Working from home ‘debate’ should step out of the 1980s

Here we go again…

It’s like the last five years never happened.

Nigel Farage’s recent ‘have a go Britain’ speech included a snippet on working from home that will land badly with many because of its failure to recognise the realities of modern life.

Weirdly calling for an ‘attitudinal change’ (whatever that means), his speech to Reform supporters said:

“People aren’t more productive working from home. It’s a LOAD. OF. NONSENSE. They’re more productive being with other fellow human beings and working as part of the team.”

Many of his applauding supporters looked like they hadn’t worked in many years. I’ll come back to that.

Who is he talking to?

Leave aside the obvious point that remote workers are part of teams who do work with ‘real human beings’ for a moment.

When I hear statements like this, almost always by older men, I wonder who they’re aimed at.

Is it young mums and dads in full time jobs, trying to balance work, childcare, and extortionate living costs?

Maybe it’s the workers priced out of cities, who dread facing daily two-hour each-way commutes just to sit in an office and ‘work’?

Or is it business owners competing for talent that seriously doesn’t want to be in an office five days a week?

These people define ‘have a go Britain’, after all. But statements like the one above don’t speak to them. Polling actually suggests it’s older Reform and Conservative supporters who appear to dislike working from home the most. So when Reform and Conservatives trash flexible working as woke nonsense, it’s clear who they’re talking to – and it isn’t me.

If Nigel Farage wants a workplace that’s older, childless, and more blokey, his speech sets the tone for that.  

And if he pushes for a 1980s hangover of 10 hours a day at a desk and coming home after the kids are in bed, ‘have a go Britain’ won’t thank him for it.

Flexible working works, if you work at it

This latest speech is one part of a desperately poor national ‘debate’ about how, when and where we work. All political parties and too many media commentators fall foul of it.

The reality is that most people don’t work from home, although this varies a lot between jobs and income levels.

Critics put out attack lines without any evidence to back them up. What does ‘productivity’ look like if where you work affects it? Does it mean that people can get more work done? That’s not our experience when we’re together as a team, and that’s fine. But nobody goes beyond the vapid statements that people work better when they’re together. We’re people after all, right?

Yes, sometimes that’s true. But it doesn’t just happen. And it can slide into mediocre and unproductive work.  

A £14 Pret lunch seems steep, I’ll admit. But there is a grain of truth to @therookiemanager’s statement on Threads.

I hear regularly about colleagues in larger organisations ‘coming together’ once a week to sit on Zoom calls all day with teams in other offices. It’s fair to ask whether this is really ‘people doing their best work when they’re together’. If ‘best work’ is the aim, the challenge for leaders is to create the time and space for that to happen.

The ‘debate’ I see rarely comes close to addressing this, although there are great examples of businesses and teams making it work for them.

People, purpose, place – getting the best out of work

As ever with vexed debates like this, it helps to start by asking what you want to achieve. How do you support a work environment that brings the best out of your team?

For me, it’s about having decent places to work from, giving people space to do what they need and making time for each other, not just the tasks.

We have a ‘work anywhere / any time’ culture that comes with expectations on communication and behaviour. It’s helped us to build a committed, engaged team based in locations spanning from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.

We come together as a team at least twice a month. I travel to Exeter every other Tuesday to check in with two colleagues who live near there and plan alongside them.

I wonder whether how we do things even counts as ‘work’ in the eyes of some people. But it keeps us connected and maintains progress. And I know we’re working harder than ever.

Trusting people and treating them like adults is key to this, as is being straight with each other about what’s going well and what’s faltering. It’s earned us recognition as a good employer, which in turn helps us attract good staff. Clients are happy and absence is very low, with just two days sick taken across the team last year.

This is work in progress for us and there are challenges. I can understand why it doesn’t work for everyone. But I’m convinced that it’s the right approach for us, for now.

And that’s why I resent politicians telling us it doesn’t work. They have no business telling us how we should run our teams.

Working in 2026, not 1986

I reckon Britain stands a much better chance of ‘having a go’ if politicians focus on policies that support productivity. Things like incentives to hire, frictionless trade, connected places, investment in skills, and affordable housing. Businesses constantly say these are the biggest concerns facing them today.  

Rehashing Norman Tebbit’s 1980s ‘get on your bike’ line gets nowhere near addressing those concerns. We’ve got to move this discussion to where most working people are.

Whatever your view on this, and however you work with your team, I wish you all the best. I’d love to hear your thoughts as to how you’re addressing this.

If you’re interesting in reading considered reflections on this subject, I recommend Bruce Daisley’s Substack and Julia Hobsbawm’s book The Nowhere Office.

And if you want to hear the team’s perspectives, we sometimes write about this in the company Substack which comes out on the first Friday of the month. Catch previous editions here and sign up below.