Britain’s working from home culture is creating a generation “used to not doing proper work”, the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has said. The Mail has more.
Lord Stuart Rose warned that personal development is suffering from workers not going into the office, while it is also damaging young people’s mental health.
He spoke out amid a drive by major companies such as Amazon, JP Morgan, Sports Direct and Boots whose head office staff now have to be in the workplace every day.
Just over a quarter of people (26%) in the U.K. are thought to be hybrid-working, with 13% fully remote and 41% fully office-based.
The trend began during the pandemic in 2020 when the Government ordered millions of workers to stay at home to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.
As lockdown restrictions were eased, many workers enjoyed the flexibility being at home offered for childcare as well as saved time and money by not commuting.
But this has put many workers on a collision course with bosses who now want them in the office more, with some even threatening or taking strike action.
Lord Rose hit out at WFH culture during an episode of Panorama called ‘Should We Still Be Working From Home?’ which airs on BBC One at 8pm this evening.
He said: “We are creating a whole generation, and probably a generation beyond that, of people who are used to actually not doing what I call proper work.
“I believe that productivity is less good if you work from home. I believe that your personal development suffers, that you are not going to develop as well as you might if you’ve been in the workplace as long as I have.
“And I think lastly there is a connection – a correlation yet to be proven no doubt – between the current state of mental health, particularly young people, and the number of people who are working away from a workplace. I think it’s bad.”
The programme, which is also already available on iPlayer, looks at whether the shift to WFH is good for the U.K. economy and workers – and what it means for the country’s towns and cities.
Reporter Zoe Conway asked Lord Rose about people with young children who need flexibility, but he said: “People who drive trains have to go to work, people who work in operating theatres have to go to work, people who work in service industries like retail have to go to work, and others don’t.
“What’s different? They have children, they have problems, they have issues. You deal with it.”
He added: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.”
Lord Rose was Executive Chair of Asda until November, having previously been Chief Executive of M&S for six years until 2011.
But Rebecca Florisson, Principal Analyst at Lancaster University’s The Work Foundation, told MailOnline: “The recent push-back from some employers to roll back on hybrid and remote work is unhelpful, and risks undoing some of the gains that have been made in this area since the pandemic.”
Worth reading in full.
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“Not proper work” – tell that to the tax authorities.
Excellent point. I’d happily class my work as “not proper work” if it meant I could be several tens of thousands of pounds better off every year, thank you!
I grant you, it’s hard stacking the store’s shelves from home.
Likely to depend on the work, the worker and the home. At one extreme, I’d imagine most novels and plays get written at home, at the other extreme hands-on physical infrastructure installation and maintenance can only be done on the spot.
Any serious work while caring for young children or elderly relatives must be a nightmare. Personally I always preferred to compartmentalise work and home, and valued the face-to-face interactions inherent in working at work.
I used to say I went to work for the camaraderie, the work, the money and the lunches. Comment posted writing from home!
May I ask when the last time was when Lord Rose had to do proper work, if ever?
Judging from his Wikipedia biography, this might have been the case in 1972 when he joined M&S as management trainee. I don’t quite know what management trainees actually do (Fetch coffee for the superiors?) but I doubt it’s spending +40h/ week 51 weeks of every year glued to a computer screen working with code.
My son has done his stint of doing considerably more hours coding than you cite. At the same time he has been building a number of very successful businesses He is now one of the multimillionaires who has voted with his feet. However his businesses still contribute substantial amounts to HM Treasury through corporation and employment taxes, and employment to around 100 staff.
However, despite working from home, he spent time over Christmas doing an overnighter in reinstating all the code for one of the retail websites after the server (run by a large German company) went down.
My son has done his stint of doing considerably more hours coding than you cite.
I used to do 96 hour weeks in the past and very likely, for a small fraction of what your son earned with his dabbling webslopping¹. However, that’s not sustainable in the long term (Did you son do that for more then 20 years?) and entirely besides the point here.
¹ Download code written by somebody else and ‘ingeniously’ glue that together with duct tape and chewing gum.
Nice of you to infer his son’s a slapdash, slipshod coding cowboy. Without any evidence.
It’s obviously possible that the mentioned person is the one white raven of all people seeking to make a quick buck with “web sites”, that is “internet-enabled sales and marketing” but I think that’s rather improbable.
For you further information he worked his placement year in his 4-year degree course for a company that provided custom stock control databases for major high street retailers. He then worked with my clients providing and maintaining simple e-commerce booking systems using MySQL and PHP, in the overseas property rental market and for a US company providing a CAM system. When i retired he refocussed our business into providing bespoke database services. At the same time he started to develop the current business with an old school friend.
Thank you for your comment. This person seems to be like many I have known in the software field who are arrogant about their claimed ability.
My son built his business e-commerce system from scratch, coding ithe entire system himself and provides customers with real-time stock information, Oh, and he also built the rest of the business at the same time with a business partner who handles the creative side of the company. The system handles currently between £1M and £2M of transactions per month. I can assure you that he wasn’t part-timing like you at 96 hours a week to get it up and running.
He started in a shed in the garden and now has his own manufacturing and warehousing operations, has retail outlets in major cities around the country and has built his business from a start-up 12 years ago to one with an eight figure turnover.
Your rather bitter and completely ill-informed response maybe says more about your abilities than it does about his.
Stuart Rose is 100% correct.
Eighty percent of civil servants don’t do a full day’s work when they are in the office. When they are not in the office the farting about must be full time.
Those who don’t want to go to the office should be sacked.
Sorted. Next.
Someone working according to UK work regulations will have 10⅓ days off for every 30 days (roughly) of the year. This means he’ll spend more than ⅓ of a whole so-called work year not working. When working, he’s going to have at least two and possibly three rather lengthy breaks and some more time lost to social friction which always occurs in groups of people. That’s quite leisurely, regardless if this requires him to travel to a special location to spend some hours with “mostly working”.
Do you have anything to back that assertion with?
Did a part of your breakfast go down the wrong way? Or do you simply excel at shouting random crap and suck at everything else, especially UK work reguations (28 holidays), basic math (28 / 12 = 2⅓ plus 8 weekend days every four weeks) and real-world working conditions in anything but web-slopping (lunchbreaks are pretty common occurence, y’know, even if you haven’t ever heard of them)?
Do you have to be quite so unpleasant?
I would have preferred to be quite a bit more unpleasant because my original statements was pretty obviously true (see detailed explanation above) and questioning my honesty thus a seriously displaced personal attack for a reason I cannot fathom.
The entity posting as “a fistful of whatnots” could simply have pointed out what was wrong with my statement if there was anything wrong with it and the intent had been some kind of rational criticism/ disagreement.
I think the entity posting as “RW”is a bit thin-skinned and oversensitive and could easily have phrased it just as you did just now.
Given your obvious spiteful and vindictive personality I really am not surprised why people in bars might want to rearrange your face on the regular. We only ever get your version of events but there’s seriously no way a man can go for a drink alone, mind his own business then organically just become this human magnet for violent arseholes. You are clearly doing a lot more than sitting/standing quietly having a drink. There’s something wrong with the way you interact with people online so what’s the betting there’s also something unnatural with the way you do so in real life. Nobody’s that unlucky, but you come on here and give us your ”woe is me” victimhood bullshit. Always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it? You never do anything to antagonize anyone and it’s a complete surprise when somebody reacts in an aggressive manner out of the blue…What a crock. And to think ages ago I used to feel sorry for you but you’ve broadcast your true colours loud and clear on here, that’s for sure!
There’s “something wrong” about reacting to obviously truthful statements, like the one about the days off someone working according to UK work regulations will usually have per year (104 weekend days plus 28 holidays) with a statement like
Do you have anything to back that assertion with?
As that’s not a questionable assertion but a simple statement of fact which could simply be correct, let’s say with something like “That’s wrong. It’s only 20 holidays” if the intent was to correct a mistake and/or demonstrate that a statement was wrong.
There’s even more wrong with followup fanboy attacks asserting all kinds of other non-truths about a person one doesn’t know in the slightest like the one executed by you here or by your informal companion. These are, in fact, typical disinfo tactics (cf 25 Ways To Suppress Truth The Rules Of Disinformation) used to silence people expressing things one doesn’t want to be expressed. None of this belongs into a discussion about WFH.
It was a request for a pointer to the source information, as it seems rather extreme and if true would have been well worth following up. Googling your statement verbatim points me at the stautory leave entitlement being around 10%.
And in response to your ridiculous comment about web slopping I cut my teeth writing assembler code for a proprietary 12-bit machine with a woven “core” high speed memory and a 5 Mbyte hard drive (yes, megabytes). And the reason I wasn’t able to do a full week at times was that the power was of due to the 3-day week
As for your explanation of your calculation, all I will say is that you have a very unusual way of doing maths (as we shorten mathematics to in the UK).
As this toxic entity has previously accused me of being a ”covert paedophile”, ”pervert” and ”malicious troll”, because I was speaking out about the Pakistani child rape gangs ( which apparently also makes me ”infatuated” with this subject, therefore I must be a closet female paedo… ) I doubt very much you’ll get any supporting evidence. I’m still waiting.
The minimum holiday entitlement that an employer must provide to a full-time worker is 28 days a year (or 5.6 weeks).
https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/employment-law/holidays/
I’ll skip providing ‘evidence’ for my ‘assertion’ that all 52 weeks of the year contain both a Saturday and a Sunday and that office workers usually have these two days off and also, to provide ‘evidence’ that work breaks – like the lunch break I mentioned – actually exist. This would be a bit too absurd.
I suspect that extensive working from home may result in an inability to engage in normal, civil interactions with other people.
Well, the government insisted on terrorising its own population into saying at home to avoid catching a cold. Basically it spread fear, terror and panic deliberately. Are they admitting they were wrong? They also refer to the possibility of another plandemic. The government created this situation and I think we can safely ignore everything they tell us from now on as they lied in the past so we can assume they are lying now. “Reap what you sow”
A side effect, they might say, with minor effects on the majority. Heard about that somewhere.
Hear, hear.
People have always had Children, and always have had to work, so that hasn’t changed, what has changed is the level of interference by Governments on who can look after Children, and what exactly has this done? we have child rape and torture gangs running amok taking children from council run homes to traffick and abuse them. The costs of private child care has in the meantime sky rocketed. However; if Governments actually supported the nuclear family instead of trying to destroy it, they could allow tax concession such that the Mother or Father could stay at home and raise the child to school age.
Which brings me on to my next point, unless employees contracts specifically state they can work from home/remotely then the employer can demand their return to the office, failure to do so resulting in dismissal as the employee has broken the contract.
It will only take a few dismissals to make people wake up and return. If this were to be combined with the removal of benefits which make the reason to work a lifestyle choice, combined with tax incentives for those who do work, the country might stand a chance.
But Labours client state needs the high level of Public sector and state employees, combined with the benefit recipients and migrants to keep them in power. So it aint never going to happen, until of course the money runs out.
Spot on.
Dear Lord Rose
Our firm’s customers seem very pleased with the “improper” work we do from home.
Beyond treating our staff with respect, paying them well and giving them interesting work to do, and providing a choice between a modern comfortable office and working remotely, we are not responsible for their lifestyle choices or their mental health.
I agree. Working from home can be highly productive, but it also requires trust or a way of spotting those who are trying it on.
I’m curious what line of work you are in, and how senior the people.
I’m in software development. I find a mix of on- and off-site to be preferable as I think he has a point about in person working being of benefit to cohesion and morale particularly on big projects or for junior team members who need to learn the ropes.
We do software.
Pretty much everyone works from home some of the time.
Average % of total staff in the office is probably around 10-15 – some staff always work in the office, many never and others occasionally.
There’s no particular pattern to who works remotely vs office, other than the office people are usually a bit more local. Some senior staff are in the office sometimes, others like me never, same with junior staff. We’ve taken juniors and others on who have hardly seen the office, trained them, and they seem OK.
They always have the option of coming in if they want. If I felt someone was underperforming and I thought it would help I would suggest it (and I have mentioned it, once I think) but my experience is that motivated people will sort themselves out and unmotivated people you should just get rid of or change their incentives (carrot and stick).
I have always been able to “cohere” with people (colleagues, clients and suppliers) whose attitude to their work is similar to mine and shines through very quickly in their actions, whether you ever meet them face to face or not. But we’re all different I guess.
I’m contracting, not employed and I returned to the office part time, mid 2024 after five years WFH on various contracts.
Lockdown had seriously messed me up, both mentally and physically, and I needed to break the isolation.
Online only, I tended to focus mostly on project team interactions, most of which were scheduled in advance, whereas I find being present allows for meeting people not directly on your project. Plus a change of scenery.
Two days is sufficient, any more seems excessive especially factoring in commute times.
I am glad it’s working for you.
I socialise with some of the work colleagues I get on with “philosophically” – most of them however are lefty metro liberals and/or covidians and I don’t miss seeing them or hearing them talk about anything other than work. I don’t make much effort to meet new people as it’s always a problem working out where they stand and I just can’t be arsed any more with having to pussyfoot when I speak.
I was f***ing angry during lockdown but built up a range of activities locally and outside of work so going back to the office didn’t really appeal to me.
I dare say there are advantages to everyone being in the office, but I still feel they are outweighed by the huge gain in work/life balance and the extra energy that our flexible arrangement gives us.
Big business is notoriously stingy with staffing costs. The fact they’re spending money for office space and utilities to get staff back in to work, says all you need to know about how much work said workers are actually doing at home.
I suspect the office costs are fixed – most commercial leases are long term – so it’s more about justifying the office space. Sunk cost fallacy.
Managers (the bad variety, which make up the majority, in my experience) get off on “bums on seats”. They just can’t stand not having people to parade about in front of. They generally don’t care what the bums are doing.
I work a lot better at home, thank you, Lord Rose.
I imagine someone employed to stack shelves on one of your shop floors cannot work from home, no.
But your IT folks can.
One man’s labour is not the same as another’s.
An amazing revellation.
Innit. What an imbecile. Does he want everyone to be the same? I imagine he wouldn’t like communism…
He should focus his energy on asking if the person is doing anything useful, regardless of where they work. Start with the civil service.
The few reasonable and justifiable instances where WFH makes sense give cover to the majority of instances where it’s mostly an excuse to skyve off
When the man went down t’Mill, the missus went upstairs to work on carding or some such. She was doing piecework rather than saying she was meeting fixed hours giving her ample opportunity to slack off whilst still being paid. Perhaps a return to homeworkers being paid on results?
“Civil servants being paid on results?”
Firkin hell the country would come to a standstill.
Why would you pay anyone on any other basis other than results? Isn’t that what work is supposed to be?
Not in the public sector, the train drivers, NHS etc.
Indeed – that’s the problem when the state gets involved and things are made “free”. Incentives get distorted.
It is a hard sell these days for all sorts of reasons. Public transport in this country was never good but has deteriorated a lot since 2020. A lot of women don’t feel safe going into British towns and cities to work these days and they are right to feel that way given the creatures that might be roaming about. There is no getting people back to work the trend is going to continue the other way because the physical reality of venturing out has become so horrific and you aint going to be able to sort that out anytime soon.
The payback is that those who turn up for work will get the promotions while the slackers at home won’t. And in due course they will be outsourced to India or replaced by AI.
Your numbers don’t add up – 80% of “people in the UK” working means 20% aren’t – including the young, retired and unemployed – did you mean “the workforce”?
Shame he didn’t point some of this out during the Covid Scamdemic.