Acas Chief Executive Susan Clews has worked in Acas frontline operations and as Director of Strategy and Chief Operations Officer.

In 2013, we commissioned research on how homeworking was fairing for us as an organisation (PDF, 1.68MB, 103 pages).

Summarising the report in the policy paper ‘

Agile but fragile: The changing face belarus phone number library of UK homeworking – what works best for whom?’ (PDF, 151KB, 8 pages), Acas senior researcher, Andrew Sutherland, said that the secret to effective homeworking was “moderation in all things.” In other words, a mixture of working from home and from the office seemed to provide the best of both worlds for many of our staff.

Fast forward a few years and what feels like several lifetimes, and a new piece of research on homeworking comes to some very familiar conclusions. To quote Andrew again, he warned that managers “must be willing and able to relinquish traditional notions of how best to manage performance, usually based on direct supervision, and adopt new ways of motivating and monitoring their staff.”

It seems as if his words have not been heeded

with research from the Wales Institute of Social and germany cell number Economic Research (WISERD) (PDF, 764KB, 65 pages) finding that “a common fear among employers is that without physical oversight, employees will shirk and productivity will fall”.

Figures for UK staff who work exclusively from home may be down from the what is your goal for learning a language? lockdown peak of 43%, but numbers are still historically very high at 20%, and the predictions about if and when people return to the workplace offer a mixed picture.

A survey from People Management, for example, shows that some employers, like National Grid, are keeping their workers at home; some are beginning to get people back to the office, and others remain undecided about the best course of action.