Ben Lowry: The homeworking revolution should boost the quality of life of huge numbers of employees

Like many customers, I rarely set foot in a branch now, managing my account mostly online.

In lockdown I avoided phoning them, knowing call facilities were struggling, but recently I could only resolve an issue by call.

As I waited in a queue, the recorded message said call handlers might be working from home, and asked callers to be patient if they heard interruptions from domestic life in the background.

Covid-19 has shown how many jobs can be done from home. When I joined the News Letter in 2007 it was impossible to work at home. You could email a story in from outside the office, but that was all.

But for a decade or so we have had editorial systems that allow reporters to work on a story remotely, so that they see on-screen what appears on the page. A front page story about Coleraine could be worked on from Colorado or Cologne, so long as you have a web connection.

After that editorial system was put in place, it was possible for people to work from home. Yet rarely did anyone do so. Why not?

Well, mainly for cultural reasons. We assumed that coming into an office was necessary.

There were prejudices too against home working – that it would create a temptation to say: I’ll just nip to the supermarket this afternoon, and work harder tonight.

Such prejudices were shared by managers around the world. The Covid-19 lockdown has shown that many fears were misguided.

Yes, people can evade work at home, but that was often possible in an office too. Most employees have a certain amount of work to do, and it is in their interest to get it done efficiently so as not to stray beyond their allocated working hours.

This pandemic has, by a lucky coincidence of timing, happened at just the point in history when technology made mass home working feasible.

Most News Letter journalists began working from home in the weeks before the March 23 lockdown. Yet we have daily teleconferences that keep teams connected and reduce the sense of isolation.

There are problems: it is harder, for example, for a reader to get in touch by phone than it was before. This, though, is also only accelerating a trend that was happening anyway, of email being the key way of making contact with journalists.

Another problem is the lack of social contact that happens in workplaces, and the inability of new staff to sit beside, and learn from, experienced colleagues.

Also the tensions at home if people are working in a cramped space around children or partners who are also working in the property.

But there are big advantages to working from home, perhaps the most notable of which is the time and money saved on commuting. This is one reason why staff working at home in many organisations are slow to return to offices.

One thought experiment I have been doing is this: what would people do if companies said you can work from home but each day you do so your pay will fall by 15%.

Thus if you work from home permanently your pay falls 15% overall. If you work from home two days a week out of five, it will fall by two fifths of 15% (6% overall).

This is not say that pay cuts are desirable, but rather to be realistic about such scenarios. Having smaller officers might save some struggling employers enough money to stay in business.

It might also suit many employees. They save money on the commute and save travel time (which is literally priceless: a billionaire cannot buy an extra second).

Such employees would also be able to move home away from urban centres, where housing costs are high, to cheaper remote locations — places where they might want to raise a family (or just be closer to the countryside).

House prices are cheaper in parts of the Ards peninsula that are a long commute to Belfast than parts of Co Down that are nearer it.

Such savings are all the greater in an around big cities. Employers such as Facebook have suggested such a future: home working for lower pay, because such workers will not need to live in a costly city.

Like many people I have spoken to since lockdown, my ideal future would be a mix of home and office working — perhaps half of each.

But even if only partial home working becomes widespread, it will have a revolutionary impact.

If, say, 50% of people who work in a city can work from home, and if those who can do so on average for half of their working week, then it will slash the number of commuters each day by 25% (half of 50 is 25).

That would ease rush hour for those who do have to commute, and be good for the environment too.

There is no doubt it would cut money coming into cities. But it could transfer much of it to towns and villages, where home workers would spend more of their income.

Covid has boosted changes that were already happening. We might be entering a period in which the quality of life rises for hundreds of millions of working people globally.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry: UK and unionist weakness and apathy on legacy has emboldened Ireland

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