Tele-commuting, working from home, became the Big Thing during Covid. It aided the lucky who could merely plug in a laptop and do their largely meaningless work. (A friend told me that after getting through emails, he basically wrote two or so paragraphs a day, from home, with lots of sleep-ins.) But now that dream run has come to an end, and companies are demanding their employees to get back into the offices, so that they can keep an eagle eye on them. Good for the companies, I think. And, what about the multitude of people who could not work from home, and suffered economic ruin? No governmental tears for them.
https://summit.news/2023/06/14/how-convenient/
“Working from home was supposed to create happier, more creative workers. It would dramatically improve productivity. It would make the economy more efficient, create a more diverse workforce and finally get us back on track for faster growth.
Over the last three years, a whole series of human resources and management experts kept lecturing us on how great the working-from-home revolution would be for the economy.
They have turned out to be completely wrong.
As company after company insists that their staff return to work, as unhappy workers quit the labour market in record numbers, and as productivity plummets in the sectors that embraced it most enthusiastically, it is surely time to admit that it has been a catastrophe.
We are owed an apology from its most fanatical promoters – and we should learn not to listen to that kind of nonsense ever again.
Rewind just a couple of years, and we were overwhelmed by “experts” telling us how working from home would transform the way that businesses work for the better.
“History shows that when workers have more control over their time, and the balance between their home and work lives improves, companies’ bottom lines also benefit,” argued Julia Hobsbawn in The Washington Post.
Peter Cheese – who as chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an HR trade body, carries a lot of influence on how we all work – argued: “The step-change shift to home working to adapt to lockdowns has taught us all a lot about how we can be flexible in ways of working in the future.
“This should be a catalyst to change long-held paradigms and beliefs about work for the benefit of man.”
Plenty of companies bought into the ideology, with businesses such as the financial services app Revolut allowing their people not just to work from home but to “work from anywhere” 60 days a year.
Academics at Stanford University even put a number on it, with a widely cited study arguing that ditching the daily commute, and swapping the suit for PJs, would boost output by 13pc.
Indeed, the Labour Party has even demanded that employees should have a legal right to work from home if they want to. After all, what’s not to like about happier, more productive staff?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Last week, Google became the latest major business to demand that its people get back to their desks. The week before that it was Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp.
Barclays has told its deal makers that it wants them back at least four days a week, and so have Starbucks, Disney and Twitter. The list goes on.
Companies want the buzz of the office again, and they want to know what their people are up to.
The pandemic forced us into a huge natural experiment in home working. Millions of people who used to commute back and forth from work every day were suddenly allowed to check in to meetings on Zoom and do everything over email or Teams.
And, like any experiment, we should be allowed to judge the results. So what happened? Output soared, right? Just like the experts told us it would? And employee well-being and creativity hit record levels as we all became far more passionate about our jobs and loyal to our employers?
Well, er, no, not exactly. In fact, the results have been a disaster.
In the public sector, where working from home was most enthusiastically embraced, and where in some corners up to 80pc of the employees don’t show up at the office any more, productivity has actually fallen, with a 1.6pc drop at the end of 2022 compared to a year earlier.”