“Should I stay or should I go now?” Work from home or return to the office?
Back in the early 1980s when The Clash’s epic punk rock anthem hit the charts (written by Headon et al., 1981), work was very different experience to how it is now. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 1981 men filled two million more UK jobs than women (ONS 2021), and the world wide web wasn’t to arrive until 1989 (Craig, 2008). Whilst working from home is not new phenomenon, the advent of the internet saw its steady growth from 2.918 million (1989) to 4.607 million (2019), with numbers spiking in 2021 to 5.6 million (ONS 2021; Clark, 2021).
This 2021 spike can be largely attributed to the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic (ONS, 2021). When lockdown legislation hit the UK workplace on 26th March 2020 (Coronavirus Act, 2020) the workforce was required to ‘work-from-home where possible’ (ibid). Work as we knew it changed overnight, and ‘the new normal’ was with us (Eyre, 2020). We have very recently entered a new phase of pandemic working, largely due to uptake of the vaccination programme, and employers are exploring their return-to-office and ‘dynamic working’ strategies (CIPD, 2021a).
Come on and let me know
As with any crisis, the events and challenges of the last 18 months have provided those of us who research work within academia new and important problems to explore. A keen interest of mine is that of the psychological contract (PC). It is a concept that is deliberately distinct from a formal employment contract and helps us un