Rachel Moore launches an attack on working from home

A delivery, house repair or child illness might qualify for a begrudging nod from the boss that we could do the job from home, leaving colleagues and management raising eyebrows, instantly suspicious that home working meant slacking.

Post Covid, working from the comfort of home has been claimed as a right rather than a privilege, standard not emergency, creating an army of return-to-work refuseniks.

Covid emergency has created a culture of the tail wagging the dog. If the needs and future prosperity of the business or organisation is to have people at desks in one building, who are the workers to resist?

But a legacy of covid is an entitled worker-centric group where employees believe their needs and wishes come above those of the business that pays their salary.

Why would people who have worked in their slippers and comfies for the past four years want to put on proper clothes and mix with people they don’t want to spend time within the name of work?

But that’s what employment is. We all have a choice where we work. If we don’t like the conditions or the people making them, we can leave.

Frontline workers, retail staff, hand-on engineers and millions of other workers have no choice to stay at home. They must show up at work every day because their jobs cannot be done at home.

WFHers will dig their heels in because it suits them. When will they put the washing on, mow the grass or walk the dog if they’re out of the house at work nine hours a day?

When WFHers say “I get so much done at home”, they don’t mean just work. All their domestics are taken care of between 9-5. Add to that time saved on commuting, and it doubles their spare time.

It’s not a coincidence that since Covid beauty salons have seen weekday 9-5 appointments soar.

I’m with Amazon, ordering staff back to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid work policy, so the company is better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other".

We are social animals. Work comes with socialisation and learning to tolerate.

And with chancellor Rachel Reeves who believes that being at work stimulates ideas with employees, and their employers, benefitting from being in the same building.

“I do think people coming together and working together collaboratively promotes ideas.”

Work comes with distractions, but from those distractions can come stellar ideas.

I can’t be alone in despising Teams and Zoom calls. No one comes across as themselves in screen, calls aren’t productive and it’s impossible to pick up on body language, nuances and emotions on the screen in the same way as in person.

Working in a team means spontaneously sharing ideas, keeping an ear out for what’s going on, spotting each others’ mistakes, working collaboratively, learning from others, acting as ‘back stops’ for colleagues – and them for you – so no one drops the ball.

Working remotely means just that – people are remote from each other and don’t know what’s going on. I know someone who secretly moved to Norway, and no one knew.

That’s fine if your job is sitting in a cupboard involving no interaction with colleagues, but if it involved communication with others, it’s a disaster.

Friends working in organisations needing people back in the workplace are facing all sorts of excuses, which begs the question, why are you doing this in work time?

School runs and covid dogs are the main excuses. People bought dogs, have never left them alone and say they cannot do what their work contract originally said before covid because of the dog.

Family schedules have been shaped around home working so people can “nip out" to pick the children up, then take them to after school clubs. 

People just need to get back to work and stop being hard-done- or resign.

That’s not to say employers shouldn’t be flexible.

My fear is that businesses are so fed up with the inflexible attitude of the WFHers to return to work, the flexibility so hard fought for to work flexi hours, compressed ours, sometimes from home, and all the advances will be lost in the intransigence to return to the office.

WFH has been a disaster for young people starting out on careers after being stuck at home during Covid. We all learned from colleagues. How lonely and unsupported they must feel at home, no wonder mental health and confidence issues are rife along that age group.

Only people who are content with living life by candlelight, happy to watch the UK’s productivity sink and will embrace energy rationing should be permitted to object to new energy infrastructure projects.

For decades, we have treated energy like a magic force that appears from nowhere.

Norfolk and Suffolk are key areas for solar development – dubbed the solar capital of the UK - but people call it destruction of the countryside.

Power generation can’t come without infrastructure. If we want to live our lives, we will need four times more power than we generate now. We also need energy security.

Protesters insist they’re not against renewable energy, it just must be out of their sight.

How reasonable is that?