Thank you for your report (Hybrid working makes employees happier, healthier and more productive, study shows, 16 June), which helps to widen the debate on the impacts of post-Covid working from home (WFH) to include those difficult-to-measure areas, not just of productivity but also other aspects of work, such as happiness, health and wellbeing.
However, one problem is that it is not so simple, as it depends on what is meant by such an elastic concept as WFH. Rather than a simple either/or binary divide of WFH versus working in the office, we need to calibrate work on a spectrum, allowing more blended, mixed or hybrid forms. WFH could be contingent on thinking about answers to three key questions about the work.
First, depth – what sort and type of work is being done eg routine, administrative, procedural versus knowledge, conceptual, intellectual? Second, scale – what breadth does this working encompass ie how individual-versus-team-based is it? Both of these are impacted on by the third dimension, temporal – how long is such working for ie hours per day, days per week, weeks per year? Such nuance can help shed light on and take some of the heat out of the debates, as well as help leaders/managers and their employees reach agreements and move forwards more amicably.
Prof Chris Rowley
Kellogg College, University of Oxford; Bayes Business School, City, University of London
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