The return of shirking from home
Remote working is back – but the chaos at the Foreign Office this summer shows the harm it causes, says Boris Starling
Here we go again. As from tomorrow, millions of people will once again be working from home. “Go to work if you must,” said Boris Johnson last Wednesday, “but work from home if you can.”
For swathes of workers, the news they can once again switch a frosty commute for the warm bath of remote working will feel like Christmas came early, but not everyone is so impressed: “Small biz will collapse,” Lord Sugar succinctly tweeted.
WFH is supposed to be the new normal, a flexible utopia of happy shiny employees working harder, better and smarter at kitchen tables across the land. But it simply isn’t working out that way in many sectors that are critical for the smooth and efficient running of the country.
The most obvious and shocking example of this is the testimony of former Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) employee Raphael Marshall about the handling of mass evacuations from Afghanistan in August by the department, then led by Dominic Raab. More than once, Marshall said, he found himself alone in the office, and “staffing shortages were exacerbated by some staff working from home, which hampered communication”.
This was one of the biggest foreign policy crises in living memory: a time when thousands of desperate Afghans were pleading for their lives, and British soldiers on the ground were doing an extraordinary job under the most difficult conditions. In other words, this was a time when any conscientious and well-managed department would have been working round the clock. Working from home? Shirking from home, more like.
The catastrophic mismanagement of the petrol crisis a few weeks after the Afghanistan debacle was also partly due to the fact that so many officials in the Department for Transport were remote working. At times like that, and also during the fiasco over granting visas for 5,000 foreign HGV drivers, Zoom meetings simply don’t cut it. You need people in the room so they can brainstorm how to solve problems. Otherwise information gets misplaced and responsibility dodged.
A similar pattern, albeit under less extreme circumstances, can be seen across many government departments. More than 500,000 driving licences were delayed over the summer after industrial action by the Public and Commercial Services Union, whose staff were reluctant to return to the office. People applying for passports are advised to “allow up to 10 weeks”, more than three times the clearing period pre-coronavirus. Disclosure and Barring Service checks, designed to weed out certain public sector applicants with criminal records, have at times taken twice as long as usual.
Latest HMRC figures show that they are clearing only just over a third of postal cases and inquiries within their 15-day target. And in some parts of the country, planning searches are taking up to 14 weeks. In normal times efficient councils can turn them round in a week or two. Delays affect not just homebuyers and mortgage lenders, but commercial projects, too.
It would be bad enough if it was just the public sector affected. But everyone has their own stories of private sector incompetence: not just in the difficult early days of the pandemic, but still to this day. Dante Alighieri gave his Inferno nine circles of hell, but were he alive today he would surely add a tenth, featuring automated answering services and their repeated insistence that his call was important to them.
Research both here and abroad has found that working from home has negative effects on productivity. A Cambridge University study published last month showed that during restriction periods people spent less time on work-related activities than usual, with parents of young children unsurprisingly accounting for the biggest difference. A University of Chicago study found that productivity of those working from home fell by up to a fifth, especially among women (who take the brunt of household and childcare tasks). And Japan’s Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry says that the average productivity of employees working from home is a third lower than that achieved in their workplaces.
Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the University of Manchester, says that “even before the lockdowns, we had the technology to move to remote working and there were very good reasons why we didn’t”. Offices exist for a reason. They’re designed to encourage and facilitate work, and in doing so minimise the kind of distractions common at home.
A positive company culture is much harder to maintain remotely. Video meetings are a pale facsimile of real-life ones: concentrating on a screen makes them tiring, the inability to sense others’ body language and non-verbal communication makes them limited, and the awkwardness of dialogue patterns when only one person at a time can have the electronic conch makes them unwieldy for any more than three or four people. The chance encounters and spontaneous conversations that lead to great ideas and foster better relationships are reduced to zero. WFH involves more time and expense spent on communication and co-ordination, cutting into work hours.
It’s for reasons such as these that Netflix boss Reed Hastings says “not being able to get together in person is a pure negative”. It’s even worse for people who have joined organisations in the last 18 months, and will have met few or maybe even none of their colleagues in person. How are they supposed to do their jobs efficiently? How can they have been trained properly?
Researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management found that world-class chess players have in general been making worse moves when playing online from home than when physically facing opponents over the board: and work tasks often require the same skills as chess moves, such as strategy, analysis, pattern recognition, option evaluation and decision-making under time pressure.
Stephen Bevan, head of HR research development at the Institute for Employment Studies, says that WFH “is a relatively privileged arrangement and is not universally beneficial”. Health can take a hit, for a start, he says. “We [have] found und that a high proportion of people e making the change to WFH experienced erienced more musculoskeletal problems, oblems, poor sleep, eye strain, higher gher alcohol consumption and poorer oorer diets combined with less exercise.” And, of course, if isolation olation affects a worker’s health, that hat will affect their productivity.
The concept of the e work-life balance, which WFH was thought to aid, has always lways been predicated on the separation between work and life: you go somewhere separate to work. The erosion of the work-life balance is usually couched in terms of work taking over life – and indeed in the pandemic there have been calls from unions for the Government to follow the French example and allow workers to “fully disconnect” and have no legal obligation to answer office communications outside working hours.
But of course the work-life balance can swing the other way too: to the detriment of the former. In his testimony, Marshall referred to “a deliberate drive by the FCDO to prioritise ‘work-life balance’. FCDO employees, including senior leaders, are often told that working more than eight hours a day suggests that they are inefficient. Whilst a healthy work-life balance is important in moderation, in my opinion the FCDO’s approach has undermined organisational effectiveness,” he said. No one is claiming that WFH is the only reason for poor performance, of course. Covid has seen millions of workers signed off sick, and for businesses relying on physical supply chains there have a also been Brexit border issues an and the closure of the Suez Canal. But one of the first rules of any effic efficient organisation is “control the c controllables”, and there are few things more controllabl controllable than the whereabo whereabouts of your employee employees.
“Work Working from home” used to b be a term of sarcasm, with air quotes around th the phrase and a knowing s smile. The suspicion i is that in some cases it rem remains at least partly so. At A the start of the pandemic pandemic, the Queen told the nation that “while we may have m more still to endure, b better days will return. We will meet again again.” Those days will ret return, but only if t those meetings are in offices rather tha than just in pubs.
In a crisis, Zoom won’t cut it. Information is misplaced, and responsibility dodged