In defence of working from home

Working from home has had a terrible effect on my state of mind and it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

Which is why I want to defend it in a week of it being under attack. On Monday, on the BBC’s Panorama, Stuart Rose, former chairman of Asda, said he believes ‘productivity is less good if you work from home. I believe that your personal development suffers’. In the US, Donald Trump set the global social media agenda by ordering the end of ‘remote work arrangements’ for government workers. I get the sentiment, but completely disagree. In the UK it is not a problem to be fixed. In fact, it could even be a shortcut to levelling up.

When I retreated to Newcastle from London a decade ago, local journalism in the North East was almost nonexistent and freelance work was unreliable. I got a job on a local magazine for low pay, then academia on even lower pay, before Alex Kay-Jelski, now the BBC’s director of sport, tweeted that The Athletic was looking for a freelance editor. I’ve said this to Alex since, but it changed my family’s life.

The work was this: log on for an eight-hour shift, open Slack, find some filed copy on the system, edit it, update the spreadsheet. Within months I was doing five shifts a week. The pay wasn’t enormous, but it was more than I got doing similar shifts for the local paper. It was London money.

Which is the point. This work does not exist in the North East of England. It is all in London (increasingly publishers are saying that applicants must be in the office at least a few days a week). But by working from home I was able to access the London jobs market. Due to my lower costs being in the north I was able to do it at a good rate, competing with people in Brixton, Dulwich, Hertfordshire, wherever.

I went from panicking about where money was coming from and scrabbling for freelance commissions or university shifts, to knowing I had work lined up and it was enough. The fear went. I was less snappy with the kids. Foreign holidays became an option, just in the nick of time for my teenage son. All made possible by me sitting in my house with a laptop for eight hours a day.

The productivity argument is fair. As a freelancer I’m paranoid people might think I’m unproductive, so I constantly look for the next bit of copy that needs editing or a story that needs proofing. Do I make more cups of coffee than if observed in the office? Yes. Do I skive? No. But obviously people do take the piss, picking the kids up, running errands. We all know that happens, but it’s pretty obvious when it’s happening habitually, and bosses should intervene.

A bigger problem with WFH is what Rose said about personal development. It is, admittedly, a stunted professional existence. Slack is like looking at your workplace through a keyhole. I have very little idea what’s actually happening and am unable to fully contribute. I am hamstrung by my lack of casual accumulation of knowledge. Nothing is overheard. I have no way of inferring the importance of anything by the tone used or the frequency of its mention. My ideas wither. My influence is absent.

Then there’s the impact on state of mind. I know, typical working-from-home lot, obsessed with their own mental health. Although I’m less snappy due to better income, the kids’ home is now my office, where sometimes I’m dealing with urgent things that make me stressed. My shifts are until 9 p.m. and every other Sunday, so there’s a big crossover. Imagine it’s take-your-kids to work day every day. The arguments. The demands. It’s not ideal, and not fair on them.

So I shut the door of the spare bedroom and isolate. Every day, alone in a room, rarely speaking to anyone, communicating by text. When I worked in offices there was always a freelance weirdo. Now I am that freelance weirdo but reduced to a name, an avatar, rarely smalltalk, almost never jokes. Andrew is typing… Delete, it’s not worth the risk. Nobody knows what I had for lunch or what I watched last night. I don’t know them and they don’t know me. It’s not quite human.

But it’s still the best thing that’s happened to me and my family, financially. Without it, I don’t know how we’d have ended up. The best jobs are in London. We couldn’t afford a home in London. Working from home solved that. It meant we have enough money. We have a good life. I wish more families were able to do it, not fewer, and to remove that route to work would be devastating.