Back to the office for five days a week? I wouldn’t count on it

Some experts and prominent business leaders have suggested working patterns will revert to pre-pandemic norms within as little as two years. James Moore explains why he thinks working from home is, at least in part, here to stay

Paul Swinney of Centre for Cities predicts a return to HQ for workers (PA)

Time to abandon those plans to escape to the country that you thought home or hybrid working would facilitate?

It might be wise to at least put them on hold if Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at economics think tank Centre for Cities, is right.

Swinney set the cat among the pigeons, and was on the receiving end of some fairly strong pushback, after predicting that most of the UK’s office workers would be back at HQ for five days a week within a fairly short space of time.

Working patterns, he believes, will be much closer to the way they were pre-pandemic than the way they are today within a couple of years following a “steady drift” back to the office.

This makes him something of an outlier. The consensus is that home and especially hybrid working – part office, part home-based – will remain a prominent feature of the UK workplace when Covid restrictions are finally dropped. Whenever that may be, and I wouldn’t bet too heavily on 21 June given the way the virus is behaving.

Some very big, and prestigious, employers have already gone down that route. Professional services firms like PwC, big banks such as HSBC and Lloyds, which have announced plans to downsize their office footprints, and public sector organisations such as the Bank of England, and HM Revenue & Customs have been consulting on home working arrangements. Some employers have gone further. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey said staff would be able to work from home in perpetuity in the pandemic’s early days. Its social media rival Facebook has also been at cutting edge of this revolution.

But Swinney correctly points out that there have been some notable dissidents. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, for example, described working from home as an “aberration” and said it didn’t work for the firm’s “innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture”. I suppose that’s one way to describe an environment in which junior bankers burn the midnight oil at home after spending hours on end chained to their desks.

JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon has also said working from home was unsuited for those who want to “hustle”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, meanwhile, said in a recent memo ordering a return to the office: “For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other.”

So that’s some auspicious company Swinney is in. He told me he expects their numbers to grow: “It’s because of the benefits of being in the office. The reason why companies spend top dollar on renting city centre offices is because they value face-to-face interactions. They lead to new ideas, new thinking. It’s not just talking with colleagues yourself. It’s hearing other colleagues discussing things while you’re in the workplace.

“It’s particularly useful for younger workers to sit in an office and see the information flying around them, to watch other people and learn how to conduct themselves, to see how their boss conducts themselves. All these are things that we miss when we’re not in the office.”

Swinney says what he calls the “creative spark” of human interaction is vital for a modern knowledge economy, something which Cook has also made note of. He says the prospect of its absence worries him.

It is, however, worth noting that at least some of Cook’s staff were less than impressed with the Apple boss’s memo, with a letter reportedly circulating pushing back on his decision to mandate that staff should return for at least three days a week – with some teams at a full five days.

CEOs like Cook, who live to work, often seem to see their plush offices as home. Staff who work to live, and lack the perks that come with board-level positions, not so much. And so far they’ve proven home working can work quite well through the course of the pandemic.

It is to Swinney’s credit that he was prepared to debate his thesis with me but I remain convinced that he and the named CEOs are on the wrong side of this one.

They underestimate the potential benefits of hybrid working, if not full time home working.

This is particularly true for certain groups of employees. Women would be one example. There are still too few of them to be found in senior roles, and the UK’s gender pay gap is too high. There is good evidence to suggest a move towards more flexible working, which would include more working from home, could help narrow the gap. And firms with more gender diversity at the top tend to be more profitable, per a study by McKinsey.

Disabled workers such as myself, who find it far harder to secure employment than their able-bodied colleagues, are another group in this position. The commute is a high first hurdle to overcome and offices aren’t always as friendly as they might be for those of us with impairments.

More generally, hybrid working, part office, part home based, can offer the best of both worlds with the capacity for Swinney’s interactions combined with the flexibility many workers value, and the productivity benefits than can accrue from working from home.

There are good grounds for thinking that it will outlast the pandemic, and also that the firms that embrace and learn how best to utilise it may derive benefits. One obvious example? An enhanced ability to recruit talented workers.

To what level still remains to be seen. Swinney’s think tank is planning to collect data, a worthy exercise which will make for interesting reading.