The giant working from home experiment and what it means for families
15 minute read
For those of us in the business of empowering parents, 2020 has been a hugely destabilising yet fascinating revolution in family life.
To put it in context, workplace change usually takes decades - the industrial revolution took 8 of them - and so, when companies shut down their offices and move to remote working in a mere matter of days, it’s every bit the biggest deal of our working lifetime.
Here at Playhood, we remain cautiously unconvinced that this instant pivot is permanent for all. But with the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, and UBS announcing that their ‘distributed’ workforce models are set to stay, it seems we’re at something of a crossroads.
What’s become obvious is that a lot of knowledge work can be done from home. And what’s more, a lot of people prefer it. So where does that leave us? The truth is it’s too early to say, but make no mistake: whichever road we choose, our experiences during this tumultuous time will influence the futures of working parents for decades to come.
An historic juggling-act.
At the beginning of this year - which let’s face it, might as well have been 1974 - working from home (WFH) was either the preserve of the self-employed or, for PAYE employees, granted by request. It was by no means new, but it certainly wasn’t the norm, and this left many parents at the mercy of a wildly varied set of policies and management styles.
Whilst not exclusively for parents, WFH has always been a no brainer for this group. As anyone with experience of this will tell you, hauling the whole family out of bed in the dark to get your child to nursery before the start of your working day doesn’t often appear in the ‘pros’ column when starting a family. Aside from knowing that you’re putting your child in childcare for longer hours than most adults even work, the transition from a rushed, emotional goodbye into the boardroom is one of the hardest bits about being a working parent. And one that rarely gets talked about.
Despite the promise of huge benefits, WFH pre-COVID-19 often felt hard won, a reward that came at a price. Traditionally, being physically present in the office was a proxy for loyalty. So, when parents can no longer stay late or do after-work drinks, it puts us at a disadvantage. We miss important decisions and worry about our status as a result. We feel the need to be visible and always ‘on’, responding to emails at 9:30pm to prove our dedication and efficiency: “We’re still here! We’re still valuable!” This might not have been everyone’s experience, but it was prevalent.
One of the reasons today’s WFH experiment is so important for parents is because remote working has, for the very first time, been mandated for everyone. And in doing so, we’ve been given the opportunity to step away from a dry debate on retention policies and management styles, and handed a chance to rewrite the playbook.
The pandemic has made us fundamentally question the role of the office in a paperless world.
Right now, as the pandemic continues its journey across continents, the world’s leading thinkers debate whether we will use offices in the future at all. A recent article in The Economist questions whether the office remaining dominant for so long represents something of a market failure, and whether the current shock to the system is in fact just giving us a new, better equilibrium.
There’s no precedent to turn to for answers - there was hardly remote working during the Spanish flu - but 2020 has given us the missing information that organisations needed to confront these questions and take the findings mainstream. Answers to questions like, ‘How crucial is being under one roof for productivity?’, ‘How does it affect our client relationships?’ and, ‘How much does it cost to move employees from office to home-based work?.
A boon for parents?
We know flexible working is very important to parents. The 2018 annual population survey showed that 56.2% of mothers and 22.4% of fathers had made a change to their employment after starting a family. It isn’t just a nice-to-have; for many of us it’s a necessity and we’ll change jobs or go freelance to get it.
Between 2008 and 2018, the number of freelance Mums, the majority of whom are classified as ‘highly skilled’, more than doubled. Partly driven by the 2008 economic downturn, it’s also been heavily influenced by social media, where going freelance is portrayed as a magical third option, sitting somewhere between being a stay-at-home mum and returning to a corporate job.
Even before the freelance revolution, London had the highest number of white-collar workers and commuters in the UK, which meant that we adapted to working from home far easier. At first glance, the WFH story seems dreamy. The possibility of less commuting, fewer pointless meetings, more flexible hours, and more family time is compelling. Then there are the cost savings - the travel, coffees, lunches and dry cleaning. Dare we dream - the move from the city to the big country house? Official well-being indicators found Londoners to be the most anxious and unhappy in the nation. We all know the benefits of a slower life, so if we were only sticking it out for our jobs, why now would we choose to bring children up here?
Certainly, for some Playhood members, COVID has jumpstarted permanent WFH arrangements that were unthinkable only eight months ago. It’s meant that some parents can have breakfast with their child and put them to bed for the first time. The possibility that this might level the playing field between parent’s roles is tantalising. And, a more balanced way of life where parenting and career occupy a more equal share of our time, can only be a good thing.
Wide-scale adoption of WFH policies could change the game, keeping more parents in PAYE and allowing organisations to retain talent (who just happen to have small children). But eight months in, has the sudden, full-scale shift been entirely successful or is the shine beginning to wear off? What's clear, as with everything that this pandemic has exposed, is that WFH certainly isn’t a level playing field and it means big changes ahead for the way we live and work.
Our ability to flex to home working depends on who we are and what we do.
Besides the obvious fact that thousands of professions simply have no option to work from home, for those that can, a key factor is the degree to which we can work autonomously. It might be ok sitting on your own at the kitchen table to research a paper, but can the creative sparks required for brainstorming and problem-solving a new campaign jump just as easily between thumbnails on Slack as they do over a coffee?
Dig a little deeper and the experience of office workers is anything but equal. Home working is easier for older workers, who over their career, have accumulated the social capital and skills needed to work separately. For workers who are younger or new to their career, the pivot is less seamless. Much is learnt socially in an office through osmosis. Not all office behaviour is positive - and this experiment has given us the space to challenge what wasn’t - but knowledge sharing amongst colleagues shapes us from clueless graduates to seasoned careerists. On the flip-side, adaptation to asynchronous communication might not come as easily to workers who are used to relying heavily on face to face contact.
Compounding this inequality is that senior, high earners are more likely to have a better home-based set up, a second parent not working or home help in the form of a nanny or au pair. Life at home in a plush office with super-fast internet and no small children interrupting your Zoom calls is immeasurably easier. We know the take-up of childcare places has fallen off a cliff since the spring/summer 2020 lockdown - Ceeda’s monthly reporting figures from early October showed nurseries and childminders were operating at an occupancy as low as 42% in some areas, with most well down on pre-COVID rates. Whether illness, income or fear are keeping parents from accessing their childcare, for those without home help WFH with a toddler has been proven to be a non-starter.
For many, WFH has meant living at the office.
Yes, technology has smoothed the shift but it’s also blurred the boundary between work and family. The speed of change meant we took for granted the importance of daily ‘transitions’, boundary crossing activities that we use without knowledge to help us psychologically detach and recover from work. As noted by Nancy P. Rothbard in the Harvard Business Review:
These transitions help to separate and preserve our distinct selves and provide the means for temporal, cognitive, and relational shifts. Maintaining boundaries instead of blurring the line between when you are “on” for one role and “off” for the other means that distraction is minimized. Creativity and flow can happen more quickly.
With whole families quarantined, the boundaries for workers are dissolving. In place of two transitions (home to work, work to home), there are now multiple transitions (work, look after a child, work, prepare lunch, work, play with infant, etc.). Each transition adversely affects concentration and productivity and, ultimately, creativity.
Nancy divides us into ‘segmentors’ and ‘integrators’. The way we organise our time and the spaces we inhabit are informed by which camp we fall into. Put simply, the former prefer clear boundaries and separation whilst the latter comfortably blend roles. Segmentors tend to struggle with home working; it’s likely they’ve never had to mix work and family before. Interruptions to their flow, like the constant check-ins to team apps like Slack and Teams, erodes available time for ‘deep work’ - crucial to many knowledge workers. This group simply doesn't relish the multitasking and domestic duties that come hand-in-hand with WFH.
Physical isolation and an increased use of technology were never going to be a great combination for our mental health.
It has become increasingly apparent - in case we were in any doubt - that human interface is critical to our wellbeing.
Humans are social animals, we learn about the world through body language, eye contact and incidental interactions. The adult social contact that comes from the workplace is often cited as a core need by parents returning to work. We’ve also seen that without these in-person check-ins, the possibility that managers miss the signs of burnout and team dysfunction is high. And, working parents are already high on that risk list.
As Dr. Stephen Porges puts it: “Long periods of time alone can lead to marginalisation to which our body reacts with a bias of negativity.” Quickly, notions of being overly concerned, neurotic, or paranoid about the situation will increase as we lack the opportunities to co-regulate” Moreover, banter and bad jokes are more easily dismissed in the office kitchen, but online, the potential for ambiguous comments to snowball into something more serious is greater.
Then there’s the unquestionable connection between our physical and mental health. When WFH full time, it’s easy to go for days without exercise and fresh air, particularly given stretched work hours as we struggle to clock off at the normal commute time or take a lunch break.
So did the experiment fail?
Well, in a word, no.
A recent survey of just under 1,000 firms by the Institute of Directors showed that 74% plan on maintaining the increase in home working, whilst more than half planned on reducing their long-term use of workplaces.
According to Global Workplace Analytics, employers in the US can save $11,000 (£8,200) a year for every employee who works remotely just half the time, in addition they get access to a far wider pool of talent. And now that so many companies have been forced to adopt technologies that enable remote working, they’ve already made the necessary investments to keep going. The cat is out of the bag.
But Ben Rogers at the Centre for London reminds them to think beyond the cost savings. Organisations are drawing down on a finite fund of social and human capital built up through years of face to face interaction – a fund they will have to replenish at some point.
And the jury is still out on the question of productivity. A recent BBC study showed that productivity went up by 16% during lockdown, but such studies have been criticised for relying on problematic self-reporting at a time when many fear redundancy and parents are juggling work and childcare. Wider studies have, however, shown that going remote has increased staff retention, a core metric for happy, productive workers. At Gitlab, the management team believes the net benefit, including the productivity increases and property cost savings they’ve seen, equals $18,000 (£13,500) a year for each worker.
When Google spent millions a few years back unpicking the make-up of their most productive teams they found that ‘psychological safety’ was the key ingredient. Described by academic Amy Edmondson as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ it seems obvious that chatting online won’t build the kind of psychological safety that making your team mates a cuppa will. It’s precisely that stuff, the stuff that doesn’t feel like work at all, that helps us grow.
A zero sum game?
Chris Bedi of ServiceNow, says the terms remote work and work from home are soon going to disappear. “There’s just work, and it’s work from anywhere,” said Bedi, recently. But does it have to be a zero-sum game?
At Playhood we don’t think so.
There’s no doubt that radically flexible remote working is long overdue and will positively impact parents' lives but we think it will always work alongside the traditional office, not replace it. And, to avoid the potentially detrimental effects on us and our businesses, we must tackle the challenges and ensure we don’t just survive the change, but thrive from it.
The truth is, for every study published in favour, there’s one to contradict it. Which, for us, only serves to give weight to our belief that WFH can fundamentally be a great thing, but few of us have the systems, structures and bosses yet to make it work well. It’s no wonder considering the speed of the change.
As managers, we need to rethink how we measure productivity, enable knowledge sharing and create psychological safety. As employees, we must learn the boundaries between our deep work, admin, personal and family time, as well as the spaces we inhabit.
All this means opportunities for a whole raft of new products and services rising to the challenge. From productivity guides from the likes of Heights, to toolkits for healthy home working from Working Den and membership clubs like Leapers for those lacking a real team, the sheer volume of critical thinking and creative ideas is impressive. Can AI and VR mitigate the loss of connection? The all remote company eXp Realty uses a VR platform called VirBELA to create a place for distant team members to gather in avatar form. And there’ll be more companies like Full Fat Agency who have given up their London office and distributed part of the cost savings to employees via a co-work budget, to spend as they wish. Others will move to a hub and spoke model, with city centres HQs working on a reduced capacity.
We predict a surge in parents WFA (working from anywhere) or more likely for this group, WNH (working near home).
Keen to be close to our children and revelling in the newly discovered benefits of the local community (how nice is it knowing the greengrocer’s name?) but needing adult company and a change of scenery at the same time, the recent surge in Playhood applications is telling. We think the future will be full of new models like ours.
Playhood Work Space
In our vision, big co-working in the city declines and a new breed of small spaces pop up in neighbourhoods, be it in shops, branches, homes, pubs or libraries. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to diversify local high-streets, usually dead on weekdays but now a hub of social and professional interaction. And for any purpose-driven organisation who sees the community as a stakeholder (and most will now tell you they do), this represents a golden opportunity to reconnect with the people you serve.
Of course London will need to reorganise, but we knew the world of work was rapidly changing even pre-pandemic, and if there’s one place that has the ideas and energy to bounce back, it’s here. Now that the door to workplace change has creaked open, we’re peering through to see a whole new world of possibility on the other side. It might feel like 2020 has brought nothing but stress and worry, but by forcing us apart, it’s our hope that it might eventually bring us all closer together.
Karen Partridge founded Playhood and is mum to a two year old.
Jen Barratt supports Playhood with content and is mum to a five and two year old.
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