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Birmingham Post
Birmingham Post
Business
Jon Robinson

Dragons' Den star Steven Bartlett weighs in on working from home debate

Dragons' Den star Steven Bartlett has weighed in on the working from home debate.

The entrepreneur, who made his fortune after co-founding marketing agency Social Chain in Manchester, shared his thoughts in a video he posted on LinkedIn.

He said that business leaders should give their employees as much freedom as they possibly can, including allowing them to go on holiday "whenever they want".

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Mr Bartlett said: "During the pandemic there was this real cultural social wave that you're an... a******* CEO if you don't allow your employee base to do whatever they want.

"You saw in San Francisco, at the heart of virtue signalling company culture, this big wave of Twitter and and all the big tech saying work wherever you want forever.

"You're now seeing a lot of those big companies - honestly, I speak to a lot of the management there - slowly regret that decision. Now they're scared.

"Companies like Twitter and some of these big tech companies who now have these huge empty offices and are struggling in certain areas where synchronous work is required.

"That means people being together in the same place on the same time zone is required. Now they are slowly back stepping it.

"What may stance on this always was, was just be crystal clear what we are.

"The companies that are suffering the most are those that have these splintered cultures where some people are over in Bali working from their laptop, some are here in London and 10% are in the office.

"Your company culture decisions should be reverse engineered from what you are trying to achieve.

"If you're running a bakery reverse engineer it from that. You open 9-5 on Monday so you need someone to be running the tills in the bakery and cooking the bread.

"But you also, and this is where flexibility is so unbelievably important, you want to attract the best talent to come and work here. That is central to you achieving your company mission whether it's making cars of croissants.

"So what can we do to attract the best talent? Give them as much freedom as you possibly can, allow them to go on holiday whenever they want to go on holiday.

"So if they are not required to be on a till or baking allow them to go and work wherever they want.

"But you have to be clear and it's not easy for CEOs and managers because they've had this pressure to just allow remote working for everybody but that's caused a lot of harm in a lot of cases."

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