Working from home was supposed to have been more productive. All the time saved from commuting could be used for working on new projects instead, we were told. And there would be such a huge increase in “wellness” that companies would find that their workers become far more loyal.
The working-from-home evangelists have spent the last few years lecturing us all that tapping away on a laptop perched on the kitchen table is far better for everyone than schlepping into a beige cubicle on the 22nd floor of a city centre skyscraper.
But as the global economy runs out of steam, and as companies look to save on costs, they are getting rid of the home workers first. The working-from-home boom is starting to turn into the redundant-from-home bust. And if people don’t get back to the office soon, they probably won’t have a job anymore.
This month has been difficult for anyone committed to lounging around in their pyjamas all day (formally known as working from home).
In the City, the law firm Slaughter & May has started tracking how often staff show up at its offices and sharing the data with department managers in a drive to make sure its people comply with a policy that requires its lawyers to spend at least three days a week at their desk.
Many of its rivals have started to adopt similar policies. Meanwhile, over in the United States, the drive to get people back has become even harsher. The online home goods retailer Wayfair was reported to have told its employees that not only was it planning to make more than 1,600 people redundant, but that staff who worked remotely were “most likely to be laid off”. It is hardly alone.
A study by Live Data Technologies found that staff who logged in remotely five days a week were 35pc more likely to be laid off than their colleagues who at least managed to pop into the office for a few hours on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.
That has only just started. Through the pandemic, and its immediate aftermath, the WFH movement had two big things going for it. First, there was a hiring boom, especially in technology, which meant that companies were desperate to bring people on board on more or less any terms.
During Covid, pandemic restrictions meant anyone who could work from home had to do so, and when new staff were being taken on at the same time it became built into the contracts.
Next, for a while it looked like it might work. After all, in theory there is no reason why people shouldn’t be as productive and creative on a Zoom screen as they are in a meeting room.
Indeed, most of the pre-pandemic studies suggested precisely that, although possibly that was because home working prior to 2020 was restricted to a handful of hyper-motivated freelancers who turned out to be completely unrepresentative of the wider workforce.
Both of those factors have now gone into reverse. The hiring boom has turned into a tsunami of redundancies, as a slowing economy shrinks demand, and as firms realise that they took on too many people during the boom.
Lloyds Bank said this week that it was planning to lay-off 1,600 people across its branch network. Microsoft announced that it was laying off 1,900 people from its Xbox and Activision gaming units, while John Lewis said it was cutting redundancy terms ahead of what looks like a round of layoffs.
Add it all up, and one point is surely clear. This year is shaping up to be the toughest we have seen for a long time for employment, with most major businesses cutting back on staff numbers.
At the same time, the evidence is mounting that working from home is not nearly as productive as had been hoped. A paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published last week looked at 43 industries across the private sector and found no improvement in productivity from home working.
Meanwhile, a paper from the New York Fed and Harvard that studied home-working in depth at one Fortune 500 company found that there was far less training and mentoring once no one went into the office anymore, with companies just buying in ready-made talent.
The results are likely to be disastrous for younger workers with less experience.
In the looming wave of redundancies the people working from home are clearly the most likely to be laid off. There are two reasons for that. First, they are less productive.
Perfectly reasonably, when redundancies have to be made then companies are going to let the workers with the lowest output go first, and generally they will be the people who are rarely in the office.
Next, when you work from home you are inevitably less connected to the organisation.
People don’t know you so well, and even if your work is very good, it is a lot easier to fire you than someone who is sitting on the other side of the office and has been swapping stories about family and holidays for the last few years.
If you are out of sight, you are out of mind, and very soon you will be out of work as well.
Employees are still very reluctant to go back to the office full time. That is why many firms are now monitoring attendance so closely.
That is up to every individual, of course. But they are likely to be the first victims of the round of lay-offs. Indeed, the way the great WFH experiment comes to an end won’t be with companies insisting on a return to the office.
It will end because the refuseniks steadily get laid off. By the end of the decade, working patterns will be back where they started – but there will be a lot of pain along the way.
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