The future of homeworking: the pleasures and the pitfalls

The experience of remote working could become an entirely convincing substitute for the physical office, something completely different from using a laptop on the kitchen table, says Steven Cutts

People could soon be sitting in front of the virtual office they left behind with colleagues who appear full size (PA)

For many of us today, normality seems so far away it’s hard to remember exactly how it felt. But if you speak to an office-based professional, there are some anecdotes that they all repeat. Most of the time, you can see the hierarchy at play. The boss sits at the front of the office and it’s impossible to get to the exit without him seeing you. If he decides to stay after 5pm then his staff are left with a dilemma. Maybe he’s watching them out of the corner of his eye. The most ambitious among them stay with their computers to the bitter end, pretending to be doing something useful. In the weird and wonderful world of office politics, this is how people get on.

Then comes the lockdown. Out of the office, you can do pretty much anything you like so long as you complete your project on time and to a reasonable standard. Of course, there were people working like this long before Covid and long before they invented the internet, but lockdown has opened people’s eyes to the possibilities of remote working in a way that they couldn’t previously see.

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