Back to the office
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many employers say they are desperate to get staff back into the office more often, but what's the best and fairest way to wean employees off remote working?
As companies from tech to banking grapple with this issue, Evan Davis and guests discuss the productivity pros and cons, the impact on company culture and career progression, and the future of the office space itself.
With many staff reluctant to give up the flexibility of remote working, is a hybrid model the answer to keeping them happy and how many office days each week should you go for? Plus, where do employees stand legally on return to the office requests, and what happens when workers simply refuse to comply?
Evan is joined by:
Kelly Beaver, CEO of Ipsos in the UK and Ireland; Stephen White, Chief Operating Officer of Santander UK; Ranjit Dhindsa, head of employment at Fieldfisher; and Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics, Stanford University.
PRODUCTION TEAM:
Producer: Simon Tulett Editor: China Collins Sound: Rod Farquhar Production co-ordinator: Gemma Ashman
(Picture: A businessman staring out of the window of an empty conference room. Credit: Chris Ryan/Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.2 | Hello and welcome to a new series of The Bottom Line. |
| 0:08.9 | We've always found on this programme, it's much easier to have a great conversation with guests in the studio with me face-to-face. |
| 0:16.4 | But it has to be said that outside of the Bottom Line studio, professional contact of the face-to-face variety has never quite recovered from the pandemic. |
| 0:26.1 | Working from home is the cause. |
| 0:27.7 | It's only possible, of course, for about half the workforce, |
| 0:30.8 | the half who are not fixing pipes, making cars, changing bandages or stacking shelves, that kind of thing. |
| 0:36.3 | But for the other half, it has |
| 0:38.5 | completely transformed the working environment. Now, for most, they're living in a hybrid world, |
| 0:45.4 | a day or two here, a day or three there. And we want to discuss that today. Employers are actually |
| 0:51.2 | often secretly desperate to get staff in more. Many are terrified to ask or indeed |
| 0:57.3 | to appear on this programme even discussing it. But we do have three to navigate us through this |
| 1:02.8 | new world of home and office. First up is Kelly Beaver, the UK and Ireland chief executive |
| 1:07.7 | of Ipsos, the polling and market research firm. And first, Kelly, |
| 1:12.3 | what are you doing at Ipsos? We ask our staff to spend the majority of their time in the office, |
| 1:19.3 | so 60% of their time. And that's time with their colleagues, but it could also be time spent with |
| 1:24.3 | clients. But it was March 2022, actually, when people started to come back |
| 1:29.6 | into the office again. So that's not that long ago. And by the September, we were 40% of time |
| 1:35.4 | based with other colleagues and also with clients. And we shifted this September to 60%. |
| 1:41.1 | OK, so three days a week in the office, if you can, or equivalent. I should say you have |
| 1:46.0 | done a very substantial piece of work on polling employers and finding out what's going on. |
| 1:50.9 | That's right, we have. And it does touch on the difficulty that a lot of employers are having |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.