Our piecemeal approach to home working is failing

We are not good at debating big policy issues in Scotland. It is largely a result of the top-down nature of our democracy, along with a desire on the part of politicians to delay or avoid having to make any decisions that do not fall neatly within the orthodoxy of Scottish governmental politics.

It is why we have had an enormous social experiment thrust on us without any real debate and it is why we are now starting to reverse that experiment, again without any real debate. The experiment was working from home and today's manifestation of it is unhappiness among civil servants that they are to be forced back into the office for at least two days a week.

It isn't that there is an obvious 'right' answer to a social debate like this. There are solid and extensive arguments on both sides of the debate and it isn't about identifying 'the correct' answer but agreeing on a collective answer that is key.

While some people have been drifting towards home working since high speed internet became the norm (Common Weal has always had an element of home working for staff), it was the pandemic which forced a rapid shift to homeworking for almost anyone who could do it. There was no time for debate or discussion; it was necessitated by a health emergency.

But, having made that rapid change, we could have done much more to create a public debate about what this meant for the future of work. The advantages of home working become clear fairly quickly. Prime among them is the time saved on commuting. Nearly one in three have a commute of between 15 and 30 minutes and another one in four between 30 and 60.

Over the course of a day that is from one to two hours commuting. That is a welcome time saving for many. But there are lots of other advantages; anyone with caring responsibilities can integrate them into a working life much more easily, people can manage affairs in their homes better (trades people, deliveries etc.) and there is much more flexibility generally.

Among the downsides is isolation, weaker limits to the end of the working day, a loss of team identity, less spontaneous group problem-solving and weaker personal relationships with colleagues. Of these, isolation is by far the biggest risk given that it can have severe mental health impacts.

Yet all of these can be addressed. One model is to create many more local working hubs for homeworkers. Highly local co-working spaces can mean that people still have the time saving and flexibility of working from home but can do so without being isolated and in the company of others.

Having a set number of days in the office can also be a solution, but it can also be arbitrary and feel arbitrary to staff. It is one thing getting together for a team strategy session, it is another commuting to an office and doing there exactly what you would have done at home but with a boss feeling they have more dominion over you.

The point is not so much about what exact solutions you arrive at but how you arrive at them. At the moment this is being left solely to individual employers with or without adequate consultation with their staff. This is in effect political abdication.

Our democracy has methods and procedures for discussing laws or regulations or spending decisions; we do not have effective methods for discussing equally important but often intangible social questions such as this one. One of the biggest problems in arriving at these decisions is that those most effected to not feel any agency in arriving at the conclusions.

Common Weal has proposed a means of dealing with these kinds of issues. Parliaments legislate but they are not always known for the quality of their thinking. We need better systems to enable wider social deliberation which is not directly tied to individual imminent decisions. That is why we want to see the establishment of a Civic Forum.

This was originally planned as part of the devolution settlement and would have been a place of deliberation and discussion with the aim of informing political debate. It would have been an open forum which could be joined by all sorts of civic voices and it's job would be to think about the big questions and the big themes facing us.

A Civic Forum, had it existed, would have begun a debate about the future of work the minute we entered lockdown and changed our working patterns. It would have found ways to involve the public properly so we all felt that this was a debate that included us and so the conclusions it reached would be ones we had a stake in.

In Scotland we have a democratic system which is focussed on tomorrow and not on the day after tomorrow, which means when the day after tomorrow arrives, it keeps catching us by surprise. We need a cleverer debate. To read more on Common Weal's proposals for a radically reformed democracy, read Sorted.