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Working longer hours from home: can we find the off switch?

Andrew Pakes · 3 February 2021

Compared with before the pandemic, we’re working for an extra two and a half hours each day and taking shorter lunch breaks, according to new research. It begs the question: are we working from home or sleeping at the office? 

A year into the pandemic, many of us are still glued to the kitchen table or working from the spare room. While this transition happened almost overnight in March 2020, its effects have cast a long shadow on our wellbeing and work-life balance.    

Technology was already blurring the line between work and our personal lives long before we’d even heard of lockdown. The always-on culture of checking emails and taking calls at home had become widespread in many companies and industries — and as the latest research shows, remote working has made drawing the line between work and home even more complicated.  

Making flexible working work for workers 

Flexible working has been a long-held demand of trade unions. Parents want the ability to manage caring responsibilities with work. Families want time to care for each other. We could all do with a little more time to breathe out.   

But now commentators are beginning to think about what the new normal may look like, we need to make sure flexibility is something that works for workers, not just employers.  

The boundaries of remote working have revealed the strains of wellbeing, always-on culture and hidden overtime. The commute may now consist only of a flight of stairs or – for some – sitting up in bed, but working hours are actually increasing as workers struggle to erect barriers between work and the rest of their lives.   

This, in turn, is affecting our mental health – cases of work-related stress are on the rise across the country.  

We need to challenge the attitude that working a little longer is fine as we are no longer commuting. Workers aren’t paid for getting to the office.   

There is also another creepier, more sinister side of remote working that has reared its head over the last year. New research in December showed that one in five companies are now using digital surveillance technology to keep tabs on us working at home, or they are planning to introduce it.  

We are heading for a world where remote working is more normalised, and even encouraged by employers. But, if we are going to keep working from home, we need a better framework for managing the trade-offs. 

Two changes for all workers to campaign for  

There are two changes that Prospect is campaigning for. First, is the Right to Disconnect, the ability to switch off from the pressures of work and to have the time for family.  

This has existed in France for years, and other countries are following suit, with Argentina recently passing a law which aims to provide a “right to rest and disconnection [from work] outside of working hours”. The Irish government has also launched a consultation on the issue, at the urging of the Irish Financial Services Union.  

Telefonica has signed a European-wide agreement with unions for workers to negotiate a right to disconnect alongside pay and conditions. The UK needs to catch up.  

Second, it is time to put proper legal frameworks around the ability of employers to monitor their employees and use their data for their own ends.   

The technology in this area has got well ahead of the law and allows far too much freedom for employers to invade the privacy of their workers and introduce tech that changes the nature of their work without consultation.  

We’ve urged the ICO to update its guidance to ensure workers’ privacy is protected. While that campaign is ongoing we’ve produced our own workers’ guide to GDPR.  

It’s our data. Under GDPR we have a right to be informed and consulted about how our data is used for monitoring purposes. We need to exercise that right – too many of us don’t know what data our employer is collecting about us.  

The government has promised to introduce an Employment Bill later in the year to provide greater access to flexible working. This would be an excellent opportunity to update our employment rights for a new digital age, providing the scope for us all to find the off-switch.   

If we are to #BuildBackBetter, then change needs to be negotiated with staff and to tackle the pressures of the always-on culture, hidden overtime and digital surveillance.   

The pandemic has changed many things, but we cannot allow it to define work without workers having a voice over the changes we want.