Do you have a ‘story’?

As someone who worked full time in the office for 24 years and has now worked full time from home for nearly 21 – always, in both periods, on the staff – I can see both sides of the argument. But I do think the sequence matters. I would have had no idea how to work for my employers if I had begun at home. Indeed, the entire concept of a newspaper then – and even, to a large extent, now – depends on its collective capacity to find, write and edit news fast. Much of that stimulus comes from being in the same building. On Monday, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, wrote a longish letter to all employees about work methods. He praised his company’s ‘culture’, but asked whether it is best set up to ‘invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other’. He thinks it isn’t, partly because people are not in the office enough. Amazon will now revert to pre-Covid arrangements, he announced, barring ‘extenuating circumstances’. They will be there five days a week. Amazon will also reinstate ‘assigned desk arrangements’ rather than hot desking. Interesting that this most modern of big businesses feels this way. Also interesting that one of the least modern of our major institutions, the British civil service, abetted by the new government, does not. Rachel Reeves could save billions if Whitehall now wrote to its hundreds of thousands of WFH employees to say that unless they return to the office by Christmas, it’s goodbye.