Farewell office, home working is the future

ANDREW MCKIE

THERE are people – I used to be one of them – who quite like the office. I had caveats; I liked it except for the work, the surroundings, the pettifogging rules, the commute, the management, the expectation that you would be at your desk at unreasonable hours, such as when the pubs were open, the people constantly coming round with idiotic questions, the meetings where nothing ever got settled except for the realisation that the folk addicted to ludicrous jargon who never did any work themselves were paid about six times as much as you… Actually, maybe I didn’t like it that much.

It’s now been about 10 years since I regularly worked in an office. During that period, however, I’ve had two or three spells of a few months filling in for other people which involved traipsing into offices, and what struck me most about the experience was how much more work you get done at home.

The past five months or so have given quite a lot of other people the chance to test out this theory for themselves, and it’s clear that there are a sizeable number of them who are in no particular hurry to get back to their cubicle. (Cubicles will, presumably, be making a return in a big way, since the hot-desking and open-plan offices companies used to be keen on are unworkable in the era of social distancing.)

Hard and fast numbers are difficult to come by, but there have been a couple of surveys that suggest that there are plenty of workers who are quite happy to keep on social distancing – in the case of some commuters, by distances of dozens of miles. How much of this is timidity or worry about disease, and how much a preference for working from home is unclear, but the most recent survey I’ve seen says that 53 per cent of office workers feel more at ease working remotely, 27% don’t feel it’s safe to return to the office, and 15% don’t want to go back at all.

That particular report doesn’t say how many people were questioned, or anything about its methodology, and was commissioned by a firm that makes office equipment, so I don’t think we can draw any very rigorous conclusions. Except that it’s fairly revealing that 81% of respondents would try to avoid greeting or interacting with their colleagues in the office, but only 11% would object to going out with them for a drink afterwards.

The potential hazards are nothing to be flippant about, though. And the difference for office workers is that, unlike NHS staff and carers or, now that lockdown is being eased, retail and hospitality workers and others such as hairdressers or chiropodists, those hazards are for the most part entirely avoidable.

If you spend your working day – as the majority of office workers do – either on the phone or in front of a computer screen, the chief things you’re missing out on by working from

All the evidence suggests that people who work from home are significantly more productive

home are meetings (which 47% of workers would like to avoid) and sharing tech equipment (which 52% are worried about).

The recent outbreak of the disease at an office in Motherwell is getting even more attention than would otherwise be the case because of the irony that it happens to be involved in contact-tracing. But that’s not really the salient point. The point is that it’s a call centre, which you would imagine must be one of the jobs most easily conducted from home, since all that is really required is a headset and a computer.

I’m aware that that is a simplification. There are a number of considerations that have made office life the norm for around 40% of the UK workforce, and that have ensured “telecommuting” or “flexible working” haven’t caught on to anything like the degree that has been predicted, more or less constantly, for decades. But now that millions of us have had an enforced and unwelcome experiment in working from home, it may be easier to make a judgment on which of these issues are all that important.

One reasonable consideration is security; a lot of call centres and other offices are understandably and correctly concerned about safeguarding their customers’ personal details – to the extent of operating paperless environments, or banning personal phones from the workplace. The chief vulnerability of data in the digital world, however, is in the networks and servers themselves, and from that point of view it ought not to make much difference whether any computer that accesses a central database is physically in the same building or not.

Another justification advanced for the office is that it’s essential to supervise the workforce. Other than providing middle managers with a justification for their own jobs, it’s hard to see that there’s much to that.

All the evidence from the research suggests that people who work from home are significantly more productive – one study conducted last year found that they worked a total of 16.8 days more each year than their office-based colleagues. Unsurprisingly, they also wasted less time in non-work-related conversation, which accounts for more than an hour a day of the average office worker’s time. The biggest time-waster of all, however, is distraction from management – and home workers get 22% less of that than their office-bound colleagues.

Sadly, there will be things like training that mean that we’re unlikely to get rid of offices altogether. And it’s true that they have some advantages. Unlike much formal training, which is often worthless, or idiotic management dictats, casually asking a colleague is often the quickest way to solve a problem, for example.

But given the enormous cost benefits for firms themselves, the huge work/life boon for employees, and the environmental gains that could be made by making commuting the exception rather than the norm, it seems crazy that we have not seen much more flexible working adopted by UK firms.

After the practical experience of several months of it in practice – even if for wholly undesirable reasons – we should be asking whether it makes any sense to go back and, given the economic climate, whether we can afford to.