Rory Sutherland and Matthew Lesh

Will Covid kill off the office?

To almost everyone’s surprise, working from home works

The most useless technology is the one you invent but fail to exploit. The Incas invented the wheel, but seem only to have used it on toys. Hero of Alexandria designed the first steam engine in the 1st century ad, but it was seen as a gimmick. The technological opportunity to escape from city-centre offices has been stuck in a similar limbo between invention and implementation.

In the 1970s, Nasa engineer Jack Nilles envisaged ‘teleworking’ from local work centres. In 1984, the Times reported that tele-commuting was the ‘magical buzzword’ on the US microcomputing scene. In the 1990s, the UK had 200 ‘telecottages’: rural workspaces with computers, communications and social support. More recently, there has been a proliferation of latte-sipping freelancers hunched over MacBooks at coffee shops and WeWorks.

Despite all the fanfare and substantially better technologies, little has changed in recent decades. Last year, just 5.1 per cent of adults in employment worked primarily from home in the UK, according to the ONS. This was barely an increase from 4.3 per cent in 2015. A larger number — about 12 per cent — spent some of the week working from home.

Then, suddenly, a plague descended. Overnight there was a mass exodus from skyscrapers. City streets emptied. The cafés and sandwich shops closed. Millions began working from home (now known simply as ‘WFH’). Half of employed adults are now working from home. And to almost everyone’s surprise, it works.

‘The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,’ Barclays CEO Jes Staley said a few weeks ago. Mark Zuckerberg has announced that half of Facebook’s employees will work from home within a decade. Many businesses, from Twitter to BT call centres, have already announced their employees can opt to work from home permanently.

Pandemics have lasting consequences.

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