The Office is back. Not just the Ricky Gervais sitcom, which is getting an Australian makeover with a female lead (filming began last month). No: the office is back. Amazon has issued a warning to staff who are not spending at least three days a week in the office. Meta wants its workers to do the same from next month. And if further proof were needed that working from home has officially been replaced by return to office, it was provided by Zoom. The firm, whose revenues jumped 300% during the first year of the pandemic, last week asked employees to come in for at least two days a week.
If only it were so simple for the UK’s David Brents. People still like working from home and forcing them to return can have unforeseen repercussions: for instance, research in the UK by the CIPD, the association of HR professionals, found that about 4 million people – 12% of employees – had changed careers due to a lack of flexible working, and 2 million (6%) had left their job in the last year.
Big tech firms are not the only ones insisting on more office time for white-collar workers than they would like. Osborne Clarke, the international law firm, has told its staff that they must be in the office three days a week if they want to get a performance bonus, although it later clarified that some staff might have “valid reasons” for not doing so. Luminaries of the Tory right, such as John Redwood and Jacob Rees-Mogg, have campaigned for civil servants to return to the office five days a week, the latter even leaving “sorry you were out” notes on desks.
Chief executives are very keen to get workers back more often, according to Mark Freebairn, a partner at Odgers Berndtson, an executive search firm.
“The chief executive community, the board community that I speak to – the majority would want more time in the office at the moment, and when one breaks cover and starts becoming more dictatorial about it, the rest will follow,” he said.
The main reason, Freebairn said, was a “genuine problem” presented by the shift to remote working: the pipeline of talent is drying up.
“I could probably teach someone bright the technical aspects of a recruitment job in an hour. But could they understand how to influence and persuade and navigate a situation to their advantage in a subtle and nuanced way? No. You have to watch someone to do that.”
There was alarm among some recruiters about the impact of working from home, Freebairn added.
A large investment fund had been targeting graduates with two years’ experience working for firms such as McKinsey or Accenture and tempting them away by “quadrupling their salary”, he said.
“They do this every two years. And every time they come back and say ‘you can’t believe how much better this crop is’. But in 2022, it was the worst crop they’d ever seen. Not because of intellect, but because they just didn’t know how to engage with people. They’ve never had the learning by osmosis that you get in an office experience.”
So will the boardroom Canutes manage to turn the tide on their workforces, as Brent might put it? What are the facts about working from home?
First, most people can’t do their job remotely – almost 60% of US workers are fully on site, according to research by Professor Nick Bloom of Stanford University, because they have frontline jobs. The working from home debate only concerns the rest – the 29% with hybrid working arrangements, mostly professionals and managers, and the 11% who are fully remote – mostly specialists in IT or human resources roles. Home workers tend to be well-paid graduates.
The amount of home working they do appears to have stabilised in the last year. Research shows about 25% of work days in the US are done from home, according to Bloom and his colleagues. Full-time employees in the UK, Australia, Canada and other English-speaking countries work about 1.4 days a week at home on average – a figure that has not changed much since 2021.
Those trends are also clear in job listings, according to Adzuna, the job search engine. The proportion of vacancies in the UK advertised as hybrid has gone above 11% this year – 123,341 in June – and the number of jobs listed as fully remote has hit 159,627, or 15.1%.
This is driven by employee demand, according to CIPD research. More than four-fifths of organisations in the UK have some sort of hybrid working policy, “and 71% of workers view flexible working as important to them when considering a new role,” said Claire McCartney, a senior policy adviser at CIPD.
She added: “It’s likely that organisations are going to struggle to attract and keep talent if they want people in the office full-time, five days a week. People do have different expectations around workplace flexibility.”
Nowhere is this clearer than in the City of London. Friday mornings at Liverpool Street station used to be thronged with financial sector workers on the way to work, but are now noticeably quieter. The few people coming out of Bank station are mostly wearing casual clothing, and plenty are tourists rather than City workers.
Data from Transport for London shows that the number of passengers tapping out at Bank was about 35,000 on a typical Friday this year, about half the level of January 2020. At 15 central London tube stations, about 100,000 fewer people are arriving each day.
Abby, an employee at a construction firm, commutes two days a week from Brighton. “I prefer working hybrid,” she said. “It’s a privilege working from home – overall I’m saving more money that way.” She and her colleague John are clear that five days a week is not an option. “Never again,” he said.
The lack of people means plenty of shops have shut and mobile coffee stands and sandwich sellers do not bother to turn up on Fridays.
“In the short term, office demand in London is down by about 20%,” said Lee Elliott, a commercial real estate expert at Knight Frank, although he said some of that related to the economic climate. Knight Frank research shows about half of multinationals plan to reduce their office space within the next three years.
“But over the long term there’s no doubt that all the UK office markets are going to be impacted by obsolescence,” he added – buildings that are dated or fall foul of energy efficiency rules that are coming into force in 2027. About 60% of London office space would either need to be upgraded or demolished, he said.
In the meantime, companies are choosing smaller, more attractive spaces. Cubicles are out and meeting spaces are in. And smaller spaces are usually cheaper.
“People aren’t focused on cost-per-desk now,” Elliott added. “The metric they’re thinking about is footfall – a bit like retail. They’re aiming for about 60% to 70% of the building being used.”
Meanwhile, the trend towards enticing workers back into offices that began with providing an office barista or a pool table has turned into a torrent of perks.
“One of the most popular benefits among employers is free meals,” said James Neave, head of data science at Adzuna. More than 5,000 job adverts in July mentioned free food – a 48% rise – offered by big names such as Sainsbury’s, Wagamama and Domino’s Pizza. Others are offering free gym memberships, tax-free childcare, mental health days, an extra day off for your birthday, language lessons, duvet days and even “pawternity leave” (time off to look after your pet).
But employers should be thinking about more than just remote or office working, according to Maria Kordowicz, an associate professor in organisational behaviour at the University of Nottingham and director of its centre for inter-professional education and learning.
“How meaningful is the work that our organisation produces?” she said. “How is it contributing to societal betterment? In a post-Covid landscape, we’ve increasingly been asking the question about how we can look after one another, how we can look after the environment, how can we ensure that the businesses that we run are sustainable. And that, to me, is what attracts ‘talent’ – which is a vague phrase, and what we should be talking about is diverse teams that carry a range of abilities.”
Perhaps the emphasis on persuasion misses the point about why people may prefer to work from home or in an office: peace and quiet, and no commute.
“We’re seeing a lot of people going back into an office environment who’ve got used to being able to focus and concentrate. And they’re going into an open-plan office and things are suddenly amplified,” said Leah Steele, an executive coach and founder of Searching for Serenity.
Neurodivergent people with conditions such as ADHD may not have realised until the pandemic why they were struggling, she said. “It was normal for them to be distracted and tired all the time, and they didn’t need to commute two or three hours a day. Suddenly an open-plan office feels overwhelming.”
More leisure time has been another plus – weekday afternoon golf became a thing in the US, according to Stanford University research.
That sort of finding has allowed critics such as Rees-Mogg to point out that productivity from fully remote working is lower than that achieved in the office – about 10% lower, according to Bloom’s research. Hybrid working may provide the best of both worlds – it seems not to have a negative effect, and may provide a modest boost.
Still, the longer-term effect on younger workers’ careers is harder to assess, and Freebairn said it was fair to compare modern remote workers with freelancers and consultants who work as contractors. They risk being seen as lacking ambition, and find it harder to advance their careers.
During the pandemic, Steele had a lot of calls from younger professionals who were anxious about not being in the office. “For someone who is more junior and is struggling, who feels impostor syndrome, and wants to run something past their boss or bounce an idea off a colleague, that wasn’t possible.”
There may be some technological solutions to these problems, fuelled in part by a growth in the number of startups since the pandemic – it seems to be easier to set up a new company without the overheads of an office.
Outfits such as Kadence create virtual office spaces that might make it easier for people to have those watercooler moments with their boss, while Scoop hopes to make it easier to coordinate days in the office with colleagues. And people who don’t have space for a desk in their bedroom can use Radious, an Airbnb-like service where you can work from someone else’s home.
The challenge for the producers of the new Australian version of The Office will be to reflect how different the working environment is now from 20 years ago. The 2024 version will feature Felicity Ward as the Brent-like manager told that her office is being shut down, and everyone will need to work from home. A tragedy for her. Perhaps not for her staff.
Additional reporting by Donna Ferguson and Maximilian Jenz
