Are you ready to lose us?
On the politicisation of the flexible work debate.
This is a slightly different edition of Working On Purpose, in that it’s about some work I did in my main job as digital editor of Stylist. But it’s something I wanted to share here because it’s really resonated on social media, it’s a topic that’s super relevant to anyone who subscribes to this newsletter, and frankly there was so much more that could have gone into the feature had I not been mindful of the word count.
So, this week I was the writer behind the cover of Stylist’s digital magazine. You might have seen it on Insta or LinkedIn, but here you go if not:
The feature that goes along with the cover is this: ‘How the push for a return to the office is forcing women out of work’. I strongly, strongly recommend reading it. Yes, before you comment, it is indeed paywalled. It won’t surprise you that I’d also recommend subscribing. Stylist is such a great publication doing all sorts of brilliant work, and the support of readers means we’ll be able to continue doing that. Also, the subscription is a bargain; for £3.49 a month you get access to so much excellent content online, or you can do £69 for a year of VIP membership, which gets you freebies, discounts, invites to special events, and the print mag delivered to your door. End of sales pitch. But really, subscribe. This newsletter is free so if you’ve been thinking about supporting it, the best way for now is indirectly, by subscribing to Stylist.
Anyway. It’s a feature about how return to office mandates, and the general pushback against flexible and hybrid working, is pushing women out of the work. Stylist is a women’s magazine, hence the focus on women, so here’s where I’ll be more explicit. The backlash against flexible and hybrid working is pushing all types of people out of the workplace; ethnic minorities (those from ethnic non-majority backgrounds are more likely to quit due to a lack of flexibility), anyone with mental health issues, anyone with caring responsibilities, anyone who isn’t super wealthy, disabled people, anyone who would benefit from flexibility at work.
The pushback is also highly political, and I think that’s a key point to be considered when we’re asking ‘but wait, why are bosses so insistent on forcing us back to the office, even at the expense of losing talent?’. The Stylist feature went through multiple iterations and angle changes before its final version, but the one that got furthest along was an exploration of the politicisation of the work divide. We changed the feature because it just wasn’t working,1 but no one likes hard graft to go to waste, so here’s an edited version of that piece’s intro:
Once upon a time, the phrase ‘office politics’ referred to squabbles like which order you put people’s names in the email ‘send to’ box and Tim blatantly taking credit for your ideas in a meeting. Not so these days. Now, the workplace is a battleground where political divides and culture wars play out, with clear factions on either side of a cavernous split.
On the one side we have team flexibility. This is the side that are pro hybrid working, have asked their boss about the possibility of doing a four-day week, who throw around terms like ‘work/life boundaries’ and ‘psychological safety’.
The other side is all about power and productivity. That’s where you’ll find CEOs issuing 5-day-a-week return-to-office mandates, columnists decrying how the ‘entitled young’ have given up on ‘real work’, and politicians like President Trump calling for the end of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The reality is that we don’t all fit so neatly into either side of the split. You can want a return to the office without being anti-DEI, and just because you work from home doesn’t mean you’re a woke leftie. But this is how the divide is so often conveyed; as if it’s us against them, right and wrong, left or right. There are no shades of grey allowed, apart from in the suits you’re wearing on the commute. And there’s a real echo chamber happening as a result. As each view is more rigidly categorised, we’ve stopped hearing from those who disagree with us. The CEOs are not talking to the remote workers, so the remote workers think that the CEOs are out of touch and have no clue why they’re so gung ho about having everyone in the office. And on the other side, the CEOs aren’t talking to the remote workers, so assume that the remote workers are lazy shirkers. The polarisation rumbles on, with a complete block on listening and understanding the other perspective.
There have always been divides when it comes to the world of work: older generation versus younger generation, bosses versus workers, ‘bullshit’ jobs versus the ones that ‘really matter’. You can see these splits from decades of headlines (just look at how long the younger generations have been accused of being lazy), and politicians have long used their approach to work as a shorthand for speaking to their determined demographics. The Labour party originated as a workers’ rights movement, after all. Multiple presidential campaigns have been centred around the notion of the American dream and prioritising business owners. And a huge component of the petitioning for Brexit was the notion that foreign workers were ‘taking our jobs’. But the politicisation of specifically flexible working versus traditional office working is a more recent phenomenon.
It started, of course, five years ago, when the pandemic hit. Covid-19 was the reason that remote working went from a rare niche enjoyed by only a few professions to a major talking point. Lockdowns and consequential work-from-home orders showed many of us that our jobs could be done from home. When lockdowns ended and ‘normal’ life resumed, the question hung around: if we could work from home, why should we universally decide to go back to the traditional 9-5, 5 days a week in office? The split started there; those who saw no issue with reverting back to pre-pandemic ways of working, and those who were outraged by the great return to the office. Commentators and politicians noticed that split and widened it.
What followed were years of creaks and groans as the split grew, with political parties sticking their flag in either side. Boris Johnson, the Conservative Prime Minister at the time, called for everyone to return to the office, commenting that staff were “more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas” when at their desks and that working from home was an experience of getting distracted by making cups of coffee and eating cheese. Conservative MP Henry Smith described the left as “lazy” for wanting to continue to work from home, while Jake Berry joked about people “woke-ing from home” and Jacob Rees-Mogg left notes on the desks of civil servants to encourage them back. When Rishi Sunak eventually picked up the mantle of PM, he did so having already echoed the messaging that the Conservative view was for the office; in 2021 Sunak spoke about the benefits of being in the office for young people.
Across the pond, the story stayed the same. Elon Musk, now a key part of President Trump’s governing body, started out his ownership of X, then Twitter, by scrapping the company’s work from home policy and later described working from home as “morally wrong”, suggesting that remote working was unfair because there are professions where it isn’t possible. By 2025, just a few months into his second presidency, Trump ordered government employees to return to the office. He went on to suggest that remote and hybrid working is inherently unproductive: “Nobody’s going to work from home, they’re going to be going out, they’re going to play tennis, they’re going to play golf. They’re going to do a lot of things. They’re not working.”
On the other side, Labour jumped on calls for increased flexibility. Keir Starmer has voiced support for hybrid working, noting that a “culture of presenteeism” is bad for productivity. The Labour party has stated that one of its major commitments is to make flexible working “the default from day one for all workers, except where it is not reasonably feasible”, and their proposal to Make Work Pay includes reference to the ‘right to switch off’ act. This sect has plenty of scientific backing, and increased flexibility at work is broadly popular – a Gallup report found that workers who want fully in-office working are very much in the minority, while in a survey of Stylist’s VIP members, 98.5% said that flexibility at work was ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ important. There’s also evidence that workers don’t respond well to politicians bashing those who work from home; one survey found that eight in 10 London workers think it’s unacceptable for politicians to suggest home-workers are less hardworking.
All of this begs the question: why are politicians, bosses and others with influence now so virulently pushing for a grand return to the office? Why are people sustaining and deepening the divide, even as evidence mounts that hybrid and flexible working is a good thing? Heejung Chung, a sociologist, professor of work and employment, and the director of King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership points to a few possible factors at play:
A belief that working from home is bad for the economy
“We’ve had economic recessions for a number of different reasons, but companies and employers have jumped to the conclusion that maybe it’s remote work that’s to blame,” Chung explains.
Attempts to trim down the workforce
We know that when ordered to return to the office full-time, many people will quit. One study found that a third of professionals aged 25 to 34 would be more likely to resign if required to spend additional time in the office. Could the return to office mandates be a way to push certain workers out?
Chung suggests: “There are companies that have been pushing really aggressively to get people back into the office five days a week. Some people think this might be because the bosses wanted to restructure the workforce; they want to get rid of people. Getting people to quit looks better than laying them off.”
Investments in real estate
“Some companies have made a huge investment in offices,” notes Chung. “It looks bad if that real estate isn’t filled; it looks like the investment was a bad decision.”
Attempts to appeal to certain demographics
If politicians and publications want to attract business owners, real estate moguls, and other powerful men over to their side (for financial benefit, perhaps?), it makes sense to lean on talking points that these demographics are shown to be more likely to connect with.
Creation of an enemy
Politicians need enemies to direct followers’ attention towards. It’s a great way to make people feel like they belong to a group (as they’ve got an enemy in common). And this technique is especially effective if you choose an enemy based on a preexisting sentiment. Lots of us feel dissatisfied with work or the world at large… what if rather than blaming those in power, we all got angry about lazy home-workers playing golf?
Ragebait
Similarly, many publications thrive on using anger to generate clicks. “They’re selling people whatever makes them angry,” Chung notes. “Saying working from home is great doesn’t sell. Saying that people working from home are watching Homes Under The Hammer and taking naps while you’re busting your ass? That sells.”
The ‘ideal worker’ belief
Flexible, hybrid, and part-time working is linked in our minds with working mothers who, have been stigmatised for decades. If everyone were to work remotely or flexibly, it would become more acceptable for women to do so; thus disrupting the gender positioning of the status quo. One way to keep things the same? Demonise flexible, hybrid, and part-time working as an indirect way to cement the idea that women (the group most likely to benefit from flexible working practices) are worse workers than men.
“There are people that have always pursued an image of what we call the ideal worker, which is the image of a white, heterosexual male who has a supportive wife who does all their cooking, and cleaning,” Chung explains. “They push for that image of the ideal worker because that's what they have done and they do not see any other way of success being presented.”
Management struggles
A common refrain is that it’s difficult to properly manage employees when they’re working remotely or at different hours. “Much of this is because the managers have never been trained to organise and manage a hybrid workforce,” says Chung. “But rather than saying we need to learn and provide training to ensure hybrid working works for everyone, some companies will just end hybrid working.”
There are all sorts of issues playing out in the field of management. A study found that 82% of those who enter management positions have not had any proper training in how to manage, and this is contributing to unhappiness for their team and one third of resignations. Rather than providing training and reassessing the entire structure of management, it’s easier to blame problems on remote working.
Power plays
Chung explains: “Another reason managers want workers back is because working from home is essentially giving workers more power. Remote working gives you freedom and autonomy. Many managers fear giving workers control, especially in organisations that are very hierarchical.”
There are benefits in maintaining the divide, in polarisation and echo chambers and villainising flexible working. And the politicisation of remote and flexible working has been hugely effective. We now very much do see the split as representative of who people are; whether you’re a woke work-from-home-r or a Conservative business owner on the side of hard graft. As a result, we’ve stopped listening. We’re quick to categorise people depending on how they prefer to work and what they think is best out of going remote or returning to desks.
To tackle that polarisation, we’re handing over the mic. Ahead you’ll find a bunch of different people’s views on hybrid working, in the hope that we’ll get back to a place where we can talk about how to make work better without instantly being dismissed as a woke work shirker if you want to WFH three days a week, or as a right-wing capitalist sellout if you think that sometimes, the office really is ideal.
And then we had a bunch of different people explaining why they were pro-office or pro-remote/pro-hybrid (some of whom are included in the final piece instead, so if you’re interested you can read back on Stylist). The piece was almost 10,000 words long, which is clearly too much, but there were some other issues with it. For one, I was trying to stay neutral about the big debate… but I’m very clearly not neutral. I have a view, and it’s that enforced return to office orders and rejections of flexibility are a huge mistake and an even huger step backwards. I’m not at all anti-office, to be clear. I think collaboration is key and bringing teams together in one space is a great way to get that done. But making jobs entirely in-office, despite the wealth of evidence that they could be done better with a hybrid setup, is stupid (I can get away with saying that as bluntly here, less so on a respectable publication like Stylist!).
In my current role, I’m in the office two days a week and work the remaining three from home. I could not go back to five days in an office. Again, I like being in the office… but not for the majority of the time. A key reason why? I find the office way too busy and overstimulating to write and edit in. There’s so much chatter, so many interruptions, such frequent ‘can I just grab you for a chat?’ conversations. All of that is great for bouncing around ideas, but it’s not conducive to the deep work that makes up such a significant part of my job. When I’m planning my week, I consciously avoid plotting in any writing or editing on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I know that work is better done at home. Two days out of five not doing that work is fine; it’s when I’ll instead do the parts of my job that are best done in the office (idea generation with the team, management chats, learning). But if the environment where I spent the majority of my week made it difficult to do a major component of my role the majority of the time… that would obviously be an issue.
My major takeaway2 from working on this feature was to ask one question: who benefits?
Who benefits from being anti-DEI? Who benefits from having everyone in the office full-time? Who benefits from nudging certain people out of the workforce?
And conversely: who benefits from flexibility?
The divide seems to very much be wealthy bosses with immense privilege against workers who are questioning how work can be better. I know which side I’m on.
Sometimes a piece just doesn’t work. I am very grateful to work with editors who get that and who I felt comfortable going to the morning after staying up late and waking up early trying to force the article to work and saying ‘this is just not very good’. A big, big thank you to Alix for immediately seeing why the feature wasn’t working, sorting out a different cover feature for that week last-minute, and being generally patient and very kind. A lot of editors would have just called me a big dumb dumb for fucking up. Isn’t it nice to work somewhere that doesn’t happen?
My other takeaway for everyone is simply: giving workers more autonomy is obviously a good thing. Hybrid working is very clearly a great way forward that allows the benefits of being in the office with the benefits of working from home. It won’t work for everyone, though! Some people will need to be entirely remote, some will prefer to be in the office full-time. Thus… we need to give people the right to choose. No forcing everyone into the same ‘this is what work is’ box.
“Much of this is because the managers have never been trained to organise and manage a hybrid workforce,” says Chung.
This is no doubt true, but overlooks the fact that most managers (at least in my experience) have never been trained to manage a workforce *at all*. They're just promoted into management on the basis of solid performance in non-managerial positions and then expected to somehow morph into good managers. Magical thinking at its finest. If they're not going to pay to train managers in the first place, they're certainly not going to pay them to manage WFH.
I think your last note on the post gets to the crux of the issue, which is that different people thrive under different work conditions (and those situations will change based on life circumstances). It reminds me a lot of the U.S. education debates where everyone is advocating for a one-size-fits-all solution for teaching children. Reality suggests we need a menu of options—something that doesn’t make a great political slogan.