Can the working from home model survive the energy crisis?
After two years of global crisis, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle when it comes to work: employees in the UK no longer want the 9-to-5, bookended by an exhausting and expensive commute.
Anecdotally, that might seem obvious. But having documented the changes to organisational life through the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the Work after Lockdown project (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council), what is significant about these findings is that this mindset shift appears to be permanent. Figures show nearly 40% of working adults in Great Britain are now working across multiple locations in a hybrid working model. However, as the energy crisis threatens to bite, there are warnings thatthis winter’s looming energy crisis could kill off our new working “culture”. So, which one is it?
Amid the detailed calculations being made, one aspect is already clear: socio-economic circumstances will be a main driver in whether working from home remains firmly rooted in our way of life, and people’s decisions about work are still the product of their circumstances.
One public sector graduate trainee told me that, by her calculations, the cost of train fares, coffees and snacks left her better off working from home. But if energy costs rise sharply, she will probably switch to travelling into the office over shouldering a punitively high heating bill. It is precisely this fluctuating picture that makes this winter so difficult to plan for. Another senior manager working for a London local authority told me that while some of her staff had indicated that they might want to be coming into the office more often in the coming months, there was a lack of concrete information or certainty.
When we consider how working trends
Read more on theguardian.com
