No matter how many years at the grindstone one has under the belt, no one, it seems, is impervious to those insidious tentacles of the back-to-work January blues. There’s the pit of despair at having to set an alarm again, the anxiety of feeling as though you’ve completely forgotten how to do your job after ten days of merriment — my cursor was blinking on an empty page for a while writing this article — and that grim, first commute back on a Baltic Monday morning.
But for some, the return to work this week has come with an added layer of tension. A cadre of major employers have taken the new year as an opportunity to overhaul their working from home policies and push their teams back to the office. As of this month, BT is adopting a “three together, two wherever” system, which mandates that its 50,000 office-based staff members across the UK and other countries come in three days a week. And mandating is the key word: employees have been told that office entry and exit statistics will be used to track their attendance.
