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Employee relationsEmployee communications

Office terrors are good for the spirit

by Personnel Today 6 Aug 2007
by Personnel Today 6 Aug 2007

Well, as most Russians never said, hoorah for Boris! Just months after controversial former president Yeltsin sadly passed away, his namesake Johnson has put the spring back in Guru’s political step.

Yep, after years of congestion charges and foreign junkets, London finally has the chance to elect a mayor it can be proud of. Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley, announced his candidacy with a few well thought-out  words on flexible working.

“Working from home is simply a euphemism for sloth, apathy, staring out of the window and random surfing of the internet,” he said. “Your mental flywheel is hardly turning, and why should it? There is no-one to impress, no-one to intrigue against, no-one to worry about, and that is the real problem with working from home.”

Fantastic stuff. At last, a politician who says what they mean. What serious HR professional believes that this fad for flexible working will do anything other than appease the liberals and slackers that HR spends its life fighting?

How likely is it that allowing Tracey from sales to work within remote-control range of The Jeremy Kyle Show will increase revenue? What chance is there that IT support’s Barry will spend less time on Star Trek message boards when he’s in a room on his own?

Johnson added: “The beauty of an office is that it creates terrors of one kind or another, while at home you are obliged to cudgel your own flanks, to create your own fear – and, in the stupor of your domestic surroundings, you fail to make the leap of imagination.”

Well, Mrs Guru is out at work, so Yours Truly is off to buy a copy of Nuts and give his flanks a damn good cudgelling.

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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