Last week Elon Musk announced that there would be an end to his staff at Twitter working from home. Since the Covid lock down, many UK companies have also brought their staff back into the office, but is this the right move? A debate ensues.

I would guess that many companies must have seen a detrimental effect in the productivity of their workforce …. or did they? What KPI’s were they employing on which to base their judgement?

The obvious employee benefits of working from home would include:

• Not having to spend time on travelling in to the office
• No expense of travelling in to the office
• Not having to get up so early in the morning on a workday
• Not having to arrive home late every workday
• Grab a coffee whenever suits
• Warmth of your own environment
• Nobody arriving at your desk saying ‘can you just ….’, or just looking for a chat
• Peace and quiet in which to achieve your work goals

The obvious employer benefits of working from home:

• Reduced electricity bills
• Reduced gas bills
• Reduced rent and insurance bills
• Reduced paper usage
• Opportunity to make IT work for you and your business
• Opportunity to improve people management and explore monitoring tools
• Opportunity to improve people management skills

I could go on and on for both scenarios but whilst I was compiling the above I gained feeling that maybe working from home could well have more advantages than disadvantages for both the employee and employer, but I get the feeling that many companies have been short sighted over the subject and as we have heard from Musk, staff don’t work as hard or see working from home as a cushy experience. Now following that familiar statement comes my argument. Are you perhaps anti working from home really because your management practices need modernising and revamping and you don’t see why you should? That’s not it in a nutshell, but our good old fashioned British values if you can remember them suggest that a happy and motivated employee is a good employee and one who will deliver as required.

Some people simply cannot perform their duties from home, some people just don’t want to work from home, but many would like the opportunity to. And what’s all this about going into the office 2 days a week just so your face can be seen? Now that is nonsense. I am sure nobody would actually be pleased to see my face at any time at all. That I believe to be businesses asserting their authority just because they can. Not in the best interests of anybody at all.

There is a lot of food for thought here and I am sure a lot for debate, but it is well worth taking the time and putting in some effort to explore the concept, you may find that it makes your company the one we want to work for!

Kevin Edwards