For anyone who has recently spent their morning commute nestled under a stranger’s armpit, it may come as a surprise to hear that passenger numbers on public transport have not returned to pre-Covid levels.
What Transport for London calls “ridership” has remained stubbornly stuck at about 90% of the levels seen before the pandemic. A similar picture prevails for light rail and tram systems across the rest of England, as a result of fewer people travelling daily to and from their workplaces.
More than four and a half years after the first Covid lockdowns kept workers in the UK and other western nations at home, the story told by transport companies appears to reflect how the world of office-based work has changed – it seems for good.
However, the end of the school summer holidays brought a flurry of announcements from large employers, which have begun to summon staff back to their desks.
Last week, supermarket chain Asda became the latest to toughen up its office attendance requirements, making it compulsory for thousands of workers at its offices in Leeds and Leicester to spend at least three days a week at their desks from January.
The retailer, which has been struggling with falling sales, announced the change along with job cuts and a restructuring, saying the return to office working would bring it “in line with our competitors and the wider market, allowing us to build high-performing teams with a collaborative culture and respond to what our business needs the most”.
Speaking to the Observer, Asda’s retail-veteran chair, Stuart Rose, who is currently running the supermarket, went beyond the company’s official line. Lord Rose, who used to run Marks & Spencer and Topshop, said having large numbers of staff based at home was “not a satisfactory way of working, particularly in an industry which is a fast-moving consumer goods industry.
“It’s not always as efficient with those teams working together in terms of online, in terms of Zoom calls,” he said.
Rose added that in his personal view, demand for hybrid working had swung too far in the workers’ favour. “Hybrid working wasn’t invented in the pandemic,” he said. “It has to fit the business’s needs.”
As a sweetener for those based at its Leeds headquarters, Asda has promised to “improve the working environment” with “a better catering offer, an on-site Asda Express, a more welcoming atrium, more meeting spaces, quiet-space working pods, upgraded toilets, new chairs and redecoration”.
Asda’s shopfloor and warehouse staff, meanwhile – like many others in service jobs – have not had the luxury of doing their work from dining tables or home offices.
But those who are able to carry out their roles remotely have, in recent years, begun to regard flexibility over where they work as a right rather than a perk, and may feel that it will take more than an office refresh for them to give that up.
The latest back-to-office mandates are just the latest skirmishes in the post-Covid clash between employers – keen to pack out their workplaces again – and their staff.
The new world of work pits employees – who have grown accustomed to the flexibility of spending at least some of the working week at home or in another remote location, with the accompanying perceived improvement to their work-life balance – against organisations, which extol the benefits of the creative collaboration fostered by bringing teams together in their expensive office spaces.
Among the strictest back-to-office mandates so far has come from online retailer Amazon. Its chief executive, Andy Jassy, announced in September that it was summoning its workers back to the office five days a week from the new year.
Jassy said the previous requirement for three days a week in the workplace had only “strengthened our conviction about the benefits” of being in the office.
The response to the change has been “mixed”, conceded Jennifer Salke, the global head of Amazon MGM Studios in a recent interview with the Observer, although she described this as simply a return to pre-Covid ways of working. “We want people to feel connected to a team,” Salke said.
While Amazon is among the few organisations calling for full-time office attendance, its stance highlights how the balance of power appears to be swinging back towards employers.
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This shift comes despite warnings from some economists, including Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom, that forcing employees back to the office could prompt some of the most talented to pursue better opportunities elsewhere, potentially leaving companies with a workforce most suited to heavy office attendance, which “skews slightly younger, male, [with] less diversity and disability”.
Ever since the pandemic, the financial sector has been among the most keen to get staff back to their desks. Spanish-owned bank Santander has now told its 10,000-strong UK workforce that they will be expected to be in the office for at least 12 days a month from January, as opposed to the previous, less formal, requirement of between two and three days a week.
Accountant PwC has warned it will clamp down on remote working, while its rival Deloitte has said it would no longer conduct remote interviews for graduates.
The public sector is not exempt from the back-to-office trend either. In recent days, the government has reaffirmed previous office-attendance guidance, requiring most of the UK’s 500,000 civil servants to spend at least 60% of their time (or three days a week) in a government building or on official business – an approach described by the Cabinet Office as “comparable to other large private and public sector employers”.
Employers of all kinds may be starting to firm up post-pandemic workplace rules, especially if they are finding the economic environment more challenging. Yet this may pose its own challenges when trying to recruit top talent, or graduates just starting their careers.
Almost half (49%) of UK graduates said they would not apply for a job that did not offer hybrid working, according to a survey by flexible workspace provider International Workplace Group (IWG), while a further 18% said they would need to seriously consider such a role.
Hybrid working was also considered as important as a competitive salary by more than half (54%) of the 1,000 graduates or final-year university students surveyed by IWG, many of whom view it as equivalent to a 13% increase in salary, because of savings made on travel and housing.
The aversion to commuting – both for its cost and duration – could likewise play a significant role in putting workers off spending more time in city centre offices.
The flexibility offered to new recruits and graduate trainees may differ from that permitted for existing staff who have office-based employment contracts.
While the issue of forcing staff to return to the office has rarely been put to the legal test, a case earlier this year resulted in the courts finding in favour of the employer.
A judge ruled that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was within its rights to refuse the request of a senior manager to work from home full-time, saying the organisation was “right to identify weaknesses with remote working”.
Elizabeth Wilson, who had worked entirely from home since the start of the pandemic, took her case to an employment tribunal after the FCA turned down her flexible working request.
The battle between employers and staff over where they work may only just be getting started.