Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC, I'm Manuela
Saragosa. Coming up: is working from home messing
with your head? When your home becomes your workplace
that's you know it's full on and it's hard
to switch off mentally that's really really draining
you're just at home trying to do everything.
As companies encourage employees to keep working from home
we ask: is it good for us? People have never wanted to
when they've adopted flexible working arrangements pre-covid
never wanted to work 100 from home the evidence is clear on that
that's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.
Remember this?
The sounds of an office - some might even say the sounds of another era.
You can download it from a website - it's called soundofcolleagues.com
and it's part of a project made by the Swedish sound designers
Red Pipe Studios. Tobias Norman is its co-founder
So, Sound Of Colleagues is actually a website where you can
find the sounds from from your colleagues that you might be missing
when you're working from home which means you can have some clattering
from the keyboard some voices whispering or talking in the
phone
the office dog in the background and stuff like that
then you can create your own um office environment,
sound-wise. I think so far, we had more than 600 thousand people
visiting the the web page from all over the world
and the funniest part is that the response is more or less the same
all over - people really recognise those sounds and they feel like
it feels more comfortable when they're sitting by themselves
working from home to have a bit of of the office noise in the background.
It's that kind of thing that Nylah Salam is missing.
She's a young journalist in London, just embarking on her career.
Working from home since the lockdown started in March, she says,
hasn't been easy. So it's literally like a little desk where you can put like a
chair in but it's really small but before that my laptop was on a chest
of drawers which obviously didn't have a space for
the chair to go in so I suffered from really bad back problems
from that because I used to sit from the side and then do my work it wasn't like
straight on my room isn't that big so I've got my
bed and my wardrobe and everything and everything was just it's just cramped
together so I just don't have the space. And it's not
just her back that suffered. My room has turned into
my workstation, a gym, a cafe, you know, where I sleep... I'm just thinking
it's all just... it was all dwelling on me it was getting to me
so there was a period of time where I just felt quite anxious and I was angry
it was quite hard I'm not going to lie it was very hard for me
even though I was on social media a lot I was becoming very anti-social
because everything was going on in my head, I didn't really want to
speak to anyone. Some days I would get up and I'd just
be so demotivated and I'll be like what like why am I here like
what am I doing, you know, I'm not even in the office, or I'm not going out the
house, I'm just... again, it's the same routine: I wake up,
work, eat, go back to sleep, and then it's every day, it's the same routine, so
i'm thinking I don't even want to be here, I don't like this.
Nylah would quite like to get back into the office but even as countries around
the world lift their lockdowns, many employers plan
to make working from home a permanent thing - or at least give
employees the choice. Among them, Twitter, Facebook, Google, also
the French auto-maker PSA - it said non-production staff will work
remotely from now on. And there are plenty of smaller
companies more than happy to scrap their offices altogether
saving money in the process. But what are the mental health and well-being
implications for employees? Dr Zofia Bajorek
is a research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, here in the UK.
She's been researching that very question. I think it's very dependent on
your situation. When workers were compelled to work from
home as a result of covid people were having to adjust to a
variety of unfamiliar communication problems
balancing parenting, home schooling, elder care,
along with that, people might have been feeling greater isolation
and anxiety about feeling that they needed to remain
productive. Covid has also added this fear of job security there is a looming
recession, anxieties about catching covid itself
and everything connected with that. Working from home at
this point could actually be very difficult because
of the related anxieties around it. For some, working from home could be
brilliant it could be the flexibility, autonomy that it provides, but for others
there is evidence that it could lead to poor emotional well-being at this time
but also I imagine if you are, have already been working from home
regularly before the pandemic then you clearly have the structures in place to
make it work and a lot of the the anxiety must
surround the fact that not everyone has the infrastructure and the
structures in place to work effectively from home?
There's the structure and related to that having all the IT
and the technology and the communication channels that you have
but there's also a thing about the routine. There's been a lot of um
discussion about work-life balance especially the younger people who might
not have their own house, who might be having to live in a student flat or
having a house share, they might not even have a spare room in which they could
work and so they might be working as well as sleeping in their bedroom so
they don't have that feeling of dissociating
work time and home time and so they're not being able to escape
work. That can have an impact for people's work-life balance, their stress
and their mental health as well. And you can imagine those parents
during the pandemic who had to home school, so having children whilst
trying to work is also a very difficult circumstance to
be in. Personally, I'm a carer so I have a
mother with early-onset Alzheimer's and so
I've had to adjust my working from home pattern.
I've had to take on additional caring needs and work that around my working
day. I've got no qualms about doing that but
it does mean that sometimes you feel like you're wearing
multiple hats but sometimes neither of them with aplomb.
You do sometimes feel guilty that you're not doing one job as well as you could.
Are there any situations you can give an example of where you've had to make a
choice? Either it's you concentrate on your work
or you concentrate on your mother and something has had to give? Yeah, it's
it's a stupid thing it's just um sometimes when I've been on a Zoom
phone call and Mum comes in and she might have forgotten the way to the
toilet in the house and so you just have to say, excuse me I just need to deal
with my mum for 10 minutes, you know, I can still hear you in the
background because you know you can just turn up the volume
so you can hear what's going on in the call you just can't be physically
present your face on the video. It is things like
that there are ways of working about it but you do sometimes feel like, oh I
should have been giving my mum that attention and work was
grabbing it at the same time. There are so many companies now that are
saying, you know, we're going to make working from home a permanent feature,
we're going to give people the choice of whether they want to come in or not
and clearly there's been a working from home revolution, it's been shown to work,
people are productive when they are at home, they can be productive,
but what advice would you have for the many companies who've been saying
they're going to make this a permanent thing from here on?
I would say check with your employees to say
whether that is a sensible way forward. Some people might need to work from home
part-time, some people might need to work from home full-time,
but what's important is to understand your employees'
needs, to continue having these conversations
with employees about what is going to be best for them
what will help them the most when it comes to
thinking about returning to the office or long-term working from home in the
future. Don't just assume that employees are
going to be all for it, basically? Exactly. I don't think that assumption
can be made. For many people, working from home just
might not be a viable option. They might not have the space, they might not have
the living conditions to do so. They might not want to.
Some people like the structure of an office. And I think something that has been seen
quite a lot during lockdown is this issue of isolation.
Some people are feeling really socially isolated
they're not having that office communication that um
everyday interaction with people that they have really enjoyed in the past
and I think actually working from home could have negative business impacts.
I think sometimes when you're having those instant conversations or
those water-cooler moments that people call them,
that often sparks a lot of creativity, a lot of productivity, it can
be an opportunity or a time when people
start having ideas about project work or how to innovate, and I
think if those conversations are reduced or
disabled because of working from home, you know, it could be really dangerous
for a lot of creativity and impact, and this issue of social isolation I
think is something that's really important that organisations need to be
aware of. Dr Zofia Bajorek. So those are the
concerns, but surely technology - the boom in video
conferencing services - can more than make up for those missed
chats over the water-cooler? Over to Cary Cooper. He's professor of
organizational psychology and health at Manchester Business School in the UK.
The thing that people I think find difficult
is the lack of social contact. That's the biggie.
They generate ideas and they like being with people, they meet their social needs
that's what human beings do, you know, we've had the technology for a long time
and in many professions you could have worked 100%
from home, but it's the social needs that people
get from going into a workplace, we know that
you bounce off ideas, you're much more creative when you're working with other
people I don't think you can do it adequately
on Zoom or any of the other social platforms. But
why is that, because I mean you can socialise on Zoom, there have
been zoomed cocktail parties during lockdowns
what is it about face-to-face contact that seems to spark ideas in a way that
doesn't happen when you meet with people digitally? What
it is, it's what we call the non-verbal forms of behaviour
you don't get the full non-verbal forms of communication
i.e. eye contact, facial expression, body posture, you don't get that. You pick
up these non-verbal cues all the time the body language that
people have, how they sit, how they respond to what you say, and all
of those non-verbals are really important in developing new ideas, new products, new
services, from a work point of view, and after you've had a formal meeting
where you're kind of idea-creating, you then leave and go have
a cup of coffee and it's over those situations the
lots of things come out, where somebody said, "well, I didn't say that during the
meeting but you know what I thought about when
you said that" - and that's how it happens when you're face to face and
it doesn't happen as well on Zoom or any of the other social
platforms. Does that mean that people are wrong to
expect working from home to become the norm?
We have learned to work from home. We know the technology basically works
but people still have their social needs to be met.
So my prediction will be in the future that
people will work substantially from home but go into a central
office environment from time to time to have meetings
to meet your social needs, and all of that.
So your home environment will be your primary workplace
but you won't be exclusively there. People have never wanted to
when they've adopted flexible working arrangements pre-covid,
never wanted to work 100% from home. The evidence is clear on that. they want to
have a central office environment to go to and you need that
for sparking ideas, team-building, and to meet your social
needs. So short term will be people will go to the central office
environment to commune again, to team-build again, to get ideas about
how they're going to work. However, as time goes by then
people will gravitate back to the home environment.
The evidence is, if people want to work flexibly
and they're allowed to and there are no real constraints to it
they are much more job-satisfied. They really are.
They say things like, where I work from, when I work, and everything else is
is up to me - I'm in control, I have control and autonomy at work.
Stress at work is the leading cause of sickness absence. Take a country like the
UK: 57% of all long-term sickness absence
is due to stress, depression and anxiety. One of the biggest causes of stress at
work is people feeling they don't have any
control or autonomy over their job. Give them flexible working, trust them
and value them and say, listen, this is what you have to achieve,
where you achieve it, when you achieve it, how you achieve it,
from what facility you achieve it from, is your business.
We'll help you and support you, just go ahead and do it. So it's about
giving people control. That is good for people's mental health.
Absolutely. And the evidence is clear: there are thousands of studies
on job control. The more you have control over your job,
the more productive you are, the more job-satisfied you are, the less sickness
absence you have, particularly stress-related sickness absence.
And that is the future and we've just learned from that that we can actually
do this we can work much more flexibly but there
are still a proportion of people who find that difficult. Professor Cary
Cooper. So, a happy medium and one where
employees and not bosses retain some control.
All of which might explain how Caroline Joynson has arranged her working life.
She runs her own PR company in the UK, and for many years
she worked from home. Eventually, though, she opted for a co-working space.
During lockdown, she had to give that up and work from home again.
But she headed straight back to her co-working space as soon as the lockdown
was lifted. She told me why. I mean I think the thing
is when you work from home and you have family around and you just
basically permanently feel guilty you feel guilty
for not being with the family and the kids
but you're working or if you're not working you feel guilty because you're
not working and you're with the family and the kids so you're really
torn most of the time mentally that's really really draining and you're just
at home trying to do everything. The boundaries are gone, basically, isn't it,
the boundary between home life and work life?
Yeah, I think that's the thing - there were really hard times where I just thought
this is impossible, you know, and not having the option to go off to the
co-working space and have that quiet time and that
headspace, it took me right back to when I kind of
was first trying to run the business from home
and all the reasons why I then decided to go into a co-working space. It was
like going back in time, but being trapped in that situation, so yeah, it was
really stressful. You know, five days at home on your own
is a lot of time in your own company and that was another reason why
co-working worked for me because no one's really meant to be on
their own five days a week full-time hours.
When you hear companies, and we've had a few companies on our programme here on
business daily, say: we're going to give up the office
completely, there's no point anymore, we're just getting everyone to work from
home, what do you think? I wonder whether there's some sort of
middle ground and I think both are needed. I don't think it can be
one or the other and I think now it's proved with
lockdown that people can work from home, you know, people that were told was never
an option for you to work from home and almost like bosses didn't trust them
well they've had to trust them now but I think for mental health reasons
and for building a successful team, having some time together in a workplace
environment is essential. Caroline Joynson there,
making the case for a working life set at least partly
in the office. She brings us to the end of this edition of Business Daily.
Today's producer was Edwin Lane. And do get in touch: is it too soon to
talk about the end of the office? Do you miss it? The twitter handles are
@manuelaBBC or @BBCBusiness. I'll leave you with a
little office nostalgia.