Why a return to office like is overdue – working from home can be miserable

Before lockdown, life revolved around a busy, noisy newsroom. From the clatter of typewriters going full speed to the glare of computer screens, they were fun places to be part of; a social connection as much as a work one.

Rewind to 2020, and Boris Johnson’s message to us all to go home and hunker down. Overnight, life changed.

We grabbed laptops, screens and enough cables to wrap round the Forth Bridge, and ventured into a new world of working from home. We figured it’d last three months.

Six years on, work from home has become the norm, and snapshots of office life are confined to Facebook’s memories section.

I remember going to London when we were allowed to travel during the pandemic, and wandering through a deserted financial sector. Today, many of those tower blocks are far from full, and many of the cafes and bars on the ground floor which nourished huge workforces have largely gone.

I lost my enthusiasm for working from home some time ago. The novelty wore off very quickly as my wife and I saw our dining table covered in hardware - screens, laptops, an iPad, mobile phones and cables running everywhere. Couldn’t even stick the washing machine on because we had conference calls throughout each day, and the noise carried.

We’ve since moved, and I now have a room where I can shut the door and create a physical barrier between work and home life.

But there is still a part of me that resents the fact that work has effectively become an unwelcome lodger, first out of necessity, and then out of sheer habit as companies closed offices and cut overheads, blurring very distinct lines between the nine to five routine, and the rest of your life.

I loathe the sense of isolation working from home can bring. Google chat is a pitiful substitute to talking face to face. I miss the noise, the humour, the chat and the simple interactivity that an office provides - if I faced another decade or 15 years of this, I’d have chucked it a long time ago.

Just because you can work from home, doesn’t mean you should, but it has taken six years to pivot the debate to the point where the same companies which scattered staff to the seven winds are now gathering them like lost sheep and corralling the back in an office environment.

But it isn’t that simple. Habits have changed, new ones established, and there is a backlash.

The Scottish Government’s proposal that staff should spend 40% of their time in an office has run into all manner of criticism, most of which is just nonsense.

Arguments range from “who will look after my dog” to “who is paying my travel expenses?” and, of course, there’s a whole new level of anxiety about simply sitting in the same room as other folk.

Flexible working is here to stay - the fact that many companies were utterly inflexible when it comes to such procedures pre-lockdown is one of life’s great ironies - and that means we have to be flexible too. Anyone embarking on an office based career today will never spend five days at their desk, and neither should they.

We can work flexibly and the wheels won’t come off. The past six years have proved that - anyone skiving while working from home probably did the same in an office.

But the only way people will learn, they only way they will understand how all the components fit, the only way they will forge relationships with managers and peers, is by being in the same room.

The world of work has, finally, started to come full circle.