Overblown working from home revolution denies us the office camaraderie and collaboration necessary for success

Working from home might be suitable and even beneficial for some kinds of jobs, but it is impractical for others and in many parts of the world
Those who want their bosses to see how indispensable and worthy of promotion they are have little choice but to return to the office

David Dodwell

Published: 1:30am, 14 Aug 2023

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As someone who has worked from home for much of my long working life, I can’t help but cast a cynical eye over the discovery of “working from home” as some kind of newfangled panacea, a holy grail liberating us from the shackles of office life, tedious commutes and endless unnecessary meetings.

My opinion is that remote working might be suitable, empowering and productivity-enhancing for some jobs in some workplaces, but it remains impractical and even unhelpful in others and in many parts of the world.

The ubiquity of the internet and good telecoms services stretching into our homes has undoubtedly opened up the potential to work from home for millions of people worldwide. However, there are many other factors that dictate whether doing so is a good idea.

For the five years after I opened the Financial Times’ one-man bureau in Hong Kong in 1984, the newspaper’s headquarters were about 9,600km away, my office was a spare bedroom in my Harbour City flat and most days were spent running between meetings and press conferences. Nobody in London much cared how I spent my working day, as long as I was there to talk to them when they arrived in the headquarters around my dinner time and the news reports kept flowing, were accurate and ahead of deadline.

The office camaraderie and gossip were unfelt and unheard. So, too, was any sense of whether my editors were happy with the reports I filed. If I had suffered even slightly from paranoia about gossiping behind my back, I would have lived in a state of constant panic. But the remoteness from headquarters never dented either my motivation or my productivity because my capacity to work successfully from home was built on important foundations.

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Before arriving in Hong Kong, I was based in the FT’s Bracken House headquarters for seven years. That was long enough to grasp the culture of accuracy, balance and integrity, and to know and trust colleagues and editorial management. Daily exposure to editorial conferences gave me a clear sense of the FT’s editorial values.

Such unifying foundations need to be built in every successful company, whatever its business. I would never have internalised or admired that strong corporate culture if I had always worked from home.

Neither do I believe senior managers in any large company can build the insights they need to discover subordinates’ strengths and weaknesses, training needs or career aspirations and development without a regular office presence and collaboration. Working from home would have deprived senior executives of the nuanced communication of body language and non-verbal cues needed to develop careers and optimise team strengths.

For sure, if you face a monotonous 90-minute commute to the office from a house with a dedicated study and ability to shut the door on screaming children, there are clear merits to working from home. But if, like many in Hong Kong, people are squeezed into a small flat with workspace shared with children doing schoolwork, the fact that the office is probably a short MTR journey away raises doubts about the merits of remote working, however amenable a particular role might be to it.

Remote working is good for productivity, so why don’t bosses believe it?

The emergence of remote working was perhaps an inevitable result of the forced experiment imposed by three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly when combined with the rising capacity to deliver work online.

This opened a Pandora’s box that is now difficult to close. Much of the animated debate has become entangled with younger workers’ demands for greater personal freedom and enhanced work-life balance – factors only marginally connected to the interests or success of an employer.

Many companies have had to examine whether, when and where they actually need staff to gather in a collaborative headquarter space. For some firms, the process might also have helped to identify jobs that should not exist at all. Some have focused on whether remote working harms productivity, failing or refusing to acknowledge that the merits and demerits of working from home are complex and varied.

Working from home has caught on among workers of all ages and led many to resist returning to the office after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: Shutterstock

Civil service unions in Australia, the UK and Canada have sought blanket new rules, seemingly without recognising that some jobs might be performed well from home while others are not. Some have expressed shock that tech-intensive enterprises such as Amazon, Google or Zoom are insisting that staff resume working at their offices without recognising the reality that certain jobs simply have to be done in the office.

There are certain working roles that must, for the foreseeable future, be delivered from a convergent venue that houses specialised infrastructure or equipment. These include doctors in hospitals, teachers in schools, airline pilots, those on manufacturing lines, in auto repair workshops, supermarkets and so on. Others need a dedicated location to deliver their services, such as construction workers, hairdressers and butchers. Taxi or bus drivers cannot work from home.

But, for most of us, the suitability of working from home is much less clear cut. It is likely to depend on the role you perform within a company, not the company you work for. If you want your bosses to notice how indispensable you are – and how suitable you are for promotion – you have no choice but to continue plodding into the office each day.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades