Home working isn't a "benefit"

Draconian attitudes to working from home are a bigger problem than stay-at-home slackers

- Barry Collins

There’s a crystal-clear indicator of whether I’m being productive when I work from home - it’s whether my invoices are paid at the end of the month. As generous as Tim doubtless is, the hard-nosed Alan Sugar side of him wouldn't settle my invoices if the news and features pages weren't filled with copy I'd written and edited. If I were sitting here playing Football Manager and watching Bargain Hunt all day, the Bank of Tim would decline payment.

So it always make me want to thump my head into the desk when I read stories of companies struggling to work out if employees are actually doing their jobs when they let them work from home. We're now five years on from the great work-from-home experiment that was Covid, and yet companies are still flailing around when it comes to measuring employees’ output.

I've witnessed the wild extremes of demands being placed on employees working from home. I know of one homeworking employee of a giant tech corp who's regularly expected to attend meetings in the middle of the night - 4.30am isn’t unusual - because they're part of an international team and it’s no great inconvenience to disturb their sleep. After all, their bed is only 20 feet from their home office.