It is a year since I packed up my laptop and left my desk in London, with its stunning view of St Paul’s Cathedral. I have been back once. Barely a day has passed when I have not read, or written about, the future of offices.
Employers have a lot invested in office property. But they should be more exercised about how staff spend their time once the pandemic lifts, than whether they sit in sanitised cubicles or at socially distanced hot-desks. The prize will go to the enterprise that can make the most of how its workers use their limited hours, as it always has.
I still remember when my father came home from the textile company where he worked to say he had shifted to a newfangled system called “flexitime”. That was the mid-1970s, around the time flexible working, pioneered in Germany, earned a mention in a Financial Times analysis of “the way to better staff morale”.