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In a digital age, getting away from the office is a necessary but not sufficient condition of being on holiday. Work encroaches on leisure time by multiple channels. The potential to be available by email can mutate into an obligation. Even when there is no direct pressure from bosses or colleagues, the psychological habit of logging on, spurred by fear of exclusion, can be hard to overcome.
This trend was established before the pandemic, but patterns of remote and hybrid working established in lockdown have further dissolved boundaries between work and home. That fluidity is mostly a benefit for employers and employees alike. It can widen labour market participation for people with disabilities or caring duties. There are good reasons why offices didn’t all revert to pre-pandemic practice.
But there are costs too. Exploitation and discrimination might be less visible online, and so harder to prevent. Remote working is part of a broader casualisation of the labour market, where one person’s welcome flexibility is another’s stress-inducing insecurity. From a commercial perspective, there is a loss of positive network effects when workers are dispersed away from a central hub. Veterans are less able to share expertise with newcomers. That is just one reason why many bosses lamented the hollowing out of offices by the pandemic.
There are many jobs that can only be done in a specific location within fixed, regular hours. Analogue work, whether as manual labour or face-to-face services, is not going away. But the definition of what it means to be at work is evolving rapidly. Politics has been slow to respond to this question. The last government did not engage with it seriously. As a minister in the business department, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg took to leaving sarcastic notes on the desks of civil servants who had opted to work from home. The pathological habit of sneering condescension might explain why Sir Jacob’s constituents subsequently ejected him from parliament.
The push to get workers rest, relaxation and recreation is part of the UK’s history. The weekend was born in Victorian Manchester when a campaign was launched to give factory workers half a day off on Saturdays and enable them to be fresh for work on Monday morning. It succeeded, and the idea spread. By 1850 it became law. A five-day week has become the norm in many rich countries.
In a modern sense, taking a break allows for reflection and distance from tricky tasks, leading to better decisions in the long run. An always-on, 24/7 work culture is inefficient and unhealthy. And for many, workaholism is an insidious imposition, not a choice. The blur between work and home became so damaging in France that the law was changed in 2017 to enable the “right to disconnect”, which allowed workers to ignore after-hours texts, emails or calls from their bosses without fear of repercussions.
Other European countries, including Belgium, Spain and Italy, have since followed suit. Encouragingly, ministers are looking at something similar here. It would be a modest intervention as labour regulations go, with the emphasis on changing work culture through conversation rather than statute. Similarly, giving employees the right to ask to work flexibly would make law what is customary in many workplaces. Weekends, holidays, time with friends and family are essential parts of a healthy – and ultimately more productive – working life.
