, is a huge success. Its shares are down by 41pc so far this year, and they are down by 57pc over the last five years. Indeed, they are still down on where they were when the 21st century began. It is hardly a great record, especially when you consider how brilliantly rivals such as Zara (with profits up 80pc again this week) have done in mid-market fashion. Whatever it is that might turn it around, it clearly isn’t long hours, at least in the view of the people in charge. Instead, the company seems to celebrate that it is putting in less work rather than more.

M&S is hardly alone in that. There is absolutely no sign of the leaders of the UK’S leading companies driving a return to work. This week, some of the largest organisations in the UK have been trialling a four-day week. You can look as hard as you like, and you will find very few quotes from senior FTSE 100 executives about the importance of getting back to the office, of emphasising the work as much as the life part of the “balance”, or of making sure that the customer comes first, as well as the organisation.

Instead, there is an endless series of commitments to flexibility, hybrid working, and wellness as if the entire purpose of the organisation was simply to make sure the staff feel good about themselves. No one would argue that it should not be part of its purpose, alongside serving the entire range of stakeholders. But ever since the pandemic it has been elevated to the entire raison d’être – and that is surely a dangerous position.

A handful of entrepreneurs have started to kick back about that. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder who spends so much time stirring up controversies it is hard to work out how he ever gets round to making any cars, told his staff earlier this month that if they weren’t at the desks five days a week they should consider themselves fired. James Dyson, the UK’S most successful manufacturer by a wide margin, argued last year that “working from home doesn’t work. I only did it when I couldn’t afford an office or employees. People need to interact and exchange views”. And Lord Sugar, who admittedly spends more time these days talking about businesses than actually running them, has condemned it as a waste of time. The handful of people who have started and built major businesses appear to have a keen appreciation of the amount of effort that goes into keeping a company growing.

But right now, much of big business is a part of the problem, not the solution. It is colluding with a culture that dismisses enterprise, and downgrades initiative. Eventually, they will get crushed by a hungrier, more ambitious start-up. A free market economy is very good at exposing and punishing complacency. Yet it will take time. And customers will suffer terrible service for a long while until then. In the meantime, we will see how M&S gets on under its part-time, job-sharing bosses.

Perhaps in a few years time, we will all be celebrating its return to the FTSE 100 index, and watching in awe as it re-conquers the high street and starts expanding into the global market.

But if not, questions might need to be asked about whether the people in charge need to be making more effort – and the rest of the UK’S leading companies as well.