Working from home – is it ethical?

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), 30% of adults had regularly worked from home in 2019 and Personnel Today reported that pre-Covid, 5% always worked from home.

Hi-speed internet infrastructure and cloud-based productivity tools have facilitated the growth in home working. The steady increase in home working was a fact of life and town planners, businesses and workers made their business and personal decisions in the full knowledge of this trend. However, the trend was for steady growth in home working, as recently as 2019 a Deloitte report “Leadership for the 21st Century”, found that only 50% of leaders considered that flexible working for senior managers would be important in the coming decade.

The pandemic has exponentially accelerated this change – An ICM/YouGov survey reports that the projection for homeworking has increased in a matter of months to 81% of respondents expecting to regularly work from home for a proportion of their time. This sudden upswing, if fulfilled, may devastate some local economies and business sectors that depend on office workers.

Working from home might not be good for people’s mental health, although the jury is still out. UCL’s Covid Social Study found that 69% of adults feel worried or very concerned about the impact of the pandemic in their lives. A proportion of this figure will be down to the lack of socialising and loneliness while working from home. The financial benefit to employers in avoiding the capital and revenue office costs will be significant. But in highly competitive sectors such as creative and technology industries, it may be too early to tell if innovation and ideas will be negatively affected.

There is a lot that is still unquantified as it is too early to predict what the “new normal” looks like and its personal and business outcomes.

However, what is known and generally accepted is that a business has a duty to a variety of stakeholders, including their staff, customers, society and the environment. In a mixed economy, such as the UK, “new capitalism” expects business to meet wider goals other than solely a fiscal return to shareholders. This includes a duty to the business community in which they are based, the many hundreds of thousands of local retailers and service providers.

There is a chasm between the middle class and working-class experience. The jobs that stand to be lost in town centres are poorly paid, such as cleaners, café and pub workers, people who work in entertainment venues such as cinemas and theatres and taxi services. According to a YouGov survey in May 2020, among workers in ABC1 (higher income) households, 53% say they are now working from home full time. This figure is just 22% in C2DE (lower income) households. Without heavy state subsidies, railway, tube, and bus services are likely to be scaled back, with the consequent impact on jobs and diminished accessibility for people who cannot afford a car or who do not want to contribute to climate change.

Long term, increased homeworking is likely to be the norm for a lot of people. Dormitory towns will eventually see local services such as cafes and restaurants catering for their home-working population – this is positive. But it will take time to change planning regulations, convert buildings, finance the acquisition of repurposed buildings and to relocate businesses. 

However, for such a seismic shift in the places where people work, in such a short space of time, there will be significant repercussions in the short to medium term.

Of course, employers have a duty to look after their employees and must not force them back to their offices whilst there is a significant level of coronavirus in the community.

There is no right or wrong answer, but businesses should take into consideration the impact on the local economy in which they operate before making long-term decisions that collectively will have far-reaching implications for society. After all, as Rishi Sunak proudly stated, when this is all over, society wants to remember that we funded a “..collective national effort and we all stood together”.