Forcing people back to the office reeks of management insecurity, and tracking them on their computers is Orwellian. What hybrid working can do is make people happy and bring life back to rural communities.
The countryside is alive with people working from home (WFH). Before covid, few would have thought that there would be so significant a difference in the way we work. Yet country people will increasingly have to come to terms with a change that will have a profound effect on the way our communities operate.
People who only need to be in the office for two or three days a week can make living in the country a reality that is wholly different from mere weekending. They become residents rather than regular visitors. About 42% of British workers are now working at home at least once a week, compared with about half of the German and Italian workforces and a significant increase over about 30% of workers in France.
Even so, there are managements everywhere who are determined to push back into the old ways. This is often only a reflection of management insecurity. It is more difficult and inconvenient to manage the hybrid working that is the emerging pattern. However, this challenge is not going to turn the clock back to the pre-Zoom days. Technological advance has presented us with this opportunity and covid has forced the pace of change. What we thought was only possible face-to-face or in an office can now be achieved from anywhere. Once experienced, there is no going back, not least because human beings, once they know something, have no ability to ‘unknow’ it.
We must accept that there are still the determined returners. Deutsche Bank has ordered everybody back into its offices, despite the lack of evidence that the previous more flexible working reduced productivity. This month, accountancy firm PwC has moved away from its flexibility programme and told its 26,000 workers in Britain that they will be tracked through their computers so that their managers will always know where they are. This Orwellian decision is excused by the suggestion that the intrusion will allow the firm more effectively to look after employees’ mental and physical health!
However, these attempts to return to the old ways contrast markedly with the growing number of lively and successful businesses that, spearheaded by international companies such as Atlassian, don’t mind where their employees work as long as they deliver.
It is hybrid working that has enabled many to base themselves in parts of rural Britain from which it is not easy to commute five days a week. These people increasingly play a part in village life, pick up their children from the local school and use local services. Some will simply accept what is offered, but others can become the drivers for change and this provides us long-standing country people with both a challenge and an opportunity.
We don’t want a continuous train of vehicles from Waitrose, Ocado and Amazon; instead, we want customers for local produce, shops and pubs. The local welcome could lead to a new source of support for better rural schools and improved services, new faces at parish council meetings and new ideas energising our rural communities. We must offer a welcome, however, and there are still too many instances of newcomers feeling shut out.
Of course, there has to be reciprocity. We’ll be rightly scornful of those few new arrivals who object to the sound of the church bells, of tractors and combines at harvest time and of the cock crowing at dawn. The outreach has to be ours, however. This new way of working can bring new life and a younger generation to ageing communities. Rural England need not be retirement England. We have much to gain from the newcomers and it is for us to make the change a success. Welcome them warmly and we will all thrive.
Agromenes is the magazine’s ‘Countryside Crusader’ and writes a column for Country Life each week
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