I’m sick of all the male billionaires telling us how we should be working

An obsessive need to cage employees in a 9-5 existence isn’t healthy

Another day, another bleating male billionaire desperately trying to keep employment in the dark ages.

Sir James Dyson joins a wealthy – but, in my opinion, morally motley – crew of Elon Musk, Lord Sugar and Jacob Rees-Mogg (who is officially a millionaire), wedded to a 9-5 model born in the Industrial Revolution. A time when men earned the bacon and women, well, cooked it.

As far as I can tell, all have three things in common: dollar, archaic mindsets and nothing to back up their argument that flexible working is bad for productivity. Nada. It’s a lot of hot air and empty headlines with no follow-through.

The issue appears to be that the world is moving on without their patriarchal green light. While a decade or so ago they’d have got their way wielding fistfuls of tenners and blathering loudly. Now, the seismic shift in the way we work post-pandemic is bigger than the sum of their outdated views.

Companies that didn’t log on and Zoom in during Covid simply had to shut down. And now the law is changing to cement that shift further.

On 5 December, a legislative change to flexible working was made – giving employees the right to request it from day one, not week 26. This is a monumental change – and one that has ruffled many a controlling billionaires’ feathers.

Dyson declared that flexible working in the UK has become “self-defeating.” He also said flexible working, “will cause friction between employers and employees”; and embracing it will cause Britain to “fall further behind” as an economy.

I see this as one fairly binary view layered with a nannying, chauffeuring, helicoptering and financially abundant subtext. The very people who need flexible working are the ones who can’t work without it. Parents – particularly mothers who are working around their unpaid labour (including picking up the childcare slack) – need to be able to flex outside of the 9-5.

Women suffering through the menopause, people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health challenges (and anyone who wants to have more life balance with work...) the list goes on.

Currently, nine in 10 people want to work flexibly, yet just one in four employers advertise flexible working. The maths doesn’t add up between employers and employees – but data showing its positive impact on the workplace does.

An obsessive need to cage employees in a 9-5 existence isn’t healthy. There is no research at all that says that strapping employees to slabs of MDF in an office – under flickering office lighting for eight-hour (minimum) days – drives productivity and increases performance. On the contrary, there is endless research to show the positive benefits of flexible working.

Stanford university professor Nick Bloom is a testament to this with his research into the positive impact of hybrid working on people. He found that if you work two days from home per week, sick days go down, employee absences go down – and you are less likely to quit your job.

But there’s more, because hybrid working also supports companies’ diversity, equality and diversity efforts. Nick Bloom noted that minorities in the workplace could be “less comfortable” in the office and could therefore be the first to quit if pushed.

Research from CIPD has also shown that flexible working can reduce absence rates and allows employees to manage disability and long-term health conditions, as well as supporting their mental health and stress. This isn’t friction – it’s inclusion.

Dyson’s other main fear seems to be that flexible working is merely a “popularity contest” and something that will not improve economic performance. Again, from what I’ve seen, there’s a mysterious lack of data to support this claim.

The only report of its kind to link flexible working to the economy is one that Sir Robert McAlpine and I have compiled called Flexonomics. It found that the current economic contribution of flexible working is £37bn – and a 50 per cent increase in flexible working rates would make this a £55bn contribution. It would also bring with it 51,200 new jobs.

Currently, it actually costs businesses to say no to flexible working requests, to the tune of almost £2bn per year. We are losing money to the bottom line of our economy because we are refusing requests.

Sir Dyson can claim that productivity is hampered by flexible working, but in my view, it’s panicked patter from a business relic. The only concern that he and other flexible working naysayers appear to have is filling the empty office space that hangs around their capitalist necks.

If we embrace flexible working, then there’s a real chance of closing the gender pay gap by “letting” more women in. But to do this, we need to boost its use in all positions from the top down.

That is why the comments from Sir Dyson are damaging. He is reinforcing practices that will ultimately shut people out of the workplace for a mythical fear of economic rebuttal. If we invest in flexible working, it will pay dividends to our economy and to every person out there facing their own daily battle to work and thrive – it’s about time we made work work.

Soon I believe it won’t be a choice for the likes of Dyson. There will be a day where he has to just suck it up.

Anna Whitehouse is a journalist and founder of Mother Pukka