Lord Stuart Rose, former boss of Asda and Marks & Spencer, has decried working from home as “not doing proper work”.
In a BBC Panorama documentary Should we still be working from home? Rose claimed that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” and that it was damaging productivity.
“We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four,” he said.
Working from home
“People who drive trains have to go to work. People who work in operating theatres have to go to work. People who work in services industries like retail have to go to work and others don’t. They have children, they have problems, they have issues – they just deal with them.”
His comments come as a growing number of employers are enforcing policies that require staff to be in the office for the majority or whole of the week, including WPP and Amazon.
They also echo the words of Debbie Crosbie, chief executive of Nationwide, who said women could be missing out on career opportunities if they exclusively work from home.
A survey by International Workplace Group in late 2024, however, found that strict return-to-office mandates were pushing workers to look for new jobs. Its poll of recruiters found that 67% have seen an increase in candidates turning down new roles that did not offer hybrid working.
In a December 2024 UK snapshot survey by the Office for National Statistics, just over a quarter (26%) of people said they had been hybrid working in the prior seven days, with some days in the office and some days at home – while 13% had been fully remote and 41% had been fully office-based (others were not working at the time of the poll).
Employment rights minister Justin Madders told Panorama that taxpayers should not assume that people who work from home are any less productive than those who are in the office.
“If we’re able to get more people into work because flexibility is available for them, that will help us reach our growth ambitions,” he said.
Madders added: “What we’re hearing from the most progressive businesses is they’re actually seeing the benefits of home working. It certainly helps them improve their recruitment and it also improves retention.”
Stanford University economist Professor Nicholas Bloom told the programme that there was value for employees in their teens and early 20s to be in an office at least four days a week so they could be mentored.
That said, his research has shown that hybrid working is neither more nor less productive than being in the office five days a week, and that there’s a sweet spot in terms of productivity and retention gains.
“In the studies for hybrid, you see once [employees] are in about three days a week, you don’t get any increase in productivity. It’s hugely profitable for business. That’s why hybrid has stuck. Employees like it and they don’t tend to quit, and productivity is about as good as it is with five days in,” he said.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
Employee relations opportunities on Personnel Today
Browse more Employee Relations jobs
