Did the Met Office, with staff working from home, fail to predict the recent cold snap? This a question that appears to trouble the Tory grandee Jacob Rees-Mogg and his staff. But then, the former business secretary has long been on a campaign against public sector employees working from home. In April, he left notes on the desk of civil servants who were not in the office. More recently, he described working from home as “second best”.
Rees-Mogg’s views about working from home may seem anachronistic, but they reflect a wider culture of in-personism. Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has demanded staff return to the office and work long hours there. Alan Sugar has deemed home workers to be “lazy layabouts”. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, which recently bought the messaging service Slack, worries that the rise of remote working means his company’s employees are “not building tribal knowledge with new employees”. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, claims remote working “doesn’t work for people who want to hustle”.
A recent survey by Microsoft found that 85% of managers said they struggled to have confidence that their employees were being productive when working from home. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail run endless coverage on why the UK must get back to the office, denigrating “woke workplaces” that give staff flexible working arrangements and declaring Britain the global leader in refusing to return to work culture. A Telegraph column last week praised the “grafters of this great nation” who journey to the office undaunted by any obstacle – including “trustafarians who think nothing of gluing themselves to the M25 during rush hour”. Of all the targets identified by the right’s culture war, here is a new one: you, with a laptop in the kitchen.
The former prime minister Boris Johnson was also at the vanguard of the war against wfh, saying that a return to the workplace would boost productivity. But what was the evidence for that? Indeed, much of the evidence points in the other direction. Continuing research led by Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom suggests that allowing employees to work from home a few days a week has significant benefits – including an increase in productivity if hybrid working is well organised. A chronic problem faced by the public sector – and indeed large parts of the British economy – is poor productivity. Rates of productivity in the UK economy have been flat for over a decade. A study by researchers at the University of Manchester found that public sector productivity had only improved by an average of 0.7% per year from 2010-2019.
Economists have pointed out that productivity can be improved through a range of interventions including more spending on research and development, better infrastructure, improving skills and better quality management . One way to boost productivity is by allowing employees to work from home. And while it is true that managers who make decisions about home working tend to underestimate the gains to productivity that can come from home working policies, and workers are likely to overestimate the gains , overall, studies show that for suitable jobs, productivity can increase when working from home.
Home working can bring other benefits to the economy. Let’s start with pay. Currently many parts of the UK public sector are impacted by strikes as workers demand pay rises so their wages keep pace with inflation. While a decent pay packet is certainly vital, there are situations where workers are willing to trade off slightly lower pay for better conditions. This seems to be the case with working from home – if, of course, it is practical to do so. Bloom’s team at Stanford University found that people in the public sector said that the ability to work from home two or three days a week was equivalent to a 6.7% pay rise. That number is over 10% in the finance and technology sectors. One reason for this is that working for home reduces costs such as commuting and childcare. But working from home a few days a week also improves people’s quality of life – and this is something they are willing to pay for. This suggests that allowing people to work from home a few days a week may go some way towards making up for shrinking real wages.
Giving people the chance to work from home can also help with retention. Despite what the founder of the Phones 4u chain, John Caudwell, says is a “growing sense of entitlement on the part of workers” who think jobs “exist for their own convenience rather than to serve customers or the public”, offering home working a few days a week can help employers to hang on to the people they have. Bloom’s survey found that a typical hybrid working policy reduced quit-rates by 35%.
Many parts of the workforce are struggling with endemic staff shortages. While the chronic vacancies afflicting the NHS and social care, the restaurant sector, the arts and the high street need in-person staff, there are many other jobs where the UK is struggling to recruit people that could build in home working as an option – from engineering to technology. Many employers are spending money on initiatives such as free food and lunchtime mindfulness classes to try to entice staff back to the office and make them happier. There is little evidence that this works. Bloom’s research has found that employees generally report being happier, though, when they are able to work from home some of the time.
Rees-Mogg and his outriders may think that attacking home working is a good way to keep voters on side. However, according to one study from King’s College London, 66% of London workers who voted Conservative thought it was unacceptable for politicians to claim that people who worked at home were less hardworking.
Where Rees-Mogg is right is that requiring many employees to be in the office at least some of the time is a good idea. Having a few days a week when employees are in the office gives people the opportunity to interact, collaborate and build their networks. Also it gives younger employees an opportunity to learn from their more experienced colleagues. Indeed, Bloom’s research suggests that working practices seem to have settled on a new norm of people spending on average two days a week working from home. The added benefit is that for many of us being in the office is cheaper than putting the heating on.
While some Tory politicians are clearly seeking to make working from home into a culture war, surely they should be leaving companies and people to sort this out for themselves. Where will this end? Will it be where JRM and the wfh culture warriors would wish? Two days a week, three days a week: shouldn’t it be wherever millions of companies and their employees decide is most likely to make their lives and enterprises simultaneously profitable? They may see an opportunity, even if Rees-Mogg and others do not.
André Spicer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London
• This article was amended on 21 December 2022. An earlier version said that a study by researchers at the University of Manchester had found that public sector productivity had only improved by “0.7% over the past 10 years”. In fact, it found an average annual productivity improvement of 0.7% from 2010-2019.
