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Working from home is harming productivity and risks creating workers who are “not doing proper work,” according to the former boss of Asda and Marks & Spencer.
Lord Stuart Rose, a Conservative life peer who has also led high street chains including Burton Group and Argos, told the BBC that working from home was helping stoke the economy’s “general decline”.
Speaking on BBC One’s Panorama programme, he said: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.”
Different companies have taken radically different approaches to working from home of late, with some firms like Boots, Amazon and JP Morgan telling head office workers to be in the office every working day.
Others, like Spotify, allow workers to choose and others still have taken a softer approach by making their offices nicer to be in, with free coffee and snacks, in a bid to get their staff to choose office work themselves.
The topic has become a political football as the government aims to strengthen workers’ rights to request home working while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has criticised a blanket approach to home working.
She told TalkTV in September: “I find it extraordinary that Labour are scraping the policy barrel here to find more ways of flexible working when actually we need to get more people into the workplace. They are not learning, they’re not getting the skills at the same rate they used to, which is one of the challenges of working from home.”
Prof Nicholas Bloom told Panorama that working fully remotely can be damaging to worker productivity, but spending two days at home per week was about the same as five days in the office.
About a quarter of people mix office work with work at home, according to figures for the Office for National Statistics, while 13 per cent are fully remote and 41 per cent spend five days a week in the workplace.
For many, including factory workers, builders and those who have a trade, working from home was and is not possible.
While home working has been available for some workers for a long time, especially freelancers and those setting up their own businesses, coronavirus lockdowns forced many office workers to continue their jobs in their spare rooms and bedrooms.
The shift made it harder for bosses to argue that home working was impossible, but those with younger workforces say they found training and collaboration harder and for those without a spare room, home working can feel cramped and isolating.
