“Work from the office”

Almost every week, there are articles in the news extolling the virtues of home working. These are generally written by people working from home or representing groups of people who work from home, who love saying how much extra time is saved by removing the daily commute and therefore how efficient it is (are turkeys about to start voting for Christmas, as we say in the UK!). Then there are equally as many business leaders with the complete opposite view to this—that actually, home workers do less than 50 percent of the work of someone in the office, as well as not contribute to the drive, culture, and entire fabric of the company.

To some extent, in the UK, I blame the political leaders who rushed during the COVID-19 pandemic to say that home working should be the new normal and that everyone could now use Teams and other technologies to communicate, so there was now no need for people to waste time going into the office. The reality, however, of running and building a business and all the associated performance management, which most politicians know absolutely nothing about, is very different.

Employees need managing, and as soon as you remove that daily and often hourly interaction between supervisor and team member, efficiency slips. From our systems data, we could see very early in lockdown that the call times of our telesales, account management, and credit teams dropped by more than 50 percent within weeks of the forced move to work from home during COVID-19. In IT, in which keystrokes are a good measure of activity, we also saw dramatic reductions, which was a view shared by many other local senior business leaders I knew.

People are now walking the dog, going to the gym, meeting friends, having their haircut, going shopping, playing padel, waiting for an Amazon delivery, doing the school run, and carrying out countless other things that they do not normally do during work hours. The savings in time from the commute have now completely evaporated, and there are now big chunks of the working day when people are literally unavailable. Home working has even created new products such as mouse jigglers, aimed at trying to stop bosses from understanding how little employees are really doing!

Also, you can’t manage and develop teams properly when they are remote, as the communication and interactions you get online are completely different from the ones that you get when you are face-to-face. Our new, and especially our young, people need to sit next to experienced employees to help them build the knowledge and way of working required to develop them into our managers for the future. This is really highlighted by our graduate program, which has shown us just how much effort is needed, but also just how important this face-to-face time is, as these young people join the working world.

Needless to say, we don’t have a flexible-desk policy either, and we believe that the relatively small extra part of a person’s full-up cost of having a specific desk for them added to our overheads is massively outweighed by the disadvantage of not having them close to their supervisor and team.

Having said the above, I also understand the importance of a good work-life balance. I soon realized, after working nearly twelve hours a day, seven days a week in my first two years, that I didn’t actually achieve more than if I had worked a more normal five-day week. I ended up so tired on a Monday morning and much less efficient than if I had properly rested over the weekend. Luckily, I did learn that lesson quite early on at UK Fuels and, in year three, got into a much better routine of work and life. Today, I want people to go home at night on time and forget about everything Radius, so hopefully, they can look forward to the challenge of working hard and helping the business develop when they arrive the following morning. Work has always been an important anchor and constant in my life, and I believe the in-office version has been hugely positive in helping me to enjoy my downtime more.

In the last six to seven years, as Radius has reached a new stage in its life cycle, it has been good that we have been able to invest in improving the overall look and feel of our facilities that now span more than twenty countries. In Crewe, which is our biggest base, we now have gyms, cafés, a yoga area, a music room, a bar, a coffee shop, and many different collaboration spaces. We also put on a free breakfast, which has proved very popular for every employee who wants to try to beat some of the local commuter traffic. We do want to be flexible with our employees and try to accommodate specific requests, but I’m afraid I won’t be changing my mind on the fact that I believe it is best for the business if people work in the office.

On the good news side, we believe we have had an unexpected boost since COVID-19, as many of our competitors followed a very different approach from ours, with many of them going to a hybrid model and some even moving completely remote. We have definitely felt a benefit from this over the past couple of years in the form of their reduced competitiveness in the marketplace, which has helped us accelerate customer and volume growth in several of our key geographies. I’m not sure how long this will continue, as there are now regular press articles about these companies returning to a full five-day-a-week-in-the-office operation after eventually waking up to the fact that the tail was beginning to wag the dog!