The future of work has been a long time coming. Over 20 years ago, we were promised that a future, flexible digital work environment would set us free from the shackles of the office and let us work wherever we wanted. By 2020, this vision has completely failed to materialise.
The internet exists. Yet the baseline expectation in most offices remains stubbornly fixed at 9-5 desk presence. Why the hell can’t we work from anywhere already?
Eighty per cent of the UK's workforce still goes to the office every day. A recent UK survey found that flexi-time is unavailable to 58 per cent of the UK workforce, and this rises to 64 per cent for people in working class occupations.
This figure may even undershoot the mark – anyone who has worked in an office that ostensibly champions a commitment to "flexible working" might understand that in practice it is generally reserved only to people with children of a certain age or those with onerous commutes.
This isn’t down to a lack of desire on the part of employees. A 2018 survey found that three quarters of the UK workforce would prefer flexible work. It found millennials – who grew up with the internet and all its time and place-bending capabilities at their fingertips – are the most keen to bust out of the structure of the working day.
And the stats back up its importance. Research from Harvard Business Review found that 33 per cent of workers believe they couldn’t be the type of parent they wanted to be because of a lack of flexible working; 39 per cent say it’s hard for them to factor in healthy living or exercise within the structure of their work day. And 34 per cent say it’s hard for them to maintain productivity over the working day.
So if employees want it and companies want to offer it, why has flexible working failed to take off? “There is a fear of shirking,” says Prithwiraj Choudhury, Lumry Family associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Managers worry that if left to their own devices, employees would drift aimlessly through the day and output would suffer.
This fear may be entirely unfounded. Choudhury has carried out a study with the US Patent Office on patent examiners – those who check patents and decide whether they should be granted or not. The more experienced employees were allowed to work from anywhere. Far from shirking, the examiners’ output went up by 4.4 per cent. In this experiment, employees were allowed to work anywhere, rather than from home. Employees were under no obligation to remain in the same city, or even country, as the office.
“It allows the person to go to a location with a lower cost of living if she [or he] chooses to,” says Choudhury. “If you have ageing parents or a spouse who wants to be in a location because of her career or his career, you can do that. It allows a lot of geographic flexibility.”
Flexible working is of course available to some. But in addition to being potentially classist, the distribution of who gets to enjoy it also risks being sexist, according to a report published in Urban Studies.
Women are more likely to be restricted to only working in the office, while men have "more varied locations and patterns of work," the study claimed. "Multi-locational working rather than working at one workplace is a largely male phenomenon,” researchers concluded.
Gender aside, there’s evidence that companies won’t be introducing flexible working widely any time soon.
Take IBM, for example. In 2009, the firm announced that 40 per cent of its employees worked remotely – something that actually allowed IBM to sell off office buildings to the tune of $2 billion. But eight years later in 2017, the company announced it was pulling thousands of employees back into the office, and scrapping its work from home initiative.
Other companies like Yahoo, Aetna and Best Buy similarly backtracked on this policy, while Google and Apple – widely seen as innovators in the workplace – never entertained them in the first place. Why? According to IBM's chief marketing officer Michelle Peluso, it was the belief that teams working together in person are “more powerful, more impactful, more creative”.
“The main constraints are a combination of the need for face-to-face interactions, and the traditions of the workplace,” says Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford Business School. “The modern workplace evolved from the original factories in the 1800s, where workers had regular daily shifts, and has changed little since.”
If anything the internet has meant that we can work flexibly, but instead of working at home or less, people are expected to be on call more. One recent study, based on data about working hours from the American Community Survey, found that hours worked since 1980 increased nearly ten per cent for Americans with bachelor’s and advanced degrees.
This has sped up thanks to a shift from manufacturing to ‘neurofacturing’, a term coined by economists to describe intellectually intensive white-collar labor that is often connected to the internet, such as software programming, marketing, advertising, consulting, and publishing. One of the reasons for this, the paper highlights, is that the internet turns every hour of every day into a potential working hour.
"The innovations in personal computing and internet-based communications have allowed individual workers the freedom to choose weekly work hours well in excess of the usual 40,” the paper reads.
But despite the slowness to take off, Choudhury believes that two factors are forcing companies to change. The first is technological tools like Slack and Zoom, that “allow lots of synchronous and asynchronous communication”, and the second is demand from workers – particularly women.
Bloom believes we shouldn’t underestimate our power to demand change. “For employees looking to accelerate this in their firm they can point to the evidence on the positive impacts on firms profits and productivity from working from home," he says.
But employers might already be taking note. The current LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report revealed that the number of global job posts shared on LinkedIn offering flexible working has increased by 78 per cent over the past three years.
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