Debates about working from home should be based on evidence, not an inter-generational culture war, says Eliot Wilson
We have been debating the benefits and challenges of “flexible working” for decades, but it was the enforced disruption of the Covid-19 lockdown which forced the issue to the top of employers’ agendas. Like many crises, the pandemic was a tremendous driver of innovation in terms of technology and working practices – employers and employees found they could do much more than they realised. As the debate over flexible working continues, however, we have to refocus and ensure that the way we work prioritises outcomes and is based on evidence.
It really began in West Germany nearly 60 years ago. Although W.K. Kellogg, the American cereal manufacturer, had allowed employees to vary shift patterns during the Great Depression, in the mid-1960s a management consultant, Christel Kammerer, was engaged by aerospace company Messerschmitt to examine issues of absenteeism, overtime, and lateness at its R&D centre near Munich. Her solution of staggering start and finish times blossomed into what was dubbed gleitzeit, and became known in English as flexitime. The rest, as they say, is history…
Last week, the 4 Day Week Campaign, with partners Timewise, announced that they would organise a six-month pilot scheme starting in November for employers to experiment with “a shorter working week, flexible start and finish times, a nine-day fortnight or compressed hours”. A previous pilot in 2022 was hailed as a great success. It is an attractive idea, offering substantial increases in employee happiness and welfare, greater retention and lower rates of absence due to sickness, while maintaining productivity and performance.
There is optimism that a new government will be more receptive to innovative practices than its predecessor. Joe Ryle, the 4 Day Week Campaign’s director, remarked that “change was in the air”. Certainly some Conservative ministers were instinctively hostile: Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg stalking Whitehall leaving passive-aggressive notes for civil servants who were working from home being a notable example. But all parts of the economic ecosystem, employers and employees alike, must beware a descent into a battle over rights and privileges.
Since April, the Flexible Working (Amendment) Regulations 2023 have entitled employees to request flexible arrangements including working from home, but there are various reasons for employers legitimately to refuse such a request, such as excessive cost or a potential reduction in performance. That balance should not be controversial. But the issue has too often deteriorated into an inter-generational culture war: earlier this year Lord Sugar dismissed those who work from home as “a bunch of lazy layabouts”, while some employees have been deeply reluctant to give up the patterns to which they became accustomed as emergency measures.
Notwithstanding the positive results from the 4 Day Week Campaign’s previous pilot, there are benefits to greater presence in the workplace. The interconnected elements of learning by observation and co-operation and a sense of camaraderie and collegial spirit are near-impossible to replicate virtually, and physical distance makes some (but by no means all) communication more arduous and time-consuming. Equally, of course, it has to be recognised that the applicability of working from home or operating flexible hours will vary from sector to sector: hospitality, for example, more or less demands that employees are present, while consultancy work has much greater scope for variety.
We have to take the heat and anecdotage out of the conversation. Employers have a right to expect their workforce to fulfil basic tasks and deliver a certain level of performance. But the debate has to rest on two fundamental pillars.
The first is output. For businesses, and indeed for the public sector, the priority is delivering the service required. That has to be sacrosanct and cannot be compromised because of different expectations of workplace culture. The second element is that decisions about working patterns have to be firmly based on robust evidence. Many factors lie beneath these two principles: we need to take into account the satisfaction and wellbeing of employees, recruitment and retention, estate costs and the wider economy. None of these is an easy calculation.
The way we work is changing, and changing fast. Moreover the changes are less predictable than they seemed at the beginning of the decade. There are huge opportunities to increase prosperity and productivity if we get these things right, but we have to prioritise the end product: without successful private enterprise, none of us stands to benefit.
Eliot Wilson is co-founder of Pivot Point Group