UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has advised that everyone should be working from home where possible, in an attempt to prevent the further spread of Covid-19. However, research suggests that the UK is not at all prepared to implement such measures.

In fact, figures released this week suggest that the UK is one of the least prepared countries to introduce a mass home-working strategy. Research by Leesman of more than 700,000 employees worldwide found that 55% of UK workers have little or no experience of working from home.

The World Health Organisation has elevated Covid-19 to pandemic status, following which major corporations including Apple, Starbucks, Twitter and Facebook began advising employees to work from home in a bid to curb the outbreak and protect their workforce.

Now the UK government has moved from asking even mildly sick people to stay home, to recommending that any British workers who can work from home, do, to reduce their risk of contracting coronavirus and fuelling the outbreak by spreading it to others.

Many British businesses have released Covid-19 contingency plans, including compulsory home-working policies, and some have begun to close sites and ban external visitors.

Impact on productivity

As well as the logistics of arranging for employees to work from home, the research also suggests that businesses can expect reduced productivity and innovation during the period employees are not in the office.

While the numbers show that the majority of employees only work at home for one day a week at most, those sporadic home workers do not tend to have a dedicated room to work from and some not even a designated workstation or desk.

Across the global database, respondents aged between 55 and 64 report the lowest satisfaction levels when it comes to their overall experience of working from home, compared with the under 25s who are the least affected by homeworking.

Some of the key benefits that people experience by being in the workplace, and that they miss by being at home, include:

• a reduction in sense of community;
• social interaction;
• knowledge transfer;
• learning from others; and
• informal collaboration.

Tim Oldman, Leesman CEO, said:

“Homeworking will undoubtedly prove pivotal in limiting the impact of the coronavirus crisis. But the data suggests that many employers and employees will be out of their depth should British businesses be forced into lockdown. Our advice is for organisations to quickly quantify where their main obstacles will be and seek support. We know how and why corporate offices impact employee sentiment but have significantly less understanding of even the short-term impact of dispersing teams into environments designed for living, not working. Global business must brace themselves, but the UK perhaps more so.”