WFH: not all black and white

In the old science fiction series, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a bit where mankind tries to prove that black is white and ‘gets killed on the next zebra crossing’. I thought of this quote when reading the contradictory headlines which continue to be attached to the vexed question of what is gong on in trends in working from home (WFH).

In one corner, we have a bunch of high profile employers apparently ‘demanding’ a return to the office for their workforce, and the likes of the Dailies – Mail and Telegraph – who have been catastrophising about the negative impact of WFH on everything from the economy and real estate, to our bodies.  In the other corner, we find positive views from employees, parents and many experts.  At the centre of the differences between these groups, is often the knotty matter of productivity.  Does WFH enhance or diminish it?  You can find headlines supporting either view – with the dominant discourse increasingly stating that the argument is coming to rest with the sceptics of working from home.  But what does the evidence really say?  I think the reason why some confusion reigns, is, that the situation with regards to office versus homeworking, is not all black and white. 

Like many other issues, WFH has become a site of polarisation.  I’ve written previously about the tendency for government ministers in the UK to demonise working from home as some kind of slacking, and to associate it with full-time remote working, as was practised by necessity at the height of the pandemic. In fact, outside of periods of the strictest Covid lockdowns, working from home has mostly meant hybrid working (some time each week in the workplace, some time at home) for the vast majority of people with the option to do it.  The contradiction between headlines indicating that WFH increases productivity, and those suggesting that it emphatically reduces it, often appears to come down to a conflation of figures regarding those who always work from home, and those who do so only some of the time each week. A widely reported recent study of data-entry employees, which found WFH reduced productivity, compared full-time office workers and wholly remote employees, thus saying nothing about the hybrid workforce.

The confusion extends to the recent reporting around what Zoom, the company at the forefront of enabling remote working through its videoconferencing software, has recently done to encourage its workers to attend in-person at work.  On the one hand, there have been pieces about ‘the end’ of WFH, while on the other, experts like Nick Bloom of Stanford University – a leading researcher on WFH trends – have pointed out that all Zoom have done, is to formalise hybrid arrangements.  They have asked employees to come in at least 2 days per week if they live within 50 miles of the office.  Hardly a return to the rigid 9-5, 5 days a week of yore.

As for productivity, Bloom is among those pointing out that the latest evidence shows that productivity does drop where people work remotely all the time.  However, hybrid arrangements are associated with flatlining or slightly increased rates of productivity (as reported here). So, it really depends who you are talking about when making assertions about office versus home-based work.  Moreover, lower productivity in the full-time remote workforce may be rendered acceptable to some companies, when the lower costs represented by doing away with office space are taken into account.  Rather than being a black and white issue, then, ‘working from home’ is a nuanced phenomenon encompassing many shades of grey.

One thing seems certain though, and that is that hybrid working is valued by employees and likely to remain widespread in the near future.  An article in Business Insider lists the current strategies of prominent firms regarding WFH policies and shows that where full-time return to the office has been mandated, the workforce has pushed back, sometimes securing less draconian policies.  And big employers are generally adopting a ‘structured hybrid’ approach like that of Zoom, whereby most people are required in the office for a proportion of the working week, while still permitted to work from home part of the time.  The resilience of WFH as a trend in the US is neatly illustrated in graphs posted on Twitter by Nick Bloom.  These show that the amount of time spent working from home has remained well above trend, while other remote activities, like online shopping, have tended to revert to pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, the UK has become the ‘work-from-home capital in Europe’ and white-collar workers around the world have been fighting to secure the right to work from home long-term.  If anyone tells you that the future of work is a black and white issue, remind them to be careful when crossing the road.

Big in Japan?: a revealing tale of parental leave policy

  

Approaching Father’s Day this Sunday, papers have begun to fill with articles about the state of fatherhood, and continuing efforts to come up with a set of policies which might hit the sweet spot of promoting involved fatherhood, and reducing gender gaps in the labour market. Our country’s current system has been pronounced inadequate by the TUC and other campaigners.

Regular readers will know that I have long praised the models of generous parental leave in Nordic countries, where fathers benefit from their own entitlement to leave, at relatively high rates of pay. I’m used to hearing about the ‘latte papas’ of Stockholm’s streets. They are to be found strolling around with their buggies and coffees while on parental leave. But my image of Japan, has been of a country with a long-hours working culture, and little history of widespread involved fatherhood. Yet, these days, if you look at whereabouts provides the most leave dedicated to fathers among OECD countries, the answer is not to be found in Sweden or Nordic countries, but Japan.  There’s even a Japanese portmanteau term for progressive fathers: “ikumen”, which brings together ‘ikuji’ – childcare – and ‘ikemen’ – cool-looking guy.

Although mothers and fathers in Sweden and Japan have similar total amounts of parental leave available to them as couple, the portion of that leave earmarked for fathers is now much higher in Japan.  Swedish parents have access to shareable leave which is mostly taken by mothers in practice. Has Japan transformed from a comparative underdog, to top of the table on egalitarian parenthood in recent years?

As ever with questions like this, the answer is ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that’.  It’s undoubtedly true that Japanese government has seriously upped its game in terms of parental leave policy. Like many of the wealthiest countries, Japan has been experiencing a long-term decline in the birth rate, and an ageing population. Japan’s fertility rate, which stands at 1.3 children per woman, is low compared the 2.1 children per woman required to maintain population levels. Historically, childcare has been the preserve of women, but in recent years Japanese women have entered the workforce in growing numbers – over 70%  are now employed.  Nonetheless, mothers often move into part-time roles and still lag men on promotion and pay. In response, the Japanese government has introduced new legislation.

In 2021, the Childcare and Nursing Care Leave Act introduced the entitlement to one year’s parental leave for fathers and mothers. However, mirroring experience around the world – also in Nordic countries, as I’ve documented here – the take-up rates for fathers have been low at the start. Only 6% of Japanese men employed in the private sector used their entitlement, compared to over 80% of women. And corporate culture in Japan is widely seen as providing the explanation – Japanese fathers remain ‘afraid’ that taking leave will hurt their career prospects. Moreover, not all workers are eligible for parental leave – those in smaller companies and on short-term contracts do not typically have these benefits.

As in other countries, there has been tweaking of legislation to encourage greater take-up. According to Diplomat magazine, in 2022, the 2021 Act was amended to make it more flexible and attractive for fathers. The amendments mean that the 12 months can be split into blocks of leave, rather than being taken all at once, and workers are allowed to complete a set amount of occupational tasks during their leave period. Employees can now give shorter notice before going on leave, and employers are encouraged to publicise uptake rates. However, these amendments do not apply to small- and medium-sized companies, nor to part-time workers or unmarried parents.

Meanwhile, there are also issues around recent entitlement to paternity leave – this gives Japanese men 4 weeks leave at 80% of pay in the post-birth period. Currently, only 14% of Japanese fathers take it – a scenario which the government is intent on transforming to 50% of fathers by 2025. Academics consulted on this ambition, said that the legislation alone was unlikely to shift strong cultural patterns of commitment to employment for men, and primary parenthood for women – but it is at a welcome step in the right direction.

I once compared the UK’s slow progress on shared parental leave policy and culture change, to turning round an oil tanker. Japan might look to its fishing industry. One Japanese fishing town has recently changed its fortunes by building an Instagram-able squid statue to attract tourists and boost the local fleet. Perhaps public art with representations of involved fatherhood might help make leave-taking bigger in Japan? Maybe Japanese fathers need more role models like the previous environment minister, who became the first senior politician to take paternity leave. Or, possibly, more female politicians would be beneficial – women make up only 10% of members of parliament in Japan at the moment. On the long road to gender equality there’s still some way to go. Japan (unlike the UK) has moved rapidly to make substantial parental leave available to fathers in their own right – but take-up is still a developing story.

A report out today which is recommending an increase in the amount of paternity leave available in the UK (which currently stands at only 2 weeks), and a more generous rate of pay to cover it, includes survey data on reasons why new fathers had returned to work without completing their fortnight’s leave. A total of nearly one third of these men said that they had either experienced pressure to return from their employers, or that they feared missing out on future opportunities if they did not go back promptly. Even though attitudes in the UK are less traditional than in Japan, and we have a lower gender pay gap and greater representation of women in public life, workplaces are not all equally inclined to support more gender-equal patterns of parental leave. Who knows what might happen if our legislation for fathers’ leave took some inspiration from Japan?

What is to be done about childcare?

Hardly a day goes by now, without the issue of childcare featuring in the headlines. It’s an indication of the attention being given to the topic, that rumours abound about what is going to appear in the Budget.  What measures are there to address a crisis in affordability for parents, and the sustainability of services in an early years sector stymied by fragmentation and low pay? While I have been writing this blog, a proposal to extend ‘free’ childcare hours in England to more young children has apparently been rejected – but exactly which options are being considered remains unclear.

Back in July 2022, in the end days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the government launched a consultation on childcare policy, but the results of this exercise have yet to be published.  Views were sought on changing minimum staff:child ratios in childcare settings (i.e., 5 2-year-olds per staff member, instead of 4), and increasing the attractiveness of childminding. Policy to relax ratios is a favourite of ex-PM Liz Truss, who saw it as a way of reducing the cost of childcare.  However, it is not supported by either early years professionals or parents, who are both concerned about its potential to reduce the quality of childcare services.  Recent reporting suggests that this measure will not now be included in the Budget, but controversy rumbles on over what else to do.

For the last decade, the centrepiece of childcare policy in England has been the provision of ‘free’ hours in early years settings.  All three- and four-year olds are entitled to 15 hours free childcare each week, for 38 weeks of the year.  Children whose parents are both working for at least 16 hours per week, can claim 30 hours free childcare – up to a high income threshold.  Two-year-olds in low-income households in receipt of certain benefits, are also eligible for 15 free hours each week. These ‘free’ hours are funded by the government, but the hourly rate of cover passed on to childcare providers, has long fallen short of true costs.  Therefore, nurseries often cross-subsidise in order to stay afloat: parents who work more, pay increasingly high fees for the hours beyond the 30 that they use each week, and many settings now charge extra for activities which used to be included in fees.  The government has looked at expanding the provision of free hours to include more children under 3. Affordability of childcare has become a hot button issue, as middle-income families are increasingly constrained by the costs, and lower-income families struggle to find affordable childcare at all.

Like the nursery rhyme, ‘There’s a hole in my bucket’, the early years sector finds itself in a situation where its capacity to patch up the current system has become so challenging, that the water (staff, funds, parents who can afford their services) just keeps flowing out.  If the government does not invest more to support a viable level of service, the proposal to extend ‘free’ hours to include children from nine months old, could end up being a potentially damaging one.  To use another nursery metaphor, there’s a risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Without additional investment, many providers could simply collapse, leaving young children without the developmental support they need, and working parents unable to reach their potential in the labour market. The government seems to have ruled this policy option out on the grounds of cost.

Of course, the parents most affected by the inadequacies of childcare provision in this country, are mothers.  In spite of notable progress in the labour force, women embarking on parenthood are still likely to earn less than their baby’s father, and where they bring up children alone, they may struggle to find jobs that generate sufficient income to cover childcare costs, or which offer flexibility to accommodate holiday or emergency care. There are growing reports that women are reducing their hours, or forgoing employment altogether, in order to square these circles.  Stagnating wages and amongst the highest childcare costs in Europe simply do not add up.  The Labour party has signalled that it wants to go big on improving childcare.  Bridget Phillipson, the Shadow Education Secretary, has proposed funding breakfast clubs in all primary schools as a first step.  She is inspired by Estonia, where a nursery place for every child is guaranteed from the end of parental leave. 

The government, meanwhile, aspires to encourage more people into to work to ease widespread labour shortages, and foster economic growth. The media is full of examples of mothers saying childcare costs are pushing them out of the workforce. The notion that childcare can be ‘free’ is all too often an illusion which masks a profound lack of investment in caring work.  If Rishi Sunak wants to improve the affordability of childcare for all, he needs to put a functioning early years sector on his bucket list for government. And he needs to fund it. Time, like the water in the bucket, is running out.

In-between times

When better to look at the maze of trends influencing the future of the work than in this fallow period between Christmas and New Year?  And if the portmanteau ‘Twixmas’ brings you out in hives, don’t worry, I promise a buzzword-free zone here.  I’m greatly resigned to banishing ‘quiet quitting’ and its ilk to last year.  The term that gets to stay on, though, is the one that has emerged with longevity: hybrid working.

In both 2021 and 2022, my most-read blogs concerned hybrid arrangements – where office workers blend their time between working from home and being on-site at their employers’ premises – reflecting the popularity of the topic in public discussion. It says something that as we approach 2023, many of the issues around how exactly to make hybrid working work well, remain unresolved. 

At this time of year, it has become commonplace for columnists to review predictions made at the start of the year, and see what they have got right and wrong (I enjoyed Stephen Bush in the FT and Jeremy Cliffe in the New Statesman marking their own homework). I’m less likely to make forecasts for the future, but, where hybrid working is concerned, the tensions I’ve highlighted over the last couple of years have proved enduring.  Issues around the power balance between workers and employers remain in flux. 

Perhaps most crucial to the implementation of hybrid working is the truism that one size does not fit all.  Different sectors, different companies and different work roles, are subject to varied demands, in determining just how much time is required in the office, and how much employees can spend working independently from home.  Big lessons to emerge from the pandemic, are that productivity does not seem to suffer under homeworking, and that most employees with the opportunity to work from home want to keep doing so.   

However, there is a lack of precise consensus over how to proceed. Some firms insist on major returns to the office, while others leave it to individual teams to organise a roster of attendance that suits their particular workstream.  There is emerging evidence that the more rigid an employer’s demands regarding office attendance are, the more likely they are to go ignored, or at least resisted.  In the Financial Times, a look at hybrid working in the City, shows that companies range across the whole gamut of possibilities, from those imposing weekly attendance expectations, to those letting teams – or even individuals – design their preferred schedules.  Hybrid arrangements are therefore both commonplace and diverse.  What is not apparently often on the menu, is the old 5-day working week in the office, or widespread 100% working from home.  No matter how much politicians have sought to polarise these contrasting models, as I have written before, they rarely exist in practice.

Hybrid working has implications for commercial real estate, as companies alter workspaces to fit more flexible arrangements.  Again, there is no uniform strategy, but many have re-assessed what to do with the space they have.  Employers looking to encourage attendance have created more attractive communal areas, sometimes reducing conventional desk space, while the boldest have embraced more permanent hybrid working by getting rid of floorspace altogether. A side effect of all of these developments is that the City and other metropolitan centres tend to be busy Tuesday to Thursday, with fewer employees choosing to commute on Mondays and Fridays.  For the service sectors who rely on office workers’ custom, this also has knock-on effects.  Many bars and restaurants declare Thursday ‘the new Friday’, when office workers socialise and eat and drink together after work. The hospitality sector has had a tumultuous time adjusting to the changing footfall in business districts.

And this leads us to the wider ripple effects of hybrid working and its implications for on-site workers.  Perhaps it was a little prescient for me to write about transport and childcare as two areas relatively neglected in discussions of future workplace trends.  Both of these sectors constitute vital support for office working, and both have found themselves at odds with government over issues of investment and future working patterns.  It’s an under-discussed topic in terms of the impact of the pandemic and the rise of hybrid working in white-collar jobs, that on-site workers have had the chance to reflect on how their own workplaces could be arranged better. Surveys have repeatedly shown that employers are less open to varieties of flexibility apart from working from home.  And yet, it is schemes like nine-day fortnights, job shares, flexitime, that might be most beneficial for workers whose physical presence is required. As these workers are often also relatively poorly paid, it is perhaps unsurprising that we are now seeing strike action in the transport sector, and widespread service closures amongst nurseries and childminders.  While the private sector in offices may be approaching some kind of settlement on future working conditions, in the public sector on-site, this seems further away for the moment.

A recent article in Worklife, the BBC’s guide to future employment trends, identified the ‘power pendulum’ as something to watch in 2023.  The pendulum swings between employers and employees as they negotiate around working conditions. In the face of further economic stagnation, some of the concessions won around flexibility by employees may come under renewed pressure.  The World Economic Forum reports that senior leaders are far less keen on working from home than their junior staff. Major lay-offs in Big Tech could signal a generally less sympathetic working environment, with more redundancies in the offing.  On the other hand, employees who have proved their productivity while working from home, and who have provided crucial services throughout the pandemic, still have a lot to bargain for. The future of work is not fixed yet.  Between you and me, it could take a while.

JRM says WFH is not OK

Jacob Rees-Mogg has raised hackles with a new attempt to end widespread home-working in the civil service.  In his ‘clear message’, he has urged secretaries of state to get their workforce back to their desks in government departments, and he has published a list of which departments have the highest proportion of staff working in the office on an average day.  This league table seems calculated to serve as a ‘naming and shaming’ strategy, with Rees-Mogg intent on visiting departments which exhibit the lowest rates of office attendance.  In forcefully encouraging a ‘rapid return to the office’, he is latest in a line of senior ministers who seem to equate productive work with office presence. This long line includes party Chairman, Oliver Dowden, with his exhortation to civil servants to ‘get off their Peletons and back to their desks’, Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who has opined on the benefits of being in the office for young people at the start of their careers, and the Prime Minister himself, who, as I outlined here, has no truck with the idea that there has been any useful transformation of working habits in recent years. 

These high-level political responses to home-working belie a limited understanding of the contemporary hybrid working environment.  Senior Conservatives routinely equate working from home (WFH) with either or both of ‘not really working’, or ‘never going into the office’.  The first of these assumptions is not only inaccurate, but also deeply insulting to a workforce that has adapted to mass homeworking during the pandemic at breakneck speed, and kept public services on the road.  The second indicates adherence to a false binary of either 5-day weeks in the office, or, permanent, full-time home-working, a rigid choice which poorly reflects current practice.  David Penman, head of the civil service union the FDA, points out that the private sector – normally beloved of government ministers – has embraced hybrid working, and used it to attract and retain talent.  Many civil servants are also already dividing their working weeks between home and the office.  Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that the majority of employees who have the option, wish to maintain a hybrid-working schedule, and that they want to negotiate on that entitlement: over a third of employees in a recent survey said that they wanted to thrash out hybrid arrangements alongside employers and trades unions, while only 11% thought politicians should determine these policies. 

So why are Jacob Rees-Mogg and his colleagues so keen to decide how much people can work at home?  Maybe the description of civil service premises as ‘taxpayer-funded’ offices provides a clue.  Although Rees-Mogg was keen to say that the desire for more civil servants to be in the office went beyond ‘value-for-money’ considerations, extracting the maximum from (small) state investments has been a theme in his brand of Conservativism.  And the revival of cities’ footfall has been a lobbying issue for a prominent strain of Tory donors who have interests as landlords and in property development.

Beyond this, Jacob Rees-Mogg and fellow ministers seem to have little appreciation of how recent government policy interacts with WFH in the civil service. Rees-Mogg outlined how departments should operate at ‘full capacity’, a tacit admission that some departments do not have office space for every worker to be in at the same time.  This is because previous government efficiency strategies have put emphasis on shrinking the overall estate footprint – facilitated by, you’ve guessed it, increased opportunities for working from home…

Moreover, as both the Institute for Government and the civil service unions have pointed out, plans for a less London-centric civil service, and the grand project of ‘levelling up’, both require making re-location options attractive to government employees. One way of ensuring that a more dispersed civil service enjoys both access to ministers and the option of living in towns rather than metropolitan centres, is by facilitating working from home and embracing the technology of virtual meetings.  With hybrid working, civil servants have a greater choice over where to live and how often to commute.  The Prime Minister has advocated for the UK to be a ‘science superpower’ and also to harness the power of data – if the civil service wants to compete for technically-minded staff, it needs to offer something to make up for the fact that its salaries are going to be lower than those elsewhere. All signs are, that flexibility can be a useful bargaining chip. 

So, in sum, the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency is asking civil servants to come into the office more, while previous government efficiency strategies have been predicated on them doing so less.  And one of the consequences of Brexit, with its enormous administrative complexity, has been to increase the overall size of the civil service, at the same time as office space to accommodate it has been shrinking.  The trend towards hybrid working has only been accelerated by the pandemic, and most office workers want to retain their ability to work from home some of the time. It looks like it’s JRM who’s not OK on this one.

Following the suit

Today saw the release of the latest basket of goods used to track price inflation by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The Consumer Price Index of frequently-bought goods is regularly updated, reflecting changing preferences and purchasing behaviour – new items are added, and goods which are waning in popularity are removed.  The departing item which caught my eye in the new version for 2022, is men’s suits.  This year’s basket of goods has dropped it from the list and added a formal jacket or blazer instead. The new item could be paired with formal trousers which are already included. These changes recognise a move away from matching suits towards something more casual, that many will recognise.

It’s easy to see this shift as all about the pandemic.  As Covid enforced, then encouraged, home-working for office staff, many found themselves at the kitchen table in ‘dress down Friday’ wear at best, sweatshirts and trackies for much of the time.  But, as for so many workplace trends, Covid might more appropriately be seen as an accelerator, rather than as the originator, of a movement.  After all, notoriously smart-dressing finance companies have been becoming less formal for years – Goldman Sachs relaxed dress codes for IT workers in 2017, and spread the policy company-wide in 2019, while J P Morgan blazed the trail in 2016.  Suit sales in the UK have been falling for several years, and some stores have stopped stocking them altogether. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that IT workers in finance were let off the hook of formal wear first, as tech CEOs have long made hoodies and t-shirts office staples, even in the most senior posts.

The shift in the ONS basket of goods, brings men’s clothing items more in tune with women’s.  Items for women include formal trousers and skirts as well as formal jackets, but no matching suits.  Perhaps as the numbers of women in the workplace have grown, the greater variety of women’s office apparel has influenced views on appropriate attire for men.  Historically, though, the tendency has been more for many professional women to imitate the neutrality of men’s suits, as I wrote here. Being taken seriously at work has often involved making muted choices in clothing and make-up. The nearest equivalent trend to the decline of the man’s suit for professional women, may be the precipitous drop in the sale of high heels in 2020 – but formal shoes remain the ONS’s basket for both sexes.

A couple of years’ widespread homeworking has, however, proved that productivity does not require many of the conventions of the office.  Casual wear and comfortable shoes have not proved damaging to many companies’ bottom line.  Teleconferencing apps may have transformed attitudes to workwear as much as to business travel.  But there are signs that these transformations are not all in one direction.  Constant online meetings led many to become even more appearance-conscious, investing in good lighting for the home-office, or even in cosmetic ‘tweakments’ to maintain and improve perceived status – and that’s true for men as well as women.

As staff begin to return to the office in person, there is also a desire among at least some of them to mark the change by getting back into smarter outfits, distinguishing time out in public from continually being at home. And it may be that this mix is where we are at – workers choosing clothing to fit the occasion rather than adopting a constant uniform. For most this will probably be a welcome freedom, but judging what to wear when, may be more challenging for some workers than others – and funding a versatile wardrobe may not end up any cheaper than buying a suit. As with many other challenges presented by hybrid arrangements, managers will need to be alert to inequalities and lead by example. 

Just as the office itself has yet to become history, there is a good chance that suits will stick around for a while yet. Even Mark Zuckerberg wears one when he goes to Congress.  If the current shift to hybrid working tells us anything, it’s that nothing need be the same every day – not where you work, or what you wear while you’re doing it. 

What is going on with WFH?

The Prime Minister has recently been quoted as saying that ‘Mother Nature does not like working from home’ – which rather begs the question as to where she’s actually been working from all this time – but that’s another story.  Boris Johnson also commented that ‘There are some people who think that working habits have been remade by the pandemic and that everyone will be only working on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. . . [but] I have my doubts. I prophesise that people will come back to the office’. For the PM, then, any vision of the future of work, is one which looks pretty much the same as the past.  Tellingly, he appears to associate working from home (WFH) with not working – as if working exists only in physical office time – a clear misreading of the contemporary experience of many corporations and individuals.  The trouble with the Prime Minister’s view is that he seems to see WFH primarily as a response to the pandemic, and not as an existing trend which has been strongly amplified by it. 

As I wrote earlier, there is a range of complex factors influencing the future of working from home, once the Covid crisis passes.  It’s likely that many office workers (under half of the labour force it should be acknowledged) will be in ‘hybrid’ working mode – mixing WFH with in-office experience, for the longer term.  Trying to force everyone back into a full-time week in the office goes against what has been learnt so far about employee preferences and workplace ingenuity.  It also goes against what we know about the services which support office working – notably childcare and transport. Commuter train routes have adapted to offering fewer services, and the long-term funding problems in the early years sector have persisted, with nurseries closing throughout the country, and the number of childminders falling.  Many parents have flexed their days, so that drop-offs and pick-ups are integrated into home-working schedules.  If the government really wants everyone back in the office, it ought to put more resources in to this supportive infrastructure.

Funnily enough, these supporting industries don’t demand the same attention as the city centre real estate and retail outlets, so often mentioned by government ministers. The need to encourage footfall in high streets underlies much of the government’s messaging.  As noted here, there has been a lot of lobbying on behalf of businesses, whose interests may align with those of political party donors.  Meanwhile, many managers are looking at how to implement hybrid working optimally, while the government stays sceptical about its lasting traction.

And there are important issues to address if hybrid working is to succeed in the long run.  There’s been bags of coverage concerned with a ‘she-cession’.  If working from home is adopted primarily by working mothers, men who return to the office will have better prospects for promotion. The trouble with this argument, though, is that it is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If employers favour presenteeism, then the gender gap in promotion and pay will likely persist or even grow larger.  But the swift adaptation to WFH undertaken in an emergency, has led to a reassessment of what works in the workplace in many cases. 

Where companies have innovated in how they operate online, and created different spaces for employees to interact, the move to more virtual working contains promising possibilities for the future.  Where the experience has meant days filled with one Zoom meeting after another, and little experimentation with more imaginative connection, then, yes, the lure of the full-time office remains stronger, as no fundamental shift in practice has taken place. 

Both Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have pointed to the importance of office-working for younger generations, who learn a lot by watching how their seniors work, and through socialising with a range of colleagues.  Younger workers are also less likely than more experienced professionals to have had good conditions in which to work from home, as many are in house shares, or living with their parents.  Working from your bedroom is hardly ideal.  And yet, a recent survey by Ipsos and partners, found that younger employees were most likely to consider leaving their job if forced to go back to the office full-time, with one-third opting to move, if this happened in their workplace.  The survey showed that two-thirds of British people would like to carry on working from home, and, overall, a quarter of them would look to move if made to return to the office 5 days a week.  These results suggest that the mood of the workforce has changed, and that employers will need to consider homeworking carefully as a way of retaining their employees and attracting new talent.  In this, as in many other areas, the public seems ahead of the government’s views.

One of the main attractions of returning to on-site working is the need to share company culture.  However, the idea that culture can only be transmitted through full-time presence in the office is flawed.  The effort of employees to maintain productivity and keep the show on the road during crisis, has proved that a sense of purpose is not defined by being in the same space all the time.  I came across an article outlining the organisational psychologist Adam Grant’s three types of collaboration, defined by analogy with sports:  gymnastics, swimming relay and basketball. Gymnastics is mainly a solo effort; relays mean knowing when to pass the baton on to the next person; basketball is a team sport requiring lots of coordination and interaction. Managers can identify which activities require which type of collaboration and facilitate suitable ways for it to happen.  One size will not fit all.  On culture, he suggests nurturing colleagues who embody organisational values and behaviour and giving them opportunities to model that culture for others. These activities will sometimes, but not always, demand physical presence.  If managers have done their thinking and involved their teams, there is no reason why collaboration cannot take place between remote workers using technology appropriately.

These strategies encourage managers to be more task- and output-focussed when they organise work.  They go well with flexible arrangements where staff shift between autonomous work and co-ordinated activity.  What’s more, they fit in with the hybrid working most people wish to continue in future.  Writing in the Financial Times, Andrew Hill reports that managers are finding that ‘culture depend[s] less on where work is carried out and more on how it is done, celebrated, rewarded and overseen’.  The workplace is moving on – perhaps it’s about time our politicians caught up. 

Late news on Early Years

Let’s face it, it’s not exactly a secret that the Early Years sector is under pressure, and that the 30 hours free childcare offer of successive governments since 2015, has created as many problems as it was alleged to have solved – I’ve been writing about it for years.  Blogs (here and here) on these issues, have been among the most popular I’ve ever posted, reflecting widespread disaffection among parents and practitioners.  They’ve seen childcare settings struggle over funding year after year, and the costs to parents of services not covered by the ‘free’ hours offer, skyrocket.

But today’s revelations from the long-running Freedom of Information request from the Early Years Alliance (EYA) really takes the biscuit.  The EYA – the largest representative body in the early years sector – has shown that the government knew that the money it was providing for early years services fell far short of true costs.  What’s more, documents show that there was recognition that parents of younger children (the under-3s not included in the 30 ‘free’ hours), or parents requiring additional hours of care above the 30, would see their bills rise by as much as 30% to cover the shortfall elsewhere. Ministers were informed that many providers might be forced to cut their staff-to-child ratios in order to make their sums add up.

Governments have repeatedly tried to make out that 30 hours free childcare is a good news story for parents and children.  The line has often been – as it continues to be in response to the EYA investigation – that there has been investment in the sector, and above-inflation rises in the amount paid to councils to cover hourly childcare rates in recent years.  But with inflation relatively low, and the gap between the funded rates and actual costs of childcare large, this does not amount to much.  It’s additionally depressing that all of this is so predictable.  Anyone with knowledge of the issues in funding childcare and encouraging parents back into employment, knows that the current scenario is not working.  And not working outside the home is the prospect for many parents – especially mothers – of young children, until the government steps up and funds early years services adequately.   Professionals in the sector have warned of the shortcomings of the 30 hours scheme, but little has been done to address their concerns.  Yet again, it seems that the government has no time for kids.

Childcare does require upfront investment.   Hourly rates need to be covered so that quality can be maintained, and providers can make ends meet.  Parents need services which allow them the option to return to work easily before their children are 3, and which encourage youngsters to thrive and learn together. A petition urging a review of childcare funding and affordability has recently reached the threshold to merit consideration for a parliamentary debate.  We have amongst the highest childcare costs in the world, while wages have been stagnating. There is plenty of demand for change.

Countries which invest in early years reap dividends – in better, more equal outcomes for children in education later on, in higher employment rates for mothers, and in communities which benefit from the links forged from affordable, universal childcare.  Instead of these multiplier effects, in the UK we seem stuck with long division. The underfunded model for early years only works to perpetuate inequalities, and the government appears unwilling to learn this lesson. 

The Zombie Office …

In spite of regular reports of its demise throughout the Covid crisis, the office looks set to make a return in our working lives.  We’ve all learnt a lot about what works online, and what fails to thrive, as the pandemic has gone on (and on …). The office will return re-animated, but in exactly what form, remains up for grabs.

Last summer, as the world emerged from lockdown 1, there was a lot of talk of never going back. Several Big Tech firms had given their workforces the option of an entire year working from home (WFH), and city-centre business districts remained resolutely empty. But as many transitioned from working-from-home rookies to fully fledged remote and flexible workers, the idea of the death of the office may have lost some of its initial appeal.  Twitter boss, Jack Dorsey, was widely quoted as offering staff the option to work from home ‘forever’, but it’s become clear that the intention is for ‘hybrid’ arrangements to be sustained long-term, whereby staff work part of the week from home and part in the office.  This pattern is now anticipated throughout Silicon Valley, with Google encouraging a return on-site from September, based on an expectation that staff will live within commuting distance of offices, where they will be regularly present, if not full-time. 

Of course, not all jobs can be done from home. The WFH trend is a distinctly white-collar, often also a middle-class, middle and upper-management one.  However, it is an influential development, with ripple effects beyond those who are able to take it up – the fact that some people can work remotely has impact. Where, conversely, staff are required in their workplace – factory, supermarket, hospital, etc. – the contrast of options for flexing is an issue in itself: people notice what is going on elsewhere.  The emphasis on flexibility for well-being in the workplace, means that on-site employers may be encouraged to look at more diverse flexibility – e.g. 9-day fortnights, varied start times, or job shares.  But a recent CIPD survey found that other forms of flexible working were much less widely anticipated by employers, than the option of working from home.  It’s therefore likely that the choice of flexible working will remain unevenly distributed after the Covid era has passed.

Meanwhile, there’s growing awareness that the hybrid workplace itself has the potential to increase, as well as diminish, workplace inequalities.  The use of technology to bring teams together has made remote working possible, and is clearly here to stay.  But managers will have to work differently in order for hybrid working to be successful in the long-run.  If some are in the office and others dialling in from home, it’s important that the office workers don’t hog the advantages of being in the room – visibility and side conversations that may lift them apart from their colleagues.  To counterbalance these tendencies, many workplaces encourage meetings to be run with everyone using their own device – so that whole team experiences a meeting in the same way, and any bias towards ‘presenteeism’ is reduced.  It’s also important that managers themselves model hybrid working, and that they look to promote remote workers, as well as those on-site.   Without mitigating efforts, hybrid working could reinforce existing gender gaps, as more women may work remotely to accommodate caring responsibilities.  And without some experience of office life, picking up insights on-the-job, younger workers could find their progression slowed, so that prolonged WFH can disadvantage new entrants, relative to established members of the workforce. 

A transformational aspect of mass home-working in the pandemic has been the fact that many companies have reported that productivity has gone up. The CIPD survey found that two-thirds of companies reported productivity remaining the same or rising. This goes against a previously widely-held view that WFH would reduce productivity, and that workers may ‘shirk from home’.   However, a ‘blurring of boundaries between work and home’ is frequently cited as a negative of homeworking, and one which is connected with working longer hours and an ‘always on’ mentality.  These trends feed into the preference for hybrid arrangements.  A number of studies indicate that most would prefer to work 2 or 3 days per week at home in future, with the remainder of the week back in the office.  The WFH trend has also highlighted the value of coming together physically to brainstorm and solve complex problems, and to foster innovation.  While the serendipity factor of the water cooler conversation, or the chance meeting in the corridor, may be overplayed, most people gain from in-person collaboration, and technology has yet to replicate all the benefits of being together in a room.

One of the players in London’s commercial real estate world has published a report showing that as companies adopt hybrid models, the actual amount of office space required may not shrink as much as is sometimes anticipated.  This is because companies will have to maintain capacity for peak office occupancy – the days when most people are in. Before Covid, it was already clear that ‘de-densification’ (allowing more square footage per employee) was beneficial for productivity, and the need to allow for social distancing is likely to have amplified this trend.  Most companies are tied into leases with a few years to run, meaning that any downsizing is delayed for most businesses.  Overall, it is therefore estimated that with the average number of days per week in the office dropping from 4.3 to 3.1, the decrease in demand for office space will amount to 9%.  While this is not insignificant, it’s rather less dramatic than is often suggested.  

Another driver towards a return to the office is the effect of what one FT article memorably referred to as the ‘blancmange’ of bland working days – the monotony being oneself at home all the time.  There has been a less easy separation of ‘work self’ and ‘home self’ during lockdowns, than in normal times.  Perhaps the pandemic will leave a legacy of a shift to what management manuals call bringing the ‘whole self’ or ‘authentic self’ to work. Months of Zoom calls mean that colleagues often know what each other’s homes and families look like, in a way that was not the case before.  This could inspire a greater long-term focus on well-being and sharing of personal issues at work; or it could be that this trend is constrained by the much-forecasted impending increase in unemployment, as government support to employers is wound down, and a proportion of businesses fail.  There may then be a more demanding labour market, where personal well-being is less prioritised.

It’s important to remember that the WFH of the pandemic is different from homeworking in more normal times.  Perhaps the future of work has become such a hot topic partly because of the lack of other activity in our lives – when leisure and social life kick in again, will we devote so much attention to it?  Maybe we’ll just revert to our old selves, as historians tell us we’ve done so often, after previous pandemics or crises …It will require purposeful management to ensure that the office emerges from its zombie state revitalised, rather than simply ‘undead’ ….

A new era for working women?

‘Covid-19 could be the start of a better era for women who work’ declared the headline in the Financial Times the other day, immediately catching my eye.  The article , by Sarah O’Connor, outlined how across the globe the pandemic has provided a rare opportunity to reorganise labour markets to benefit working women.  Key to this process is reform and expansion of childcare, and recognition that flexible working – rejecting presenteeism – should be widely available.  I don’t necessarily disagree with the diagnosis or proposed solutions – and it’s clear that the pandemic has put these issues into sharp relief – but I’m rather more pessimistic about governments’ (certainly our government’s) commitment to the task. 

And it seems I’m not alone. Over on Twitter Oxford academic Abi Adams-Prassl pointed to ‘government silence’ on childcare issues, and the need for an ‘ambitious strategy’ to address this.  Furthermore, unlike previous recessions, the Covid crisis is hitting women’s work hardest, in the UK and elsewhere.  Many of the sectors which have been temporarily shuttered or limited in their scope of operations – e.g. retail, hospitality, personal services, the arts – are also female-dominated areas of employment.  And for those who have been able to work from home, all signs are that the burden of childcare and domestic labour falls on women more than men. I’ve explored this issue in a number of blogs over the last few months (e.g. here and here).  Analysis by the TUC showed that redundancies among women rose by nearly 80% in the second quarter of this year, while the equivalent figure for men stood at just over 20%.

Meanwhile, an article in the New York Times explores how American women are increasingly dropping out of the labour force in the Covid era. Figures show how the people leaving the workforce – becoming economically inactive, rather than unemployed and seeking future work – are overwhelmingly women.  What’s driving this female exodus from paid employment? The writer argues that it’s the persistent gender pay gap, which means that in many couples it still often makes sense for women to do the bulk of unpaid labour and care on top of paid employment.  They consequently suffer the kind of burnout that leads to retreat from the workforce. It’s easy to see how this could become a more general trend in many countries, including our own.  Here, a number of surveys have indicated that women are bearing the brunt of stress in the shift to remote working alongside childcare responsibilities (e.g. here), and it’s been shown that mothers are more likely than fathers to be furloughed for childcare reasons, and once furloughed to be more exposed to redundancy risk. Just at the time when the gender pay gap could be widening (the NYT article suggests it could rise by up to 5% in the States) our own government has suspended the obligation to complete gender pay gap reporting, so any evidence of these trends could fail to be captured properly.   

The childcare sector has been neglected throughout the pandemic, and many early years and after-school settings have struggled to re-open fully.  Without access to formal childcare – and with restrictions often preventing the use of informal childcare by family members – many parents find their employment options constricted.  Without the web of support underlying parental employment, the system begins to fall apart.  Hence the frequent call to recognise childcare as infrastructure – it’s not just roads and public transport that enable us to take up jobs, but childcare too.  Until we see politicians donning aprons and working playdough with the same frequency and alacrity that they put on a hard hat and high-vis jacket, we’re not likely to see support for parental employment revolutionised. So, I’m afraid that on the Covid crisis being the beginning of a transformation of women’s opportunities, my glass remains half-empty rather than half-full. After all, as the Prime Minister recently demonstrated in a carpentry workshop, he does not exactly know the drill … Build Back Better? I’d as soon Call Care Core.