Citizen Writes
Research hot topics
The allure of homeworking
2025-04-08
By Professor Stephen Wood, Professor of Management, University of Leicester
Five years on from the outbreak of Covid-19, employers are still concerned about getting employees who worked at home during the pandemic to return to onsite working. Predictions were made at the time that the pandemic would accelerate the use of homeworking and usher in a new normal. This has been realised as many employees across the globe have continued to work at home at least some of the time.
In the UK, by October 2024, almost 30 per cent of the working populations performed their duties in hybrid fashion; a figure that has increased steadily from 10 per cent in January 2021, the time of UK’s last lockdown (according to Office of National Statistics figures). In contrast, the proportion working full time at home fell from 40 per cent to 12 per cent over the same period.
There has, nonetheless, been a backlash against this trend from some leading employers and politicians as they urge, or even demand, employees come back to full-time working in the office. For example, in January this year, the BBC reported that Lord Alan Sugar told “workers to get their bums back to the office”.
This echoes the-then government minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s insistence in 2022 that civil servants should return to their office, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcing his antipathy to homeworking based on his not being able to focus when working at home: “My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing.” While Sugar and others stress the importance of the onsite interaction for the development of ideas, sharing information, learning and mentoring, Johnon questions the effectiveness of homeworking.
In my research, homeworkers are in-tune with Sugar as they acknowledge the significance of face-to face interaction at work. In focus groups with professional workers that I conducted as we came out of the pandemic, the first question I asked was, what did you miss most while working at home? And in all groups, the very first answer, was the social side, ”having people around, that camaraderie”, “People. People”, they said. But, participants also saw a positive side to the lack of in-person interaction; the lack of interruptions.
Employees report the opposite of Johnson’s modus operandi: that when working at home, they are more focused, develop more of a rhythm to their work, concentrate more on priorities and give more in-depth consideration to tasks, and thus improve the quality of their work, and it is through this that any productivity gains are likely to be made. As one employee said, “For me, homeworking is Janus-headed, a two-sided coin. Yeah, I really enjoy the ability to concentrate better and focus. [But] I missed being able to engage with people… daily contact”.
More generally, groups identified this as a paradox of homeworking: the lack of social interaction on the one hand diminishes the ability of people to do their job, while on the other hand the lack of interruptions increases it. Alongside this, they identified (similarly unsolicited) a second paradox: on the one hand, homeworking increases contact with family members with positive effects on well-being, while, on the other hand, it makes detachment from work more difficult, with its detrimental effects on well-being.
These paradoxes created tensions for employees which they managed in various ways, particularly through what psychologists call job crafting and boundary management, alongside the use of video-conferencing. Obvious methods people used included having a separate office or instructing children and other household members to avoid interrupting them.
More subtle strategies to segment work from home life, included people dressing in their work clothes just before logging on, then changing out of these when finishing their work; or that of a person living alone who used a towel to cover his PC after logging off, to completely hide his work equipment and signal the end of a working day. The extent of the success of such micro-management of homeworking, particularly in aiding work performance, was a major influence on employees’ orientation towards homeworking and its role in their future lives.
Hybrid working is itself a way of managing the contradictions so employees achieve a more integrated life, for which the majority of participants in my studies expressed a preference. They had learnt both to manage working at home and to like it, during their forced experimentation with homeworking. Attitudes to homeworking changed over the course of the pandemic. At first, many people were wary of homeworking – for example PAs thinking they could not possibly do their work at home as it depended on a close relationship with their boss – but began to realise they could.
Most claimed that they would not want to go back to a full-time office role, or even could not, because they did not want to lose the better work–life balance they had achieved. Some even wanted full-time homeworking, while a small group were keen to go back to work, which, perhaps surprisingly, included women with small children as their child-care arrangements were disrupted in COVID-19.
The key policy question posed by the backlash against homeworking is whether the trend towards its greater use should be reversed. An implication of my research is that reversing the trend may be at odds with the majority view of employees, who may prefer it where feasible. A petition against returning to work full time in the office at WPP, a world -wide advertising agency, is reported to have achieved over 10,000 signatures. While similar petitions are reported to have taken place at J.P. Morgan, Disney and other such companies.
Such calls from employers for a return to the office pose the issue in black-and-white terms as an either-or choice, onsite or homeworking, thus neglecting the and-both solution offered by hybrid working. That they meet with resistance is more about this absolutism as most employees typically want hybrid and acknowledge the paradoxes within homeworking (and onsite working). It is not a matter of hybrid being the best of both worlds, or that homeworking is the perfect workplace so hybrid is a compromise; and certainly not that people had pre-existing preferences toward homeworking which they can now fulfil. Nor are they certain they consistently perform better at home.
There is then no need to trade off the benefits of on-site working and homeworking against each other – rather the aim should be to make both work optimally. Employers should encourage line managers and employees, together, to review what can and cannot be done at home, in a way that acknowledges interdependencies between roles and tasks, links core tasks to a well-defined strategy with clear priorities, and ensures demands are manageable and include fostering creativity. If employers are concerned about restoring the primacy of on-site working they should begin by ensuring they provide genuine opportunities for such employee involvement.