the times | Friday August 28 2020 1GM 29
Comment
Don’t bet the house on working from home
A wave of offshoring could be coming, but a lack of interaction and post-work socialising may draw us back to the office
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826This raises potentially painful
concerns about employment. Home-
working will automatically create a
cheaper hiring opportunity if
distance and borders are not deemed
to matter at all. Why pay expensive
existing middle-aged people who
rarely meet in the flesh? Is someone
in a different time zone available?
Harry in Haslemere may think he is
intrinsically worth more than Mia in
Mumbai offering to do the same job
in marketing for half the amount.
The post-Covid, office-less company
may not see it like Harry.
A new phase of offshoring — what
happened to textile work and call
centres — could be coming for
Britain’s middle classes.
There is one flaw in the finance
director’s dream of ever reducing
costs, though. In all manner of
industries creativity, growth and
innovation rest on interaction in
the office and afterwards in the pub.
We are social animals.
Ambitious, young white-collar
Britons have been starved of these
opportunities for learning and
advancement. If they flock back to
offices it will be to prove themselves
much keener than us over-forties
wittering on about work-life balance.
All in all, it suggests that if a
company offers you the chance to
return to the office, it would be wise
to get on the train and go to work.by staff to return to the office,”
says the boss of a leading City
consultancy.
This may sound lovely for those in
the suburbs, for now. But having
written a history of the City,
observing how it has always changed
shape and dictated trends, my advice
would be: do not bet your house and
garden on this continuing.
No one should assume that the
motor of capitalism will somehowstay lodged in this gear to suit our
desires because we like our new
work-life balance. Talk to City
insiders, both veterans and new
thinkers, and it is clear they are
already looking beyond the simple
logistical problems such as the
impossibility of getting staff into a
tall building in lifts with social
distancing.
A senior banker tells me that the
crisis has revealed who is really
working and who was mainly going
to lots of meetings in and out of the
office to fill time. Another says that it
has demonstrated how entire
departments have become vastly
overstaffed and underemployed.Ambitious young
Britons are being
starved of opportunities
Fifty of Britain’s top companies will
send no staff, or very few staff, back
to the office any time soon, it was
reported this week. In the City, as
recently as 2018, the asset manager
Schroders moved 5,000 staff into an
eco-friendly new headquarters on
London Wall with 11 garden terraces.
Now it says the commute is dead.
The optimistic view is that this is all
fine, and we can ignore government
pleading to get back in there to save
the sandwich bars, because it is simply
the acceleration of a technology-
driven trend that eliminates the
importance of distance. What could
possibly go wrong if we carry on
working from home?
A lot, I suspect. We are at the
beginning of an intensely difficult
tussle about what white-collar
companies of the future will look
like, and who, and how many, they
will employ.
As has been the case so often in
the development of capitalism, the
City is ahead of the game in starting
to rethink, quietly, what a post-Covid
firm might look like. Without the
office, what is a company and will it
need to employ so many expensive
staff here in Britain?
Publicly, big City firms and banks
proclaim that most staff want to
work from home and everything will
carry on merrily as before. “We have
had no desire — none — expressedI
f you are working from home
within an hour or two of central
London and enjoying the garden,
you are where you are thanks to
a process of high-Victorian
creative destruction and invention
that created commuting, the concept
of the office and the modern idea of
the company.
The arrival of the railway in the
City of London in the 1840s is under-
appreciated as an economically
revolutionary event. The clerk or the
manager in an insurance firm or a
City bank no longer needed to live
within walking distance of work. He
— always he until much more
recently — could live 20, 30 or more
miles from the desk, comfortable in
what became the suburbs and
commuter towns.
By train, thousands of staff could
be funnelled quickly each morning
into a square-mile patch of land
where the business of making money
out of money grew ever bigger.
In 1841, Fenchurch Street station
was opened, the first within the City
boundaries. The vast Waterloo and
London Bridge ventures were built
south of the river on less desirable
land. The impact on the topography
and society of the City and the wider
southeast of England in the second
half of the 19th century was
breathtaking. From those new
London stations, developers punched
railway lines out into the home
counties, creating sites for millions of
suburban homes with more space
and gardens. This was replicated in
most major cities in Britain.
In the City, the railway surge
all but eliminated residential
accommodation. Its land became
much more valuable for buildingsomething new — the vast office.
Inside those offices, companies grew
and developed the rituals and
infrastructure we know now: the
front desk, the lift, the meeting room,
the canteen and the executive floor.
We are still living, or we were
until the pandemic stopped us in
our tracks, with that model. The
suggestion now is that this way of
working is done. The office is history.The suggestion is this
way of working is done.
The office is history
Iain
Martin
@iainmartin1