WFH "costs nothing". WTF? Polly Toynbee is a fool

WFH  -  “It’s free, it’s sensible and it makes workers happy. The government needs to accept that this is the new normal”

Guess which idiot wrote that?  Well, no prizes, it’s Polly Toynbee, in a Graun piece entitled Labour has been sucked into the WFH culture war. It should know better. 

We’ll let her make her case, as she bewails what she detects as government reverting to neanderthal office-bound working practices. 

… many workplaces have thrived because of it … A perverse strain of rightwing thought opposes almost any social progress that improves other people’s lives … Zoom meetings save time and wasteful travel, employers are free to hire talent from anywhere in the country, and employees have escaped escalating property prices in London and steep commuting costs. WFH has been a boon for the climate, too; according to one US study, two to four days of remote working a week lowers carbon emissions by between 11% and 29% … hybrid working policies [are] key to attracting talent … people value the ability to work from home two or three days a week about the same as they would an 8% pay rise.  Does [the government] want to be nice to employees, or nasty? … new employment rights will help civilise working life. Growth-boosting plans to get “economically inactive” people with disabilities or caring responsibilities into jobs will only succeed with maximum flexibility. And WFH, remember, is free, which makes it look like a very sensible policy in a year when large pay rises seem unlikely. 

Setting aside the ridiculously hyperbolic conclusion one is supposed to infer from that deliberately misleading sentence on climate benefits, we can assess the force of what she’s saying, before entering the counter-arguments (which, true to her miserable form, she does not acknowledge at all).

Efficiency:  yes, and nobody disagrees, Zoom etc as a facility is a fine thing to have and can make for all manner of efficiencies.  So what?  The telephone has been around for well over a century.  I attended my first “teleconference” in 1986: the resolution of the mug-shots wasn’t great, but even then the sound was fine and it had the ability to switch to doc-display mode.  Presumably Toynbee inhabits a tech-free world of Graun chatterers who imagine it was invented in 2020.

And …  and?    Well, excepting only the “costs nothing” point which we’ll return to, everything else in her case is basically “staff like it”.  Well, staff say they like a lot of things: more money, extra holidays, free childcare, slap-up canteen lunches, company car, health insurance, non-contributory pension, golfing away-days …   and they all take their place in a businesslike assessment of how the trade-offs are going to work out.  So let’s get to the trade-offs, eh, Polly? 

It’s really odd because I would have thought lefties, softies and tree-hugger types would have been the first to acknowledge the absolutely critical importance of direct human contact.  Actually, many of them would.  Humans are designed for face-to-face interactions, it’s utterly intrinsic in our makeup.  Whenever this breaks down, inhumanity takes hold.  That’s an extreme statement of the case, but in a less dramatic form: you try negotiating a complex deal, or making an important new hiring, by any other means than regular over-the-table contact, F2F.  And over the coffee-break – and over a beer afterwards.  I guarantee that in direct competition with companies that insist on a solid percentage of time spent face-to-face with colleagues and counterparties alike, the company that says OK, WFH, sounds fine to me, just check in online a couple of times a week will lose out very significantly over the long run.  And everyone who is serious about getting things done is coming back to this view, albeit belatedly.

What we are running into is the world of people who advocate that anyone can self-diagnose with PTSD or ME and be “supported” by the state as they skulk in their bedrooms.  That any child who doesn’t like school or isn’t top of the class needs an individual SEND plan + tutor at school, or can be “home-schooled”.  Contrary to what people with this mindset believe, there can’t be a high percentage of staff who are truly more productive “WFH” four days a week.  For the avoidance of doubt, there will of course always be some people with genuine PTSD / ME / SEND problems / high unsupervised personal productivity etc etc.  But percentage-wise, not many.  Toynbee is extrapolating from her own working practices and assuming the rest of the world runs like hers: a self-motivated journalist tripping around from home-office keyboard to restaurant-lunch-on-expenses, and back to keyboard again.  The woman is a fool.

So:  “WFH is free”?  Nope, it comes at a serious cost:  net efficiency /  productivity / effectiveness at its most functional and cash-oriented; and erosion of face-to-face human contact at its most elevated.

As with many issues, the key is resolving the trade-offs.  Toynbee, pathetic polemicist that she is, doesn’t even acknowledge them.  She is a fool and I diskard her uterly, as Nigel M would say. 

ND

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PS, this is all in the same week as Toynbee writes “Ignore Musk, ignore the critics – you’ll feel the benefit of Labour’s policies in your pocket before long“.  What more do we need to say?