Apple is telling staff to return to the office – is working from home coming to an end?

There is a tug-of-war taking place between the attractions of hybrid working and the difficulties of managing a workforce that is not physically in the same place most of the time, writes Hamish McRae

There are significant cost savings both to employer and employee when working from home (Getty)

Working from home? Still? Or less agreeably working on holiday? Or under the cosh to get back into the office?

Apple Inc has just given its staff a deadline of 5 September for them to return to the office. They must spend at least three days a week there: Tuesday, Thursday and one other day agreed among their team. So if that is what the most valuable company in the Western world demands, will this become the new normal more generally? How does this square with the UK pattern of workers on average spending only 1.5 days a week in the office? Or will the US be an outlier on hybrid working, as it is over its very low vacation allowances compared with most of the rest of the developed world?

Several things are happening and as always it is hard to pick out what is important – the trends that will gather pace everywhere – and what are just experiments that will fade. While the return to the office seems to be happening much more slowly than many expected, there is a tug-of-war taking place between the attractions of hybrid working and the difficulties of managing a workforce that is not physically in the same place most of the time.

The holiday season further confuses things. There was already an erosion of the barrier between work and leisure, with people logging on in the evening to clear emails. Now, some people at least are logging on while nominally on vacation, be that a “staycation” or a trip to a beach on the Med.

Yet some clarity is beginning to emerge. Here are three propositions of things that have become pretty evident, and three that are still to play for.

First, there are many jobs that require physical presence and always will: you cannot staff a hospital ward from a laptop. That will, for people who want to work mainly from home, shut out some types of career.

Second, for those who can work online at least part of the time, hybrid working is here to stay. Note that Apple is only requiring people to be in three days a week, not five. In a tight labour market employee preferences matter, and companies miss out on talent if they cannot offer some home working.

Three, there are significant cost savings both to employer and employee from working from home: smaller office space, lower commuting costs and more.

Now the less clear issues.

First, and enormously important, we don’t know much about the long-term quality of output. Hybrid work teams are hard to manage, indeed there is an argument that it is the worst of both worlds, according to Frances Milliken, professor of management at Stern School of Business, New York University. Yelp, for example, has gone to full remote working for this reason. But this option is really only open to high-tech enterprises, for their business is already online.

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Second, we don’t know whether what works in the short-term will also work in the long. It is too soon to know whether new employees can be trained effectively if most of their work is remote – whether work teams can bond together, whether innovation can happen if people are not spending time together in informal activities such as a drink after work. We can see it will be different for people at different stages of a career, but we can’t judge how different.

And third, we don’t know what improvements will take place by substituting technology for physical meeting, and where the losses will be. We are all on a learning curve. Some things are obviously easier, some harder. But that is a short-term reaction as we adapt our working practices, and until we have rethought a lot of the things we do, it won’t be possible to make a sensible assessment of whether the quality of our output is really better or worse.

Actually, I think we will start getting some signals pretty soon. If the high-tech giants of America find they need people in the office to keep pushing their profits up, they will get them into the office. If the banks in New York and London make more money with people crouched over desks in dealing rooms then those dealing rooms will be packed with their most ambitious staff.

If, on the other hand, the companies that go full remote do best, then full remote it will be. The market will decide. But my guess is that hybrid will be the main way forward and managers and staff alike will learn how to make that work best. Maybe Apple’s three-day office week will indeed become the new normal.