The Elephant in the Room

"Working from home, the elephant in the room!"

Essentially my point was, and remains, that working from home is predominantly caused by the fact a lot of people neither like or feel in anyway engaged with what they do.

Work is a necessary evil rather than something to enjoy.

I had assumed this would slowly improve as we adjusted to a different culture of work, to my surprise I appear to have been wrong, it seems to be getting worse.

Below I am going to highlight some of the issues and then talk about where the positives are and the actions we can take.

I am lucky enough to currently be working with FTSE 100 businesses through to start-ups of just 3 people. The context, cultures and demographics are infinitely diverse, however they almost universally face similar issues.

Those issues are connected to (but not necessarily caused by) the work from home culture we have fallen into without thought or planning.

This is causing intergenerational conflict, a lack of engagement in work, reduced leadership development and simply put not a lot of happiness.

I will say, as I've said many times before, I 100% support flexibility and a grown-up approach to balancing all of life's needs, but we are currently not achieving that.

All of the following examples come from the conversations we have day in and day out with business leaders:

Disengagement with work- People walking out / shutting down when a project deadline is at the end of that day. Yes this is 100% more nuanced than people being lazy, but whatever the rationale, it causes resentment, conflict and an unhappy client.

A lack of confidence in communication - see quiet quitting (still a thing), ghosting (definitely increasing - even among middle-aged professionals...)

Also shown by the number of teams who now meet online but with cameras off and predominantly muted... Where is the Team culture? rapport? and sense of collaboration?

Where are our leaders? - we are now five years past initial lockdowns. Those young people who entered the workforce are now at the stage of becoming mentors, role models and leaders to those entering the workforce in 2025. However, they have not been given the opportunity to develop any of the necessary soft skills. Hardly surprising if you are working from home, or your manager is refusing to come in more than once a week to support you.

Boredom - I heard one young professional claim that working in London was boring, this was after pointing our that most weeks they work fully remote from their flat. Well of course that is boring...

Working hours - I know of a FTSE 100 who plan to see no more than 2 to maximum 3 hours of productive work when their teams work from home. This is an important one, because this is not leadership dictating anything, this is not even team or public knowledge it is simply behind the scenes unpublished data based on the average outcomes across thousands of team members. Not great for productivity and will only increase happiness if the starting point is that you don’t like your work.

Confidence - we are increasingly seeing a drop in the confidence levels of the people we meet. Many say they just want flexibility, but what they really mean is that they are now so accustomed and more comfortable at home that they are now intimidated by the idea of going into an office. The level of anxiety we are seeing at the mere thought of having to go into the office just a few days a week is genuinely surprising.

We are actively de-skilling our workforce, and it's not making anyone happier.

It doesn't have to be this way, and we don't have to go back to the old way of doing things.

Let me repeat that, I'm not suggesting or calling for a return to old systems.

The good news is that as always, EVERY person wants to feel that they are adding value, doing good and contributing to the world around them, but that dies off when people find themselves in a position of unhappiness.

We will never be happy by only trying to be comfortable, and to hide from challenge at every opportunity we get.

So the solution sits in bringing these two points together.

It is incumbent on employers to realise that in modern society a lot of people simply are not interested in trading their time for some money, there has to be more to it than that.

There has to be a purpose that aligns with that intrinsic desire to have a positive impact.

Almost every company can find purpose in what they do.

Profit is the life blood of impact, without it we simply fail, but a profitable business can and should put people and society on at least an equal footing with shareholder return.

If you do this and clearly articulate how your actions will positively impact the world around you and how individuals can contribute to this, you create a greater sense of purpose, alignment and ultimately team engagement.

It is then incumbent on individuals to embrace the fact that a life well lived, a life enjoyed, a life in which you thrive requires you to step out of your home, to step into challenge, to step into difficulty. In that process growth and confidence are found and built.

The world has changed, it is changing fast, and we’re not going back. But if both leaders and their teams can embrace the challenge, and not just seek comfort, we can learn to balance the priorities and working styles of a new world.