working from home uk january 2022

Jacob Rees-Mogg is leaving this note for civil servants who aren’t at their desks… pic.twitter.com/7KzBcGKVJP — Dino Sofos (@dinosofos) April 22, 2022

“Sorry you were out when I visited,” read the note left by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency. “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish.”

Over a post-work grapefruit gin and tonic at the Two Chairmen, a Westminster pub favoured by civil servants, she says receiving Rees-Mogg’s note has made her reconsider her dream of a long career in public service. “I’d love to tell him where to shove his good wishes,” she says. “We’ve all been working our socks off throughout the pandemic and now he’s leaving notes implying we’re not working if we’re not at our desks.

“And, this from the multimillionaire MP who [appeared to have] nodded off in parliament ,” Julie (not her real name) says to the agreement of colleagues. They are drinking outside the pub on a recent Wednesday evening – which has become the new night for after-work drinks with so many people only in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays (sparking the acronym Twats).

It is now four months since Boris Johnson told civil servants that they “need to show a lead and make sure … everybody gets back to work”. But more than a third of the UK’s office-based workforce is still working from home (at least for part of the time), according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Fewer than one in 10 say they want to return to their desks five days a week. Hybrid is officially the new normal, according to the government’s statisticians.

The ONS said the most common reason given for home working was because it had become “part of workers’ normal routine”, suggesting they “have adopted home working long-term”.

Going back to the office is less popular in the UK than in Europe, according to travel figures compiled by Google’s Mobility report. It showed that last week UK commutes were down 22% compared with pre-pandemic levels, while nearly all Europeans seem to be back at their desks, with Spain and France commutes down 9%, Germany 7% and Italy 6%.

Workers in London appear to be the most sluggish about returning. South Western Railway, which runs commuter-heavy trains from Surrey and Hampshire into London Waterloo, the UK’s busiest railway station, says that rush-hour arrivals have only recovered to 50% of the number pre-pandemic. The number of passengers on the tube remains at 70% of pre-Covid levels, according to Transport for London figures. Across the country, rail passenger numbers have returned to about three-quarters of pre-coronavirus levels, according to the latest Department for Transport data.

Even train industry bosses are still working from home. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) is the industry body “encouraging businesses and commuters to take the train and get the country back on track”. Yet as of 1 June on its website, it continued to tell its own staff: “All we ask is that you do a minimum of two days a week in the office; the rest of your time can be working from home.”

A recent newspaper report said that the RDG’s chief executive, Jacqueline Starr, had been taking the train to the body’s London headquarters just twice a week on average, spending most of her time working from home in Somerset. The RDG disputes this. A spokesperson said that “some weeks [Starr] works from the office three, four or even five days a week”.

Bosses say they want staff back within sight because they are more productive in the office and it’s harder to collaborate and be creative with colleagues over endless video calls. Many workers, however, say they get much more done at home without gossiping and other office distractions.

Office work can mean more interactions – or distractions

Three-quarters of people polled by the ONS said working from home has improved their work-life balance, as well as allowing greater flexibility for working parents and big savings on commuting (in money and time). There is an age divide, with younger people and recent hires more likely to be keen to be in the office to learn from more experienced colleagues and to make it easier to get noticed. Older people who are more established in their careers are, generally, less concerned about presenteeism.

“Hybrid working is not in principle wrong, but unfortunately we see problems with the Passport Office, we see problems with DVLA [the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency], some government services not being provided in the way they should be,” Rees-Mogg told the Guardian during a tour of border controls at Eurotunnel in Folkestone. “And so getting people back, getting people to work to their contractual terms, to ensure that we are providing the services that the British voter expects is important, or we don’t need the office space.”

It is certainly not just the government re-evaluating its property portfolio. A survey by the flexible office space provider Regus found that 69% of companies are planning to reduce their office footprints – which would imply most have accepted the future of work is hybrid. The City of London has announced plans to “repurpose” office buildings left empty by the pandemic into at least 1,500 new homes by 2030. The new homes would represent a 20% increase on the current 7,850 residential units and mark a sharp change in direction. Just seven new homes were built in the Square Mile between April 2017 and March 2018.

One person who thinks this shift to hybrid work is no bad thing is Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University in California, who has been studying the efficiency of home working since well before the pandemic struck. He says the science shows working from home makes staff more productive – and happier.

“Many bosses want everyone back in the office every day because they think that staff are most efficient when all in together,” he says. “All this stuff Rees-Mogg and Boris [Johnson] are saying about people not really working properly unless they’re in the office is disproved by the research.”

As early as 2015, he published research showing that in a study of 16,000 call centre staff, those who worked from home were 13% more efficient than their office-based colleagues. The paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that the WFH team were more productive as they took fewer breaks, were sick less often and put in more calls an hour as they didn’t get distracted by tea breaks and water-cooler moments.

Yet the prime minister told the Daily Mail, which has been running a campaign against creeping WFH culture, that his “experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing”. Bloom, who previously worked in Whitehall, says this is “pure dog-whistle politics”.

“They [Rees-Mogg and Johnson] are playing to the crowd. I assume they have sat down with advisers and figured out attacking WFH is popular with voters they need,” he says. “It’s popular rhetoric with Brexit supporters and non-graduates who are likely to be working frontline jobs.”

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the unions’ umbrella body, has warned that working from home risks creating a “new class divide” as frontline workers in supermarkets and hospitals, mechanics and other customer-centric jobs do not have the option to work from home. Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, says: “Everyone should have access to flexible working. But while home working has grown, people in jobs that can’t be done from home have been left behind. They deserve access to flexible working, too. And they need new rights to options like flexitime, predictable shifts and job shares.”

The ONS found this week that 23% of workers earning £40,000 or more are still working from home five days a week and a further 38% are in a hybrid pattern, splitting their time between the office and home. But just 6% of people earning £15,000 or less are working from home every day, and only 8% have hybrid working privileges.

Victoria Robinson, a partner at PwC, who advises firms on adapting to WFH and hybrid working, says it’s “unrealistic and unwise” for employers to force workers back to the office full-time.

“This is not a temporary blip; the pandemic has led to a permanent change in working practices and the office as a form of control is gone for ever,” she says. “We’re in the midst of a ‘great resignation’, with more a fifth of workers expecting to change jobs in the next year.

“The war for talent has well and truly arrived,” she says, and it is employers who have to make sure they have an “attractive employee value proposition” to retain and attract the best workers. “Employees are telling us in one of the largest ever surveys of the workforce that what they really want is more flexibility,” she says. “Granting that keeps staff happy.”

While PwC was one of the first big companies to give staff a cash incentive of £1,000 to encourage people to come back to the office last autumn , the firm is now promoting an “empowered flexibility” model in which employees are expected to spend 40-60% of their time “co-located with colleagues”. All its 22,000 UK staff have also been given Friday afternoons off throughout the summer.

Such examples are instructive. While endorsing hybrid working, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development cautions that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Claire McCartney, the CIPD ’s resourcing and inclusion adviser, says “many employers are reporting productivity improvements”, but some have a less favourable view. “Companies and employees need to work together to find the right balance.” This is the time to get teams all to agree on “some principles of how much home working is appropriate”.

There are also concerns about the potential mental health impacts of working from home. Research by management consultancy firm McKinsey found that working from home had actually increased “burnout” rates among all employees as they struggled to juggle their careers and family lives, and this was particularly the case for women. The survey of 65,000 employees found that the gap between male and female burnout rates nearly doubled, with 42% of women reporting burnout compared to a third of men.

The big global banks Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were among the most dogmatic in ordering all staff back to the office after complaining that it was impossible to “hustle” from home. But the banks’ bosses have struggled to enforce the policy and have been forced to relent over fears of losing top talent.

Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, David Solomon, said “remote work is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal”, and predicted in February 2021 that it would be “an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible”.

A year later, however, less than half the bank’s employees were regularly turning up to its New York headquarters, forcing Solomon, who is a club DJ in his spare time , to again plead with staff to come back.

“The secret sauce to our organisation is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients,” he said in an interview with Forbes magazine. “Part of the secret sauce is that they come together and collaborate and work with people that are much more experienced than they are.”

Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase’s chief executive, said working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”

The wife of one of his top bankers “sent me a nasty note about: ‘How can you make him go back?’”, Dimon told a Wall Street summit in May 2021. “But that’s life.” But JP Morgan also struggled to persuade bankers in New York and London back to their desks, despite tracking swipecard logs and managers reportedly “putting the fear of God” in people who didn’t turn up enough. Dimon finally relented last month and said 40% of the bank’s 270,000 employees could work as few as two days a week from the office. In his annual letter to shareholders, he said “it’s clear that working from home will become more permanent in American business”.

The London law firm Stephenson Harwood is allowing its staff to work from home 100% of the time – but only if they take a 20% pay cut. “Like so many firms, we see value in being in the office together regularly, while also being able to offer our people flexibility,” a spokesperson said.

Working from home can mean being there for more bath times

“The best bit, though, is that I can be a better dad to my daughter and a better husband to my wife. For context, I work in the PE [private equity] team and spent the last week working hard to get a transaction over the line but I did not miss a single bath time – neither my daughter’s nor my own!” However, other Stephenson Harwood lawyers complained that it was unfair to pay people different amounts for doing the same amount of billable hours.

Google went for the carrot – rather than stick – tactic to get its employees back to work at its vast Googleplex headquarters in Silicon Valley by hiring the R&B artist Lizzo to perform a private concert.

“We’ve had a long two-and-a-half years of protecting others and ourselves but also being very disconnected,” Lizzo told the thousands of Googlers , who had been ordered to go back to the office three days a week. “Thank you for being back. Thank you for surviving. Google: we back, bitch.”

Bloom, the Stanford professor, says early reports show Google workers are mostly following the mandate. “Getting Lizzo works, but it’s hardly a permanent solution. What next: Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber?” he asks. “The big reason people want to come back is to socialise with colleagues. Really, the best solution is to make the office a nice place.”

More on this story

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How the pandemic transformed the world of work in 2021

New ‘work from home’ guidance: should I return to the office and what are my rights?

Workers in England have been told they no longer need to work from home

Boris Johnson has scrapped guidance that urged Britons to "work from home" where possible, as Plan B measures aimed at tackling the spread of Covid-19 will no longer be in place from Thursday 27 January in England.

Workers were told to leave the office in favour of remote working in December 2021 when the spread of the omicron variant triggered increased restrictions from the Government.

However, the Prime Minister will no longer ask workers in England to stay away from the office and other work sites where possible.

“People should speak to their employers about arrangements for returning to the office,” Mr Johnson said.

Employers will have the power to decide whether it is necessary for staff to be physically present at work or if they can continue working from home where they choose to.

Here are your rights when it comes to flexible working:

What is the official guidance?

In England, the official guidance to work from home where possible has ended and workers will be able to head back to the office.

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told workers to continue to work from home where they can.

The devolved governments of Wales and Northern Ireland also asked citizens to avoid the office where possible.

What should my employer do to protect me at work?

The Government has removed all limits on how many people can meet at one time in workplaces, along with all social distancing measures. This means businesses do not have to keep workers and customers separated from people they do not live with.

Employers that do ask workers to come in have been told to put in place a number of measures to protect them from contracting coronavirus, such as keeping offices well ventilated.

The measures can be found on the Government website .

Can I ask my employer for flexible working?

Yes, all employees have the right by law to request flexible working, which can include working from home. The only requirement is that they have worked for the employer for at least 26 weeks.

Employers can turn these requests down only if they have reasonable cause to do so, for example if the type of work involved cannot be done from home. They can refuse applications as long as they have a "good business reason".

Alexandra Mizzi of Howard Kennedy, a legal firm, said employers often used the potential impact on performance as a reason to refuse working from home requests.

“However, they will find it much harder to justify refusal when home working has worked out fairly well,” she added.

Can I claim tax relief or an allowance for working from home?

The Government website states that you are able to claim tax relief for "additional household costs" if you have to work from home on a regular basis - either for all or part of the week.

Those who are eligible can claim tax relief for gas and electricity, metered water and business phone calls.

Applicants cannot claim for the entirety of the bill - just for that which relates to work - and you are not eligible if you choose to work from home.

The gov.uk site states that you can apply for tax relief on £6 a week (for which you will not need to keep evidence of your extra costs), or the exact amount of extra costs you have incurred above the weekly amount (which will require documentation such as receipts, bills or contracts). You will then get tax relief based on the tax rate you pay.

This article has been updated with the latest guidance.

Do you prefer to work in the office or at home? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below

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Homeworking and spending during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, UK: April 2020 to January 2022

Examines the effect of homeworking on individual finances, spending, and the key items driving changes.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/homeworkingandspendingduringthecoronaviruscovid19pandemicukapril2020tojanuary2022

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When does work from home guidance end in the UK?

Boris johnson repeals social restrictions for england as threat from omicron variant wanes, article bookmarked.

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Boris Johnson has announced that his government’s “ Plan B ” social restrictions for dealing with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in England are to end.

Speaking in the House of Commons, the prime minister said that, from Thursday 27 January, guidance on mask-wearing in public places and presenting Covid passes to enter crowded venues will be scrapped as the New Year rise in infections continues to wane without having resulted in the mass hospitalisations experts had feared.

Work from home guidance will meanwhile be lifted immediately, with people are no longer encouraged to work remotely if possible, which has been the official guidance since 8 December 2021.

The decision to bring back the working from home instruction was not taken lightly last month as the adverse impacts of the policy on the mental health and wellbeing of individuals is well documented, as is its detrimental effect on businesses, particularly office-adjacent services like cafes, restaurants, pubs, dry cleaners and gyms.

Many offices around the country had welcomed staff back to their desks for around two-to-three days per week between the initial easing of restrictions on 19 July - once known as “Freedom Day” - and the arrival of Omicron.

Taking time out from the firestorm still raging over the Downing Street “Partygate” scandal, Mr Johnson told the Commons that he also hopes to remove the requirement to self-isolate from 24 March, saying: “There will soon come a time when we can remove the legal requirement to self-isolate altogether, just as we don't place legal obligations on people to isolate if they have flu.

“As Covid becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others.”

Responding, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused the prime minister of being “too distracted to do the job”.

“The 438 deaths recorded yesterday are a solemn reminder that this pandemic is not over,” Sir Keir said.

“We need to remain vigilant, learn the lessons from the government's mistakes, with new variants highly likely we must have a robust plan to live well with Covid.”

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