With a strike on the London Underground starting this evening and running through tomorrow—sparked by disagreement between staff and bosses over pay and conditions for those working on upcoming "night tube" services—the capital will soon ring with the cries of those who find themselves unable to get to work. Many will likely resort to doing what they can from home.But we should all stop whining and think about what we can learn from this. Britain would be a better place if more people worked from home. Those in the capital should tell their bosses to treat tomorrow as an experiment in remote working, and send them these four arguments if they only get a stream of emailed expletives in response:Fitter, more productive...
In 2014, Stanford University academics compared the performance of remote employees to those in the office at Ctrip, China's largest travel company. The study found that, contrary to the assumption that remote workers might slack off, they are in fact 13 per cent more productive than their desk-bound colleagues. Most of this improvement came from an increase in the amount of time spent working, with the employees in the experiment taking fewer breaks and less time off for sickness. Such findings have been supported in the UK. An LSE study found that employees who are able to work from home are more productive "because they are less distracted, grateful for the flexibility and the time they save on commuting is ploughed back into work."
...and happier
Those working at home enjoy higher satisfaction levels when compared with their counterparts in the office. People who work from home some of the time and those who spend most of their time on the road reported higher job satisfaction and engagement with their jobs than any of their colleagues, according to Acas, an HR company. Some 20 per cent of Acas office workers reported being dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their working patterns compared with just four per cent of those who work at home at least some of the time. Greater satisfaction at work could also lead to improvements in measurements of society's wellbeing. This indicator has been
increasingly viewed as a useful supplement to GDP measurements which focus solely on economic factors. David Cameron, speaking in 2006, described the task of increasing society's sense of wellbeing as "the central political challenge of our times."
The pound in your pocket
Your wages will stretch further if you don't have to go into the office every day; workers' pay packets seem more generous without the cost of commuting. A study by Hay Group—a management consultancy—in 2012 revealed the significant proportion of wages spent by commuters who use rail travel. In Birmingham, manual workers travelling for longer than 50 minutes each day can expect to spend 21 per cent of their earnings while in London the figure is 17 per cent, before taking into account the costs of tube trains and buses.
Equal opportunities
Disabled people could benefit from a world where working from home was more widely acceptable. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found in 2014 that disabled people are around four times more likely to be out of work than non-disabled people. Facilitating work at home could have a significant impact in narrowing this gap and encouraging firms to hire more of them. A Living Standards Survey conducted by Scope in 2013 found that almost half of unemployed disabled people said that flexible working would have helped them stay at work but they were not given this option. If more of these were in work, not only would the individuals themselves benefit, but firms across the UK would have access to a larger skills pool and the state could see a fall in the benefits bill.
