A NEW REPORT SAYS WFH IS A TOTAL DISASTER

Just after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, we were assailed with stories of the meditation rooms, table football competitions, sumptuous lunches and unlimited time off during the working week. In between all this, they somehow managed to do a bit of work before finishing the day with a lovely little red from a California vineyard whilst sunbathing on the office’s roof before popping off home.

Such companies pioneered not only games rooms, yoga sessions and free lunches, but also limitless vacation time, working from home before WFH became a thing, and, increasingly in recent years, an environment in which little Maoists straight out of their safe spaces on university campuses could dictate a political role for the companies, ensuring compliance with their passionately held progressive norms.

For hundreds of thousands of tech sector employees, the dream has come to an end. Recently, there has been a bloodbath in Silicon Valley with companies of all sizes announcing the biggest layoffs in their short histories. Microsoft has announced it is laying off 10,000 staff, Google has cut 12,000 jobs, Amazon is in the process of cutting 18,000 from the payroll and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has shed 11,000. These are the big companies but all sized companies are following suit. In less than three months, they have shed 220,000 jobs.

As we mark the third anniversary of the start of the pandemic, millions of people realised that they could work from home – and why should this not be the new normal? Many planned never to sit in an office again, cities would die, and employers would see the benefit, yet more and more firms are announcing that it has been a disaster for their bottom line.

At Davos in January, James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, had a warning for employees: “You don’t get to choose your compensation. You don’t get to choose your promotion. You don’t get to choose to stay at home five days a week.”

Companies are secretive about their internal data but there are numerous stories of a sharp drop-off in aggregate worker performance in the past two years. Anecdotal evidence of the inefficiency of working from home is plentiful. Netflix data shows that peak streaming times used to be weekend evenings. Now it’s mid-afternoon weekdays. Amazon says that its peak ordering time has shifted from evenings and weekends to all weekdays between 10am and 5pm. There are also reports of children’s nurseries reporting a drop in demand, because if Mummy or Daddy are home, why pay for childcare?

If working from home isn’t working for companies, it isn’t working for most people either. Social isolation has contributed to mental health deterioration and other disorders.

Employees are also starting to note that working from the office is cheaper when it comes to their energy bills, and that they feel better when they get dressed, make themselves presentable and go to the office to mix and interact with other human beings. In creative industries, this is an absolute must as little creativity is born out of isolation.

A recent Boston conference heard from the Wharton School’s Peter Cappelli, one of our best thinkers on work, management and organisations. Cappelli asked the other side of the question, “Is permanent remote working good for employers?” Cappelli reviewed the experience with remote work prior to the pandemic. While “life satisfaction” increased for WFH employees, “work-related and career outcomes are worse on every dimension examined,” with increased communication problems at the firm and more work for supervisors.

He also put the issues raised by Morgan Stanley’s CEO into a larger context. He noted that with “permanent remote working, a lot of things are harder to do – collaboration, innovation, maintaining culture, employee engagement, etc. Hybrid work, where employees are in the office some of the time, isn’t an automatic solution. Firms still have to maintain office space, they get less social interaction and group creativity, and face increased scheduling and IT problems and more cumbersome project management.”

We may not fully return to the old patterns of work but the tech downsizing tells us something old is new again: companies perform much better when their employees are working alongside other colleagues under the watchful eye of management, away from the temptations of the sofa, Amazon, kids and the television networks.

The tranquil experience of being under the Sahara’s majestic night skies will stay with me for a long time. By Travel Editor Tess

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