It is a Friday afternoon in August, and Talia is sitting in her bedroom typing away at her keyboard.
Or at least that’s what her boss thinks she’s doing.
In fact the 27-year-old, high-flying City lawyer is basking in a French vineyard with her family, sipping wine and enjoying the sunshine.
She was due to go on holiday from Monday but, instead of losing one of her valuable 27 days of paid annual holiday, Talia told her boss she was ‘working from home’.
Using these three magic words, she was able to sneak off to France for an extra day’s holiday unnoticed.
‘I hadn’t seen my family for a while,’ she told me. ‘It was the Friday before a week of leave so I assumed I wouldn’t be given any urgent work.’
But for Talia – like so many employees these days – the ruse is no one-off.
Almost five years after Covid-19 forced staff out of their offices, many are refusing to surrender their precious prerogative to work from home (File image)
‘I’ve got too many examples to count,’ she laughs when I ask whether she ever bunks off while ‘working’ from home. ‘Just last month, I joined an online work meeting on a train because I was on my way to Europe for a concert.’
Given that Talia’s colleagues come into the office only about once a week, it is no surprise her absence went unnoticed – even though she works for one of the country’s top law firms.
‘No one’s ever told me I’m not allowed to work in other countries,’ she says. ‘So I figure that as long as I’m online at the right times, it’s fine.’
Almost five years after Covid-19 forced staff out of their offices, many are refusing to surrender their precious prerogative to WFH.
Drinkers have flocked back to pubs and holidaymakers are jetting off to exotic locations again – but many offices remain inexplicably empty.
Workers I spoke to across the public and private sectors almost tripped over themselves to brag about the ways in which they had duped their employers while ‘shirking from home’.
‘It is a point of pride,’ one boasted over a drink. Because, despite the claims of many in the Labour party, working from home often means doing the bare minimum.
So it is alarming that, given the doom-laden economic inheritance he claims to have received from the Tories, Sir Keir Starmer wants to roll out a radical new Employments Rights Bill that would enshrine the right to work from home into law.
This would mean employers having to establish why they expected staff to turn up to work, rather than the other way round.
Last week, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds claimed that this drastic overhaul would make employees more ‘motivated and resilient’, ending what he called Britain’s culture of ‘presenteeism’.
But many of Labour’s own ministers don’t agree with his Panglossian assessment.
Earlier this week, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall admitted that young people in particular – who often live in shared rental accommodation and lack anywhere quiet to focus at home – can find home working particularly difficult.
For them, the practice can be a ‘nightmare’, Kendall said, during a fringe event at this week’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool.
Earlier this week, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall admitted at the Labour Party conference that young people can find home working to be a ‘nightmare’
Her words echo those of Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has said there is ‘value’ to being in an office, that she would like to see civil servants at their desks and who claims to ‘lead by example’ by turning up to the Treasury every day.
So if some of the Cabinet get it, why is Sir Keir so determined to foster Britain’s new culture of slacking?
In recent months, a growing number of business leaders have started demanding that staff return to their desks.
Bosses at Dell, JPMorgan and Amazon all believe that in-person interactions improve culture, increase collaboration and are more effective.
In a memo sent to all employees earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said: ‘When we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.
‘We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practise and strengthen our culture.
‘Collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler and more effective, teaching and learning from one another are more seamless and teams tend to be better connected.’
And he is right.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, more than a dozen people who regularly work from home unashamedly told me how they often avoided work while doing so – opting instead, for example, to sunbathe in the garden or go to the pub for a drink.
Alicia, a 24-year-old civil servant, told me that one afternoon she had sex with her boyfriend – who was also WFH – while logged on to a government Zoom call.
‘I made sure to turn my mic and camera off but I was really worried it would malfunction,’ she giggles.
Remember, you are paying this woman’s salary.
Another woman I spoke to – who works in fashion – booked herself into a fake Microsoft Teams meeting in her shared work calendar for half an hour so that she could ‘get down to business’, as she put it, with her boyfriend.
‘No one called me because on the shared calendar it looked as though I was already in a meeting,’ she tells me.
Other tech-savvy employees have discovered ‘hacks’ that make them appear productive but allow them to enjoy themselves instead.
At Sharon’s sales company, bosses track the number of outbound calls employees make in a given day using the office’s Customer Relationship Management [CRM] system.
They believe this means they can monitor how many sales calls staff members are making. But they are wrong.
To get around the tracking mechanism, Sharon switches the customer’s phone numbers in the system to her boyfriend’s mobile number. So, when making apparent business calls with a potential customer, she is in fact calling her boyfriend.
The names in the system remain – only the number changes – so her bosses have no idea what she is doing.
She lets each call to her boyfriend run for around 10-15 minutes, so it looks as if she’s had a long, fruitful conversation with a potential client, before hanging up.
Using this method, she has managed to enjoy a day out at the zoo, gone to brunch with friends and even fly to a wedding abroad while still ‘smashing’ her calls targets.
‘If it’s a hot day then I’ll just spend it sunbathing in the garden,’ Sharon boasts.
‘I’ll normally postpone my meetings for the following day when it might be raining. I can use my WFH days to get all my ‘life admin’ done or just to sleep in.’
Rachel, 40, has taken it even further. ‘I’ve been working from home for years,’ she says, ‘and over that time, I’ve come to realise just how much of my workload can be streamlined.
Writer Sabrina Miller says ambitious young people beginning their careers are complaining it is difficult to learn from their seniors if their boss is at home
‘Using AI, I’ve managed to create bots which draft my emails for me. Because of this, on a typical nine to five day, I probably do about two hours of actual work.
‘No one has ever questioned it. In fact, once a colleague complimented me on how ‘personal’ and ‘thoughtful’ one of my email responses was – little did they know it was my AI.’
Writing in a newspaper last week, a professional copywriter confessed they have even been working two jobs at the same time because they’ve never been required to visit either office.
In the anonymous article, they explained: ‘With the commute being from my bed to my desk, there’s so much more time to play with . . . And with tools like [team messaging app] Slack, you can be available to work for two different places.
‘I’m much more productive if I compartmentalise my day. I do a bit of work for one place, then have a little break, then do a bit of work for another place.’
Taking company-wide Zoom meetings from a swimming pool, sleeping in until midday and watching episodes of The Office for hours on end were just some of the other ways people told me they spent their WFH time.
Such confessions provide an alarming insight into the calamitous waste of taxpayer money and human talent that comes with this lazy mentality.
Recent studies show that Britain’s work from home culture is becoming increasingly entrenched – a huge problem when our productivity is so much lower than our international competitors.
The number of people ‘hybrid working’ has significantly swelled since the pandemic ended.
Last month, around 23 per cent of adults admitted to hybrid working, compared with just 7 per cent during the early days of lockdown.
Data from the Office for National Statistics also found that 37 per cent of people admitted to working from home ‘all of the time’ or ‘some of the time’ between August and September 2024.
Of those, around 13 per cent worked from home every day.
Around 40 per cent of people aged 30 to 49 admitted to working from home at least one day per week, while approximately one third of people aged 50 to 69 said they did, too.
Younger workers – many of whom have never experienced five consecutive days of work in an office – are increasingly refusing to join companies that don’t offer ‘flexible’ working.
A recent poll found that 49 per cent of Gen Z (aged 16-24) said they would quit their jobs if they were forced into the office more than three days a week.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, influencers are advocating laziness instead of hard work by promoting ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘conscious unbossing’.
‘Quiet quitting’ is doing the absolute minimum in a job, while ‘conscious unbossing’ means to refuse ‘stressful’ middle-management positions.
In some cases, this behaviour happens before someone has even started their job.
More than a quarter of UK employers have reported instances of new starters failing to turn up on their first day, in a new workplace trend dubbed ‘ghosting’, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
But Gen Z aren’t always the problem. They too are victims of WFH.
Ambitious young people beginning their careers are complaining it is difficult to progress in their jobs or learn from their seniors if their boss is at home most days.
Yet it seems little can be done to stop Labour’s dogmatic march to entrenching this pernicious and destructive culture ever further.
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