Still Shirking From Home

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog about working from home (see Shirking From Home), in which I wrote that, “Some people are opposed to home working on principle and in my experience these people’s prejudices are based on their conception of how effective other people are when they work at home” and recent comments from journalists, radio and TV presenters, and politicians have given me no reason to change that view; if anything, it has reinforced it.

There remains a perception that working from home means skiving and shirking, that workers are more productive in an office, and management can only effectively monitor what is being done, and by whom, in an office environment.

The interesting thing about the negative and critical statements being made about working from home is that by and large, the comments and views are not being expressed by employers, but by commentators and politicians.

Thus, we have LBC presenter Nick Ferrari criticising civil servants for continuing to work from home and 'staying in their pyjamas,' and telling someone who called in to his show that they should be paid less because they weren’t working as hard at home as they would in the office. His fellow LBC radio show host, and sister of the Prime Minister, Rachel Johnson claimed on her programme that working from home actually meant being people were “on their pelotons” and “watching Netflix.”

On Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley told viewers that workers need to be back in the office so that managers can monitor their work, while in a bizarre flight of fancy, Camilla Tominey, writing in The Telegraph, claimed that “Home working is a middle-class Remainer cult.”

As far as I am aware, Ferrari, Johnson, Madeley, and Tominey are not employers, nor do they provide any evidence to back up their comments. They are passing their opinions and prejudices off as fact in much the same way as a saloon bar bore regales his audience with ‘facts’ that are nothing more than the product of their febrile imagination.

We have heard from one employer however, Lord Sugar, who echoed Rachel Johnson by saying “It's time for everyone to get off their backsides — and their Pelotons — and get back to work.” According to Lord Sugar, the pandemic has unleashed a workshy, entitled culture in which people demand — and are allowed — to work from home. It’s true that the coming of covid accelerated the trend for working from home, and it’s just as well that it was possible for so many people, otherwise the effects of the pandemic might have been even more severe for businesses and commuting workers alike.

People who have spent most of the last two years working from home quite efficiently and effectively, should not be bullied into returning to offices by chat show hosts and journalists. Some employers will want to carry on as they are, some will want workers back in the office, and others will adopt hybrid schemes with some home working and some office working. All of these approaches are valid, and which is adopted should be on the basis of the best interests of employer and employee alike.

The idea that working from home is a skivers charter, that home workers are all on their pelotons or watching Netflix instead of working is a lazy and inaccurate trope. Okay, so some possibly are. There probably are people who work from home and don’t pull their weight, but they are also likely to be the sort of people who would do the same in the office.

In fact, I would argue that it is easier to look busy but do very little in a busy and fully staffed office than it is at home. It seems not to have occurred to Sugar, Johnson, Madeley and Tominey that the managers of people working from home monitor their output.

Naturally though, there are people who will take advantage of working from home to do the bare minimum, people who are easily distracted and wander away from the task in hand to do something not work related. Here’s what one man, whose home is also his office, had to say on the subject: “My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee, and then you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you're doing.” Worryingly, the man who said that is our Prime Minister.

Perhaps the culture the Prime Minister describes is more prevalent in the public sector in general, and his office at home in particular, than it is in the private sector. It certainly seems to be the case that civil servants have been getting it in the neck for not wanting to return to the office, with Jacob Rees-Mogg recently touring his own department and leaving messages on the desks of absent workers lamenting their absence and looking forward to seeing them in the office soon. 

Mogg's tactics did not find favour even with some of his Cabinet colleagues as both Grant Schapps and Nadine Dorries – who appropriately called Mogg’s approach ‘Dickensian’ – disagreed with the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, not that we seem to have seen much in the way of Brexit opportunities, and – like military intelligence – Government Efficiency is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Mogg has hinted that civil servants who refuse to return to the office could see their pay cut, and that echoes Nick Ferrari’s comments. It could be argued that without the cost of commuting, home workers are better off than their office bound counterparts, but the home worker needs to heat and light their home and pay for broadband and office peripherals that they would normally be supplied with. You may remember that when the pandemic started, MPs were allowed to claim up to £10,000 to cover additional office costs incurred as a result of the coronavirus such as buying laptops and printers, a benefit not afforded to the majority of workers whom the government implored to work from home.

Working from home – either full-time or in a hybrid format – is here to stay, no matter what the Johnson’s and Rees-Mogg (who apparently doesn’t have a computer on his office desk and has the air of a man who requires his staff to transcribe emails onto parchment with quill pens for him to read) may say.

Pre-pandemic, views on working from home were, as I said back in 2013, based on commentator’s perception of other people, and the view – formed and enhanced more by opinion and prejudice than fact – has crystallised, but I would bet that those saying such things would, were they working from home, have a more favourable view of their own effectiveness while doing so.