While I have your attention By Charles Bannerman: Time to cherry pick best bits of working from home

One lasting and radical legacy of this pandemic will be the practice of working from home.

Rushed in two years ago to prevent physical mixing, the workforce adapted to it incredibly quickly.

Now, potential benefits completely unrelated to Covid-19 have emerged and could give this fundamental shift a longer-term future. However, there are also significant drawbacks, so where does the balance lie?

Top of the “plus” list must be a huge reduction in travel to work, saving on time, emissions and costs of commuting and parking. The implications are enormous.

Working from home also limits opportunities and temptation to spend money, often on unnecessary items. However, that creates consequences for city centre businesses such as sandwich shops and pubs, but should we be expected to spend money for the sake of it, simply to keep businesses going?

Our economy should be able to be dynamic and open to change. But I fear that one major consequence would be to accelerate the decline of city centres, of which we in Inverness are already painfully aware.

Home working does also have extra costs, especially heating an otherwise empty house. Should employers be expected to pass on their own savings on premises to their employees here? Or is this a reasonable quid pro quo for these personal economies I’ve just mentioned? Do tax rules allow sufficiently for this as a business expense?

And what about eternal Zoom meetings? I have an almost pathological loathing of meetings at the best of times, but find Zoom next to intolerable. It limits discussion, kills often helpful direct interaction and especially, I believe, distorts decision making. If you want to squeeze through a controversial or unpopular measure, choose a Zoom meeting where it will seem much more difficult to challenge. Face-to-face interactions are streets ahead.

Then there are the mental health issues of working in isolation with no better reminders of the rest of humanity than a screen and a telephone. Some compensate by going for an early morning or a lunchtime walk, but a big consequence of not having to travel is being stuck under house arrest for the whole day. In some occupations this is established practice, but long before this, our way of life was already becoming much less socialised. Is our sociable species not isolated enough already?

What about employers ensuring that workers are doing a fair day’s toil when only remotely supervised? Some employees actually find that they contribute more with flexible hours where you can, for instance, quickly mow your grass but then phone an extra client after normal closing time to compensate.

Some employers acknowledge this, but of course there are many jobs – gamekeepers, police officers, surgeons etc – that you simply can’t do from home.

I don’t think there’s any single answer here and the key is for employers and employees together to select the blend that works best for them, such as getting everyone in for meetings and discussion, with the rest of the week at home. The genie is now out of the bottle, so let’s cherry pick.

This virus has certainly created a completely new dimension to working practices. We now need to evaluate and optimise this and, occupation by occupation, select which have a longer-term future and value.

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