As with other innovations, it carries risks as well as benefits.

Originally published August 2021.

There is this great cartoon where a man sits behind a laptop having a Zoom call at his kitchen table perfectly shaven and dressed in a shiny shirt with tie, but under the table he is in his boxer shorts and socks, and the floor is littered with empty beer bottles. A hilarious depiction of a real-life situation, but it also illustrates the wider social impact of our stay-at-home experiment. For some workers WFH is a shiny perk and something to savour, while for others it represents a barrier to progress their careers and a perception of inequality.

A traditional employment contract will state the place of work and the time you are working for the employer. Typically, the place is an office location, and wherever the employer wants you to be and the time, normally 40 hours per week, plus any additional time required by the employer. These are all covered by employment legislation protecting both worker and employer rights.

Changes to this model were already made before the pandemic, most obviously with the introduction of part-time jobs, which allowed many women to enter the workforce, and outsourcing trends that created the contractor model. Supported by new technology and further enhanced by the gig economy, these innovations changed the perception of the fixed full-time office workplace. 

Led by the technology sector, businesses experimented using a mix of contracting, part-time jobs, as well as this new technology-enabled phenomenon: WFH. Its goal was to increase productivity and staff-to-workstation ratios, so that they could viably operate expensive, cool, inner-city offices operating as a smoothly connected international network. It was against this backdrop that our stay-at-home experiment began, which forced most of the workforce to WFH for the first time. 

From an employer’s perspective there are positive effects: lower space-per-worker cost and better retention rates because of happier staff, but there are also negative effects: reduced creative outputs due to lower interaction levels and costlier more complex management tools. 

In the end, it all but reinforced the concept that different jobs need different solutions. This was already apparent in the outsourcing of back- and mid-office jobs to cheaper locations and now a new dimension will be added to the mix by embracing the WFH concept.

Companies have found different solutions. Goldman Sachs announced that in June its US and UK workforces would return to their offices full-time because it sees social interaction as vital to its success. It also announced that it was setting up a Birmingham office to be close to a talent pool within its universities. On the contrary, HSBC announced that almost 1,000 jobs would be WFH permanently post-pandemic. Furthermore, from personal experience, a friend was recently offered a 3+2 job at an investment firm in marketing, ie, three days in the office and two days WFH. Finally, a young MiF graduate told me that all his starting position job offers were WFH only.

At first sight, five different reactions to the pandemic, but there is one underlying trend: different workplace solutions for different job levels. 

We have been fed stories of how wonderful working from the back garden is and how people loved the absence of commuting – often to help sell the stay-at-home policies to the public – but it’s clear a large part of the workforce does not like full-time WFH. A lot has been written about the physical element of WFH – crying kids, small flats, etc – but the social aspect is less documented, in spite of the fact that almost everyone I meet misses the social interaction with colleagues and would like to return to the office, albeit not full-time. This worker-preferred flexible model has its difficulties, though.

Let’s go back to this 3+2 offer. Virtually everyone would love to WFH on Mondays and Fridays, which of course is impossible. So how is the employer going to determine which employees can WFH on which days? Will it be in the contract, a perk to hand out with promotions or at the line manager’s discretion? Inevitably it will create a sense of unfairness.

A full-time WFH contract for young graduates denies them the chance to socially interact – also outside working hours – with their new colleagues and build their network. Their pay is likely to be ‘matched’ with their cheaper home location or cheaper Birmingham office rather than London HQ. It will feel like another end of term exam before being invited into the office to meet their colleagues – probably starting with a 3+2. No doubt they will be jealous of those in the graduate scheme who rotate around teams building their knowledge and networks every day.

For work addicts, five days in the office is a dream, but there are not many of them and the stay-at-home directive has surely reduced their number. For most full-time office workers, flexibility will be a perk. Waiting for the plumber to come and not lose a holiday is a positive, as well as being able to finalise a project report in your garden without being disturbed. Most companies will allow this flexibility and leave it up to the line manager’s discretion to decide, but once WFH becomes the norm, employees will consider it a right. Managers will therefore need to adhere to discrimination laws and make defendable decisions; and if they fail, it will leave workers feeling alienated and treated unfairly.

Finally, once you have reached that point in your career when you are on top of the pyramid, you can decide to WFH whenever you like. A Zoom call with a young banker from a tropical island may be an incentive for him or her to work even harder, but I can imagine that a factory floor worker having to come up to a no-window room clutching a laptop in order to talk to the boss sitting in a palatial room, overlooking a manicured garden, might trigger a different reaction.

The WFH experiment is inevitable, but it will create new questions which have to be answered by employers and employees alike and as with other innovations, such as part-time work, zero-hour contracts and gig-economy jobs, a new equilibrium needs to be established in both practice and law. The risk is that left to its own devices, WFH could result in the growing inequality of a shiny above-table workplace and a dreadful one underneath.