The New Normal interview series: Embracing the remote working revolution

‘Because of the Covid-19 crisis, a great deal of the working world had to become more flexible virtually overnight. I have been campaigning for companies to adopt flexible working practices for years and faced a lot of skepticism, people said you couldn’t break the nine-to-five. While forced remote working is very different to effective flexible working, what the crisis has proven is that it is possible for people to work effectively without being in an office. When money is at stake, anything is possible. And if companies hadn't Zoomed in, they would have had to shut down. That is the bottom line.’

‘I started the Flex Appeal – a campaign to push for flexible working for all in a bid to reduce stress-related burnout and increase productivity – in 2015 after my own flexible working request was denied. The reason given was that it would open the flood gates to others seeking flexible working. And I remember thinking while I quit, “Well, what is the fear of opening those flood gates?” How many good people were businesses losing because they couldn’t work nine to five for whatever reason?

‘It made me start questioning the system we're in. A system that was born in the Industrial Revolution. The author Douglas Coupland said “I believe the nine-to-five is barbaric, we will look back on it as we do child slavery in the 18th century”. I think he is right. In our TED Talk we drew analogies with battery hens and free range chickens. And the point is that free range chickens create better eggs. There must be a more humane way of working than strapping someone to a slab of MDF under a strip light.’

‘With Covid-19 we've burst the bubble on “It's impossible, it won't work.” Remote working has worked, but now we need to talk about the new normal, how do we keep that momentum up? How do we stop returning to the old archaic model? I think we're now moving towards this new normal where there'll be two sides. One side will just adopt flexible working as a norm, but then you'll have the other side. The side that says working remotely under lockdown didn’t work, that people were slacking, which is the word that is constantly used in relation to anyone working from home. But working from home in the context of a pandemic is not working from home in the normal sense. If you are a parent and your child’s school is closed, you're doing home-schooling, childcare and potentially an eight-hour working day.’

‘I really hope that tech and trust are at the heart of business moving forward. The biggest kickback we've had has been, “Well, if I let everyone work from home, they're just going to be watching television in their underwear.” But that's a recruitment issue, that's somebody who would potentially be stalking their ex on Facebook in the office. I think the new normal will edge away from, “Should we implement flexible working?” to, “Are we recruiting the right people?” Because the questions for business have to be, “Why don't you trust your people to work anywhere and everywhere?” “Why do you need to see people to know what they're doing?”’

‘Flexible working can also help some businesses that have struggled during the crisis to reduce costs. Once you've recruited the right people, you can free up office space that you no longer need, reduce your footprint, save money. And at a time when, for health and safety reasons we need to be separate, you can use this time to rebuild your business, but not feel that you need to do that within the confines of bricks and mortar.

‘I think we'll always have offices. I think we'll always have HQs, but not everyone needs to be there all the time. It is a fundamental shift in the way that we work. There's a lot of reluctance because we're creatures of habit and we're creatures of routine, and we've been working in this hulking great nine-to-five wheel for so long that a lot of people are going to struggle to get off that. But the thing that's happened here is that we've been forced to. So I think that we have a breakthrough and should push on. In my flex work utopia we won’t even have to have these conversations about doing things differently, it will just be woven into the fabric of our working world.’