I USED to be normal. I used to get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt and trousers, drive to an office, say “good morning”, switch on my computer, look at my computer, make coffee, talk to (and about) other people, have a laugh, get irritated, get more irritated, go to M&S for lunch, do some work, switch off my computer, say “good night”, do the reverse journey home, and then repeat it the following day. It was the sort of thing millions of people used to do. Go to an office. And I liked it.
Sort of. I now work from home. I am now my own colleague and my own HR department. If there’s a final warning to be issued, I issue it to myself, and in many ways, I’m more suited to life this way. I don’t have to deal with the downsides of office life: the distractions, the noise, the people. But I don’t get any of the upsides of office life either: the distractions, the noise, the people.
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But this is just the way a lot of us are living now, and employers are adjusting. For a long time, companies resisted the idea of staff working from home because they thought of it as “working from home” with big sarcastic inverted commas. If someone told you they were doing a day’s work at home, your first thought was “uh-huh, you’re watching Come Dine With Me in your pants and wondering whether 11.30am is too early for wine”. Bosses thought they needed to keep you where they could see you.
The last year or so may have changed that however: employers are more flexible now. Google, for example, have said they’re planning for a time where most of their staff never return to the office full-time. But, interestingly, the majority of their staff have said they don’t want to abandon the office completely and this may be because they sense the truth: the office is good for us and we should fight to save it.
One of the reasons I’m saying this is because of a chat I had recently with the psychologist Robin Dunbar, who is an expert on social relationships and has written a new book on the subject called Friends. Dunbar is concerned about the idea of businesses moving their staff to working from home. It may look like a good idea, he says, but we should think about it very carefully.
The problem, Dunbar believes, is that working from home can be bad for the employee, particularly young people, but bad for the employer too. On the subject of young people, he says he’s spoken to many firms who were looking at staff working from home and can see the problems.
“The companies thought they were going to have real trouble persuading older staff and the younger ones would go whoopee,” says Dunbar, “but it was the reverse: the old ones didn’t need to be told twice because they have well-established friends. The complaint they had was from the young ones who said, ‘we come into work to see our friends.’ When you think of the loneliness there is already, it’s only going to make it worse.”
Dunbar says there are potentially serious consequences for employers too. “Any organisation,” he says, “a hospital, factory, whatever, is a social world and how well it works depends on how well it functions as a social world. The one thing organisations depend on is trust and goodwill and trust can only be built up round the coffee machine, etc. Those kind of casual social things are hugely important to how efficiently they work.”
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I know Dunbar’s point may be hard to spot if you’ve worked in an office – it can be a frustrating place at times. But his bigger point is that all the seemingly wasteful stuff (the coffee, the chat, the gossip) is good for the organisation and good for staff too.
It’s why we should go back if we can. It’s why we should fight to keep the office. It’s why I love working from here, in my little office-for-one, and it’s why I hate it a little bit too.
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