Is work from home working?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Working from home became the norm for millions of us around the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic, but now three years on some major employers are insisting on their employees returning to the office, for at least some part of the working week.
The levels of working from home currently vary, depending on the country and its culture. The Netherlands are looking at legislation to allow employees the ability to work remotely, whilst in Japanese culture the preference for employees tends to be going into the office. So how do we navigate a future where both business and personnel needs are met to provide a good work life balance.
This week on the Inquiry we’re asking ‘Is work from home working?’
Contributors: Jose Maria Barrero, Assistant Professor of Finance at ITAM Business School, Mexico and Co-Founder of WFH Research project Dr Saori Sugeno, Lecturer in Corporate Governance and International Business, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey Román Gil, Partner in law firm Sagardoy Abogadas, the Spanish firm of Ius Laboris, global employment law alliance for multinational companies. Dr Wladislaw Rivkin, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Trinity Business School, Dublin, Ireland
Presenter: Charmaine Cozier Producer: Jill Collins Researcher: Matt Toulson Editor: Tom Bigwood Technical Producer: Kelly Young Production Co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
(A working from home environment / Getty images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That 56 seconds it took me to swim that gold medal win. I looked for that feeling for 30 years and I never found it. |
| 0:12.0 | A podcast about the people behind the medals on the podium from the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:24.0 | Welcome to The Inquiry. I'm Charme Cozier, each week one question for expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:36.0 | July 2023. Work, or rather a particular way of working, is having an appraisal. |
| 0:44.0 | During the Covid-19 pandemic, doing your job from home became the norm for millions of people around the world. |
| 0:51.0 | Fast forward three years to now and many of those remote workers want to keep it that way. But Google, Meta and the biggest bank in America, JPMorgan Chasing Co, |
| 1:02.0 | that just some of the companies telling staff to return to the office for some or all of their working week. |
| 1:09.0 | It seems major employers are having second thoughts. |
| 1:13.0 | So this week we're asking, is work from home working? |
| 1:22.0 | Part one out of office. |
| 1:28.0 | What the pandemic did was basically forced society on mass to try out working from home. |
| 1:35.0 | And what that meant was we were able to learn that it works and we were able to experiment with it collectively. |
| 1:42.0 | Jose Maria Barrera is assistant professor of finance at ITAM, one of the top universities in Mexico. |
| 1:50.0 | He also co-founded the WFH Research Project, which has been gathering data and running surveys on remote working since just after the first lockdown started in 2020. |
| 2:03.0 | So the idea I think before the pandemic that was fairly widespread is that if you're working remotely, you're basically out of the side of your manager or your employer. |
| 2:12.0 | And so it was fairly easy to use the economist's word, Shirk. |
| 2:16.0 | Basically not working as diligently as you would be in the office. |
| 2:20.0 | The pandemic basically changed that because by forcing everybody to be at home, they kind of made it basically not a faux pas to say, hey, I would like to work from home. |
| 2:30.0 | And it sort of broke that kind of narrative that when somebody asks to work from home, it must be because they don't want to work very hard. |
| 2:38.0 | WFH Research questioned several thousand people in the US about their working arrangements. |
| 2:44.0 | It also runs a global survey in 34 countries. |
| 2:48.0 | So interestingly, we see some variation in the amount of working from home across countries. |
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