Repeat after me: Working from home is NOT an ideology
When work from home becomes a question of culture, not practicality, we have completely lost the point, writes Eliot Wilson
Last week, this paper reported that the United Kingdom has the highest rate of employees working from home in Europe, with white-collar workers averaging 1.8 days a week. The global average is 1.3 days, and Britain is pipped only by Canada, at 1.9 days a week.
I wrote last July that we should focus on overall productivity when we make an assessment of flexible working. That remains my view, all the more so as it seems that the increase in working from home is not temporary. As Dr Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King’s College London, told City AM, “remote work has moved from being an emergency response to becoming a defining feature of the UK labour market… hybrid work is no longer the exception – it’s the expectation”.
More than five years after the first cases of Covid-19 were identified in the UK, which was the proximate cause of this great shift in employment patterns and habits, the debate over working from home has taken a deeper hold on our psyche.
Working from home is not a matter of workers’ rights
It is not just, as I suggested last year, that “the issue has too often deteriorated into an inter-generational culture war”. We have now come to see working from home as a benefit, right or privilege – delete as appropriate – almost wholly unmoored both from the temporary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, and from the practicalities of employment more generally. Instead it has become an element of terms and conditions akin to salary or annual leave – and this is when it stops making sense.
Let me issue a caveat: if the employer and the employee agree that someone should always work from home, or never work from home, or find a place anywhere on that spectrum, our business here is done. I am a passionate believer in personal liberty and in free markets, and if a satisfactory arrangement is reached between the two parties, it is no business of the government or polite society, let alone a columnist, to intervene.
However, a consequence of cutting flexible working free from its context and translating it from a practicality to a benefit is that we then consider whether it is “fair” or “equal”, and that is a hopeless pursuit. We need to be honest about working from home: it is more adaptable to some professions than others, and absolutely impossible in some. More than that, as a general rule, it is an option more likely available to higher earners. An advertising executive might very well produce his or her best work from a comfortable home in Kent, but a barista or a cleaner self-evidently cannot.
Some argue that this is unfair, that working from home is a privilege which is disproportionately enjoyed by those who are already comfortable and privileged. One response would be to concede but ask how that can be changed (not easily, I suggest). But the very proposition depends on the idea, which I think is debatable, that working from home is inherently easier and more pleasurable than working in an office. Essentially, we look at those who work from home and, without needing evidence or corroboration, we think they are simply having too much fun.
Lest we forget the point: getting the job done
Flexible working should be a tool, an element of carrying out your job rather than one of the conditions within which you do so. I remain convinced that it must be seen through the lens of productivity, while allowing that the measure must be broad: it is not just about producing the work required of you, but wider cultural and professional issues like learning by watching, informal collaboration and contributing to a productive and creative environment.
It should certainly not stand in the way of your employer’s management of employees: when it is near-impossible to organise in-person meetings because people are not in the office at coinciding times, we have let the method of work dictate the work itself.
Fundamentally, whether you attend a fixed place of work, have the ability to carry out your employment from home or elsewhere or find a hybrid of the two should depend on what fits your role and maximises your performance. That someone in one role is working from home and another cannot should be as much about “fairness” as a calligrapher using a pen while a financial analyst uses a spreadsheet. If we can see the new pattern of work in those terms, we will be one step closer to a sustainable, flexible and appropriate model which is directed towards getting the job done.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink