In the major businesses where board-level decisions have been made to force employees back to an office, resistance has been strong.
I’m reading more and more about major organisations trying to reverse the ‘working from home’ arrangements that the pandemic forced them into, and some of their reasons for doing so are disappointingly disingenuous. Some people may read this and say: “At my company there’s a very good reason why people need to be in the same office”, and I’m sure it will be a very good reason, perhaps even a compelling one for certain staff. But some of the generalisations I’ve heard as to why “everything needs to go back to how it was five years ago” are simply risible.
I do have some experience here, having set up a small company where we all worked from home before the internet even existed. It was considered radical and (to be honest) a bit amateur. I’m convinced it would have worked in any case, but once email and the web arrived, home working gave us such a cost advantage over our competitors that it propelled us to number one in our market. A second company I set up was eventually bought by a competitor many times our size because, according to its owner, “We need to find out more about this working from home thing”.
(They subsequently moved the business into their expensive central London offices, and destroyed their acquisition in the process.)
Empire building
Many employees, such as those in production or warehousing, obviously have to work at the company site. There can then be advantages in locating the rest of the workforce within earshot in the same building, even if they don’t need to be there. However, it seems that at some organisations, the the unspoken driver to wanting to get staff ‘back in the office’ is the desire from senior management to be able to sit and keep a watch over their empire. I’d suggest that anyone who still feels that’s necessary is the problem themselves here – or perhaps they need better staff. Or both.
There’s little need to recap the advantages to an employer of having employees work from home. In the second company of mine mentioned above, we were able to recruit the very best people in the world, rather than from the tiny pool who lived within commuting distance of an arbitrarily-placed office and who were also happy (or able) to commute to it. We could keep the services of our best people even when life meant they had to move home or could no longer work continuously from 9 to 5pm. And we could ask staff to be more flexible with hours because they didn’t have to waste so much of their days sitting in cars or on trains.
Stop treating us like children
Sensibly, the UK government appears to want to embrace the advantages of working from home. In the major businesses where board-level decisions have been made to force employees back to an office, resistance from staff has understandably been strong. The Sunday Times reported one signatory to a petition against such a move complaining that those who work in international teams will just end up “sitting on video conferences all day in a location that is less accessible and/or comfortable to us”. Another added: “Stop treating us like children and trust your employees.”
I think the workforce knows when it’s being asked back to the office for good reasons, and when it’s just for empire building and surveillance.