Office culture – Britons tip the work-life balance | Britain

FOR 23 YEARS, Richard Ramsey’s working life had the same essential rhythm, one that will be familiar to office workers everywhere. The hours changed, the pay changed, sometimes the job changed. But he always got into a car in the morning, spent 30-40 minutes crawling the four miles into the office, in central Belfast, and came back the same way each evening, ready to sleep and repeat. His colleagues at Ulster Bank had started to work more flexibly in recent years. But, as its chief economist, he assumed that the office was the only place he could work: he needed to be close to his beloved Bloomberg terminal.

It turns out he was wrong. In March, when covid-19 began to spread rapidly in Britain, everyone at the bank’s headquarters, like millions of other British office workers, was ordered home. Mr Ramsey experienced “teething problems” for a week, but he soon replicated his office set-up. When the office reopens, he will mostly stay at home, perhaps going in once or twice a week for meetings. He misses the camaraderie of the office, but that is outweighed by the time he saves on commuting and the flexibility to walk the dog at lunchtime. “It’s not going to go back to the way it was,” he says.

Workers everywhere find it tricky to juggle the competing demands of work, family and social life. But evidence suggests Britons find it trickier than most of their European counterparts (see chart). According to an index produced by the OECD, a typical Briton spends roughly an hour a day less sleeping or at leisure than workers in comparable European countries. And 12% of them work more than 50 hours a week—a larger proportion than in America and nearly three times as many as in Germany. Despite all this toil, Britain’s productivity lags behind its competitors.

The pandemic has upended these norms. Millions of staff have been furloughed; thousands of redundancies are being announced each week. But even the majority who have kept their jobs are doing them in different places and in different ways. On July 10th Boris Johnson began encouraging workers to return to their offices, in part to revive plummeting demand for firms that depend on old working habits, such as sandwich shops. That will be hard going since, on the whole, employees are keen on working from home. According to a YouGov poll published in May by Skillcast, a compliance-training firm, two-thirds of Britons would like to continue doing so, at least some of the time.

Until now, employers were the biggest obstacles to such flexibility. Research by the European Commission in 2018 found that while Britain has among the highest share in Europe of workers who want to work flexible hours or at home, a fifth of workers who had this option had never taken it up. Roughly a third of workers said doing so was discouraged by managers or would be viewed negatively by colleagues. In…