Will we still be working from home three years from now?

So for Britons, it’s back to working from home, though for many people WFH is more like SITO – sleeping in the office. And since the new rules may apply for up to six months, we had better find ways of making it all work.

But will it stick for longer? Three years from now, will a lot of us still be in this situation? Or is this one of the sea-changes in working patterns that takes place once in a generation, something akin to the decline of clerical jobs that have taken place since the 1980s? 

You can see the attractions for companies, which need less office space. You can see the attractions for us, or at least those of us who have room for a home office. And you can at least glimpse the mighty changes to our cities that will result if many office blocks are emptied forever. Walk around the City of London or gather on Wall Street and they are Death Valley. 

But what will really determine how we will be working in a few years’ time will be what is most efficient: which methods of working get the job done best? There are very different views. 

One was expressed by Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, on Monday. He predicted that some of the work patterns developed in recent months will remain. He said that he didn’t think Apple would “return to the way we were because we’ve found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually”. 

But maybe launching new watches is different from creating new entertainment products. Reed Hastings is co-head of Netflix and he said that remote work was “a pure negative”. Maybe it is different too from running a bank. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, thinks there will be long-term damage if people don’t get back to work. 

However, even Cook hopes that a majority of Apple’s people will be back at the headquarters some time next year, so maybe this will be more a question of degree rather than absolutes. 

The truth is that we don’t yet know the long-term costs for both companies and individuals. If it were really more efficient to have people at home, why do companies use that excuse to account for the fact they take longer to deal with queries? Why does the government use that excuse to explain the logjam in getting a passport renewed?

Worse, if there is a loss of performance now with staff that are already trained and know each other, there will surely be bigger losses when new staff who don’t know each other come on board. In the short-term, we can mostly manage without seeing each other; long-term, the costs will mount. Career development issues will mount too as time goes by. Even if people can do their jobs as well from home, maybe the fact that they are not physically present in the office will mean that career opportunities pass them by. 

If this line of argument is right, then we will gradually see work practices return quite a lot of the way back to normal. People will spend a bit more time working remotely but they will have to justify that by working at least as competently as they did before. If companies find that they lose an edge if their people are not on-site, then you can be sure that if workers want to keep their jobs, they had better show up. There will be some increase in remote working but my guess is that it will be less dramatic than now looks likely – less the Tim Cook vision, more the Reed Hastings and Jamie Dimon one. 

However, there will also be huge increases in our productivity from the things we have learnt over the past six months. Some generalisations. We will be more disciplined in meetings, and more of those meetings will be online. We will travel for business less frequently. We will still commute to offices most of the time but maybe not every day of the week. We will be more focused on the quality of our output, less concerned about how that output is generated. And we will value those informal interactions we have with our colleagues in the office even more.