Home, bitter sweet home

When I was a little younger, I shared an apartment with a friend. He was a web designer who worked for several large companies. It didn’t make any difference to him what time it was, or whether it was night or day. He just sat there programming regardless of the hour. He was also a fan of the TV serial ‘The Walking Dead’, which he would often watch in breaks from his coding. Although what I was writing then wasn’t code but prose, we still ended up synchronising like an Olympic swimming partners and were soon keeping the same hours. For example, at 3 am we would go outside for a cigarette break and take a stroll around the empty streets of our estate, after which would have coffee at four and then later sleep until the afternoon. At the time work just seemed like one unending party: you had that feeling of being entirely unburdened, because – apart from deadlines, which were the only things that punctuated our lives – we were completely and utterly free spirits. We could work how we liked and nobody cared. On the other hand, it was also a time when the work was unending and interminable. Maybe the breaks were plentiful when we could have a coffee, some fun or a bit of exercise, and there might have been the occasional road trip, but in the end it was like being in the police force and always on duty.

As it turns out, this lack of balance is one of the main risks of working from home. Your work can take over everything: it eats up your time and does it at the expense of your personal life. Work doesn’t care about our need to rest, our family lives or our hobbies and – paradoxically – it’s when we work at home that we often work too hard. Social media platform Buffer has recently published a report that concludes that one of the three biggest problems with working from home is “not being able to unplug” – when people become incapable of disengaging from their work. Another big problem is clearly that there are a whole host of potential distractions lurking for the seasoned home worker, each of which can drain them of their effectiveness. In my personal experience, children are the biggest distraction that I’ve encountered with homeworking. A while ago a certain video went viral in which a nanny desperately tries to keep the children out of the room where their father was doing a television interview. In a lot of households the situation is now much the same, with the only difference being that most of us don’t have nannies.

However, returning to the report I mentioned earlier, the biggest problem of working from home is not these distractions, nor is it how hard it is to keep your private and working lives segregated. It’s the difficulty of communicating with our colleagues. And the second biggest problem is the loneliness. It turns out that chatting by the water dispenser (or the coffee machine, if you prefer) is of almost fundamental importance for most companies. It’s actually the gossiping – which some used to see as just skiving – that improves the exchange of information within a firm as well as both the creativity and the effectiveness of a team.

However, it should be pointed out that despite all the downsides (I’m not going to list all the advantages, because that would take another article), working from home currently has more advocates than opponents. In fact, those in favour of it now make up the overwhelming majority. My wife works in a corporate office on Rondo Daszyńskiego in Warsaw’s burgeoning Wola business district. A survey of the employees was recently taken and it turned out that 91 pct wanted to work at home for at least three days a week and two-thirds of that number didn’t even want to come back to the office at all. The findings of a recent report by CBRE told a similar – but not quite so extreme – story. Strangely, bosses are not very often surveyed, so what they might prefer remains shrouded in mystery. But my personal opinion is that it won’t be the workers who have the final say on the future of the office. For instance, just look at what Netflix has been doing. The streaming company recently leased 8,000 sqm in London’s West End, which is three times the space they had before. One CEO widely known as an opponent of home working has described the inability to hold face-to-face meetings as a “pure negative”. I suspect that when the dust settles and everything starts getting back to normal, the advocates of remote working will be unable to hang onto their recently-won freedom. I believe that the ancien régime of the office workplace will reassert itself and is not going to be overthrown at any time soon.