Are home-working managers holding back the careers of younger staff?

Bagging a hybrid working role was a pyrrhic victory for Olivia Crowshaw. While the 23-year-old relished her new-found freedom, remote working soon took its toll professionally. “I felt like I wasn’t getting the most out of my career because I wasn’t meeting as many people,” she said.
Managers at the London cosmetics company where she worked were either fully remote or coming in just once a week, making the office a lonely place for Crowshaw. “You’re going into an empty office and it just felt like it wasn’t worth the effort. It was a 50-minute drive [from her home in Bedford] for me to sit in silence,” she said. While she was glad that her colleagues were able to juggle other responsibilities, including childcare, more effectively when working remotely, she felt she was missing out.
After two years, she decided to start looking for a different job with more in-person interaction. She landed a role at the Spanish bank Santander and generally works three days a week in its Milton Keynes headquarters.
“I have built stronger relationships in such a short amount of time because you chat to colleagues about things that aren’t to do with work — you’re not just joining meetings and then leaving again,” she said.
Instead, she has regular meetings with managers who are frequently in the office and on hand to help. She said it has provided a boost to her career. “It definitely has a knock-on impact on how much you learn from your work, but it is also about the networking and getting to know more people,” she said.
Santander wants more of its employees to follow suit. This month, the bank became the latest company to tighten its remote working policies, telling its 10,000 UK employees that it expects them to be in the office at least three days a week. PwC, Britain’s biggest auditor, has also asked its 26,000 UK staff to return to the office for a minimum of three days each week. Both firms hope that this will improve on-the-job training for younger staff, such as Crowshaw, who have suffered as many of their middle-aged mentors work remotely.
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While workers are slowly coming back to the office, middle-aged employees have been the most reluctant to return. Figures released this month by the Centre for Cities think tank showed that 18 to 24-year-olds in London spend an average of 3.1 days a week in the office, compared with 2.5 days for 35 to 44-year-olds and 2.7 days for those over 55.
Results from a survey of 10,658 people over the past month by the recruitment agency Hays, shared with The Sunday Times, found that 45 per cent of 20 to 29-year-olds are fully in the office, compared with 38 per cent of those in their forties. The data flies dispels a common misconception that Generation Z (those born between 1997-2013) are perennial remote workers and in fact shows that millennials (born 1980-94) are the ones lagging behind.
Perhaps more troubling, Hays found that the trend was becoming more entrenched. Across all age groups, the proportion of staff working fully in the workplace fell year on year. The drops were most pronounced for older workers. For workers in their forties, the proportion opting for hybrid work jumped to 44 per cent from 39 per cent a year earlier. For the oldest cohort, the figure climbed from 35 per cent to 40 per cent.
Firms are taking notice. Laura Hinton, the UK managing partner of PwC who was behind the return to the office diktat, said her firm was concerned about the effect of remote working on training. PwC is one of the nation’s biggest graduate employers. “So much of what we do depends on learning and development, not just professional qualifications but on-the-job learning from others,” she said. “This is almost always best done face-to-face and requires people at all levels of seniority spending time together.”
PwC’s Big Four competitor, EY, allows teams to make their own rules about where staff can work. But Justine Campbell, EY’s managing partner for talent in the UK and Ireland, agreed that excessive home working could affect training. “We aim to strike a balance between the needs of our clients, the benefits of in-person collaboration and the personal flexibility our people need,” she said.
EY’s decision to start measuring staff attendance through turnstile data earlier this year was seen as a crackdown on remote working. Sources close to the firm denied that this was its intention and said the latest quarter showed that its London offices were at 80 per cent occupancy.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University in California, who has studied working from home extensively, said that the generational divide was driven by where and how employees live. “When I poll my 20-year-old undergraduates they are typically wanting to work remotely at most one day a week,” he said. “They say it is more social being in the office, it’s easier to learn and their flats are often shared and small, so not appealing for home working.”
Childcare costs are also a key factor. The data shows that remote working peaks between the ages of 30 and 50, when employees are most likely to be juggling raising a family and stand to lose the most from coming into the office, especially during the school holidays.
Bloom said that commutes play a role. Older workers in leafy suburbs are faced with a lengthy, expensive train commute compared with their younger colleagues, who are often clustered in London.
The reticence of the middle-aged to return to the office has dragged London behind other international cities. The Centre for Cities found that London has been among the slowest of surveyed cities to show a return to workplaces, with employees in the capital attending the office an average of 2.7 days a week compared with 3.1 days in New York and 3.5 days in Paris.
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Rob Johnson, an analyst at the think tank, said this was driven by the UK’s comparatively high public transport costs. “We have found that people tend to cite travel costs, rather than an aversion to working in the office, as the most common reason for remote working.”
He pointed out that in Paris, where employers are obligated to subsidise at least 50 per cent of their workers’ commuter costs, remote working is far less prevalent. In neighbouring Belgium, employers cover a minimum of 75 per cent of staff commuter costs. While employers are not mandated to stump up for transport costs in countries like Italy, often trade unions secure similar agreements for staff.
Some fear that as the managers languish at home, the City’s productivity will fall. This is because London loses the “agglomeration effects” of employees clustering together. Johnson said: “This will have implications for individual people’s skills and development, but also in aggregate for future productivity. And given London seems to be on a slightly different trajectory from these other cities, you might see London’s competitiveness slide … if you’re taking a long-term view.”
However, Abigail Marks, a professor at Newcastle University’s business school, said that the effects of remote working on productivity were more ambiguous. While collaboration can be lost, she said, remote working often means that employees work longer hours more intensely as they are removed from office distractions. “It takes away a scenario of where I am walking to a meeting and run into a colleague and catch up over the next ten minutes,” she said.
In the tug of war between employers and employees, companies have been using more sticks than carrots to bring their staff back. Citibank is understood to have told staff that end-of-year bonuses will be contingent on turning up, while Amazon has told its UK employees that perennial remote workers will be overlooked for promotion.
However, Claire McCartney, the policy and practice manager of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that return-to-office diktats could be self-defeating and risk alienating employees. This can be seen in the civil service, which found itself embroiled in a war with the last government over its remote working perks. Former minister Jacob Rees Mogg left notes urging workers to get back to their desks. Employees at the Office for National Statistics are also refusing to comply with directives to come back to the office for two days a week.
The effects on training are critical to the civil service. Junior civil servants run the risk of going weeks without seeing their mandarin bosses.
However, one civil servant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the push back to the office had harmed morale. “People have shifted their whole lives because they were promised the chance to work remotely. We are happy to come back, but when it makes sense, not just to meet arbitrary political ends. I for one, feel that I get just as much done remotely.”
It is not just training that some staff feel they are missing out on. Crowshaw at Santander said that a remote-working culture deprives younger people of the networking skills necessary to progress in their careers. She also that working in person has also allowed her to make deeper friendships with her colleagues. “I want to meet people and I want to then spend my lunch time with my co-workers who then invite somebody else,” she said.
Another tactic used by companies is, where possible, to make their offices nicer places to be. Last year, Santander cut the ribbon on its £150 million UK headquarters in Milton Keynes, Unity Place, to try to lure people back to the office. An imposing glass tower from the outside, Unity Place is equipped with street food stalls, cafés and a rooftop bar.
It is certainly working for Crowshaw, who loves her offices so much that she invites friends from outside to lunch with her at the canteens. “It’s actually incredible. It’s crazy that an office can look like that,” she said.