Here’s why your boss is suspicious of you working from home

You’re not paranoid: employers really are worried about the short and long-term effects of flexible working arrangements

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When friends and I swap apocalyptic stories, this is how mine goes. The Prime Minister declares he’s had enough, he’s going to take action. Thousands of ADF personnel are deployed through the suburbs; they knock on doors, barge into homes and shout “get out of that home office, get dressed, put on proper shoes and get back into the office”.

It may not come to that but I’m guessing that’s how employers are thinking as we move into the second half of the year of working from home.

And as someone who has worked from home full-time for more than three decades, I can ­appreciate why.

As the pressure mounts for people to get back to the office, lots of reasons are being offered. Support the businesses in town; get lonely workers back in touch with colleagues; reignite the ­esprit de corps of the workforce; cut home energy bills; rebuild corporate profits (well, perhaps not that last one).

But there is one reason that won’t get much attention, if only because it’s so abstruse. You might call it corporate culture, you could call it corporate inculcation but it refers to the way our identities have been moulded to work, simply by the fact that we spend our time and energy at the workplace.

Obviously, lots of things create a corporate culture — bean bags and free beer help — but the fact of spending most of our days and sometimes evenings at our place of work, next to colleagues and bosses, plays a big part. We learn what’s expected of us, how to get ahead, who to pay attention to, who to avoid and what language to use simply by rubbing up against our colleagues (and that’s probably an ill-advised expression).

When we spend so many of our waking hours at the office, work assumes a big role in our life. It becomes the centre around which other activities take place — exercise happens before work, dentists can be fitted in on holidays, lunch is at the desk, family must wait until after work.

Glen Le Lievre

The sun in our life has shifted. Slowly and not even sneakily, people who are working from home have realised that work should be central to their 9-to-5 lives but it doesn’t have to be ­pivotal. They are running/swimming/cycling in the morning because without the commute, there is now time. They are sharing their lunch hour with children or partners. They can do home maintenance after work because there is still light. They can duck up to the supermarket in between Zoom calls and even start cooking dinner during the lull between calls.

What’s more, many are discovering that a working life without the commute, dressing up, sucking up or swapping streaming tips can ­defuse the pressure of that work/life balance they’ve been talking about for years.

We’re not talking nirvana. Parents of young children and people who live alone probably can’t wait for office life to resume and most workers seem to want to go to the office a few days a week. Office work will happen again but will it ever hold the sway over our identities and energies as it did pre-2020?

As a pioneer of a work-from-home life (HR would call me “the island”), I know how suspicious employers are of WFH and the fact that it now has an acronym makes them really worried.

The difference between WFH and WFO might be hard to quantify on a KPI sheet but here’s how I describe it. My priority is, firstly, on my work; secondly, on my readers; and thirdly, on my employer. Hope that doesn’t get me sacked but at least I’m not alone.

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