Working from home was supposed to create happier, more creative workers. It would dramatically improve productivity. It would make the economy more efficient, create a more diverse workforce and finally get us back on track for faster growth.
Over the last three years, a whole series of human resources and management experts kept lecturing us on how great the working-from-home revolution would be for the economy.
They have turned out to be completely wrong.
As company after company insists that their staff return to work, as unhappy workers quit the labour market in record numbers, and as productivity plummets in the sectors that embraced it most enthusiastically, it is surely time to admit that it has been a catastrophe.
We are owed an apology from its most fanatical promoters – and we should learn not to listen to that kind of nonsense ever again.
Rewind just a couple of years, and we were overwhelmed by “experts” telling us how working from home would transform the way that businesses work for the better.
“History shows that when workers have more control over their time, and the balance between their home and work lives improves, companies’ bottom lines also benefit,” argued Julia Hobsbawn in The Washington Post.
Peter Cheese – who as chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, an HR trade body, carries a lot of influence on how we all work – argued: “The step-change shift to home working to adapt to lockdowns has taught us all a lot about how we can be flexible in ways of working in the future.
“This should be a catalyst to change long-held paradigms and beliefs about work for the benefit of man.”
Plenty of companies bought into the ideology, with businesses such as the financial services app Revolut allowing their people not just to work from home but to “work from anywhere” 60 days a year.
Academics at Stanford University even put a number on it, with a widely cited study arguing that ditching the daily commute, and swapping the suit for PJs, would boost output by 13pc.
Indeed, the Labour Party has even demanded that employees should have a legal right to work from home if they want to. After all, what’s not to like about happier, more productive staff?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Last week, Google became the latest major business to demand that its people get back to their desks. The week before that it was Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp.
Barclays has told its deal makers that it wants them back at least four days a week, and so have Starbucks, Disney and Twitter. The list goes on.
Companies want the buzz of the office again, and they want to know what their people are up to.
The pandemic forced us into a huge natural experiment in home working. Millions of people who used to commute back and forth from work every day were suddenly allowed to check in to meetings on Zoom and do everything over email or Teams.
And, like any experiment, we should be allowed to judge the results. So what happened? Output soared, right? Just like the experts told us it would? And employee well-being and creativity hit record levels as we all became far more passionate about our jobs and loyal to our employers?
Well, er, no, not exactly. In fact, the results have been a disaster.
In the public sector, where working from home was most enthusiastically embraced, and where in some corners up to 80pc of the employees don’t show up at the office any more, productivity has actually fallen, with a 1.6pc drop at the end of 2022 compared to a year earlier.
Across the economy as a whole it has flat-lined, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that output per hour worked was only 1.9pc higher by the end of 2022 than it was in 2019, well below the trend rate of growth.
What the heck happened to that 13pc increase in output we were promised? It simply never materialised. And far from being happier, it turns out that people are quitting the workforce at record rates.
In the UK, more than half a million people have decided they don’t want to work anymore, either taking early retirement, or else claiming benefits.
And, finally, more and more companies are insisting that their staff come back to the office.
Given that they are all profit-maximising organisations, with plenty of tools to measure output, it is hard to figure out why they would be doing that if the new ways of working were as great for the bottom line as we were told.
The WFH experiment has been a failure on an epic scale. It might have sounded good in theory. It might even have worked in a few small samples, usually focused on a handful of highly-motivated freelancers or self-employed professionals who enjoy working for themselves.
But for most ordinary workers, it has proven a disaster. Staff lose motivation. They don’t create new ideas. They slack off, new employees don’t ever learn the culture of an organisation and they don’t feel any team spirit towards people they only ever meet in person once or twice a month.
Indeed, probably the only people who managed to increase their output were the savvy few who took on two WFH full-time jobs, confident that their employers would not ever find out they were only working half the time.
It is time we got an apology from its cheerleaders. And we should learn the lesson of its demise. Fashionable theories that involve people working less might sound good in principle.
But the harsh truth is that they always end in failure – and leave the economy in far worse shape than it has ever been.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRlbGVncmFwaC5jby51ay9idXNpbmVzcy8yMDIzLzA2LzExL3dvcmtpbmctZnJvbS1ob21lLWZhbmF0aWNzLXdyb25nLXByb2R1Y3Rpdml0eS1kcm9wcGVkL9IBAA?oc=5
2023-06-11 09:00:00Z
CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRlbGVncmFwaC5jby51ay9idXNpbmVzcy8yMDIzLzA2LzExL3dvcmtpbmctZnJvbS1ob21lLWZhbmF0aWNzLXdyb25nLXByb2R1Y3Rpdml0eS1kcm9wcGVkL9IBAA
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