People’s love affair with working from home, triggered during COVID-19 lockdowns by the often cheerless embrace of Zoom, is cooling sharply, while the daily commute is becoming fashionable, especially among the young.
The alternative is experienced by too many as lonely, isolating, distracting, threatening to one’s mental health and polluting of one’s home space. In the UK it is expensive to keep warm — and those at home are often the last to find out what is going on among their colleagues.
Workplaces, after all, are where people make friends and sometimes meet life partners, as well as learn all that tacit knowledge so crucial to doing their job well and so build their careers. Humans are social animals and creating working lives permanently apart from others was always going against the grain.
Illustration: Mountain People
Figures from Transport for London (TfL) confirm what many already know thanks to TikTok, where sharing workplace highlights among Gen Z staff is among the new viral memes. It is fun and refreshing to be at work with other people.
Thursday last week saw the highest London Underground usage since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 3.64 million journeys. Subway usage is climbing to between 75 percent and 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels, up from 45 percent in January, while buses are even more popular.
Passenger levels on some bus routes in outer London are back to pre-pandemic levels, TfL said.
The signs are that it is the young who are readier to re-enter the world of nine to five. Weekday cycling in London is up 25 percent from pre-pandemic levels, with commuter cycling mostly undertaken by the young and early middle-aged.
Another straw in the wind is that one-third of all journeys are now paid for by contactless mobile phone devices — again most likely to be used by the young and higher than pre-pandemic levels, TfL said.
Based on current trends, by next summer or early autumn London’s overall commuter traffic would be very close to or above pre-pandemic levels. It is a similar trend around the UK.
Stories abound of young people moving jobs not because they want to work from home, but because they want to work in workplaces populated by other staff. Better that than the mounting bleakness of commuting alone from your bedroom to the kitchen table day after day and living a sterile online life — a major source of depression during COVID-19 lockdowns.
A number of people I know have switched jobs largely for this reason. Others who are forced to work from home choose to do so in collective workspaces, just to get out of their house or apartment regularly and share a coffee.
The message is beginning to be taken on board by employers.
Consultancy Timewise last month reported in its annual Flexible Jobs Index for this year that only 12 percent of the 6 million job adverts it had analyzed in the first half of the year allowed for some form of hybrid working.
This should not be a surprise. It is less an obsession with presenteeism that drives employers to want to see their employees at work physically, and more that they understand the importance of tacit knowledge and that most work is delivered by teams rather than by individuals.
Teams work best with lots of face time and shared purpose — all best framed by being in the same physical workplace at the same time. Try building a great team whose continuity is permanently challenged by members working remotely. It can be done, but it is not easy.
However, employers such as Twitter’s new chief executive officer, Elon Musk, who insisted his workforce come to work Monday through Friday, are only partly right. Alongside the desire to work beyond the home, there is a strong demand, learned from lockdowns, for more ability to vary where and when work is done.
Beware, the workplace is in flux.
As Timewise also reported, nine out of 10 workers want to vary their hours, but only half are able to do so.
As ever in contemporary Britain, there is the long shadow of inequality.
It is those with greater skills who are best able to exploit the new shared understanding that some work in any week can be done from home effectively, at the same time as very few want to work at home full time.
What is emerging is a new class of privileged workers in privileged sectors — finance, business services, consultancy, academia and parts of the media — who can insist on working from home for part of the week, with Friday and Monday especially favored to create a long weekend.
Others who work in the foundation economy — such as at shops, hospitals, cafes and gas stations — where presence comes with the territory, have less hybridity, as do the unskilled with low-paid, flexible part-time work imposed on them — fewer hours than they want, but with little flexibility over when to work them.
Where will it end? The workplace and office are not about to die, nor are the last rites to be delivered to commuting — some of the wilder claims made during lockdowns.
The evolving norm could be a three to four-day, workplace-based working week, with some flexible hours added on, unless governments decides to impose common standards for everyone, the privileged sectors taking the lead.
If that became the standard-setting culture, even the disadvantaged parts of the labor market would do what they can to follow suit, but slowly and unevenly.
It is a moment for a rejuvenated trade unionism to make its appeal.
There is every chance of work starting to become happier and more built around the arc of people’s lives, with more hybridity for those with young families and less for those starting out or rejoining work who do not really want or need to stay at home.
The future is unlikely to be the Gradgrind of Musk, or the confines of the front room. Rather, it is an opportunity to reclaim work not as an act of alienation or exploitation, but as something integral to our lives.
As economists wring their hands over stagnating productivity, society is stumbling toward finding part of the answer: organizing work so people can freely give of their best.
It is a trend governments should buttress so that it extends beyond the advantaged and privileged as far as possible to all, but it is a ray of optimism in dark times.
Will Hutton is a columnist at the Observer.
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