Lord Rose of Monewden, who served as chairman of Asda from 2021 until last November, says the “general decline” of the UK economy is due to the rise in WFH culture
The WFH culture has created a generation of people who are “not doing proper work,” the former boss of Asda has said.
Lord Rose of Monewden, 75, added he the new way of working is contributing to the economy’s decline. The entrepreneur, who served as chairman of Asda from 2021 until last November, believes people are less productive at home than they are in offices.
But the government’s new workers’ rights bill is set to make it harder for employers to turn down requests by staff to work from home. It was discussed on BBC’s Panorama last night, on which Rose expressed his frustration.
The Conservative peer who was knighted for services to the retail industry said: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four. We are creating a whole generation and probably a generation beyond that of people who are used to actually not doing what I call proper work.”
Justin Madders, the employment rights minister, has previously said working from home creates a more motivated workforce. However, recently some of the world’s biggest companies, including Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan, have mandated staff return to the office full time.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive ofJP Morgan, had sought to reinstate office working from 2021, The Times reports. He only achieved this for his workforce of more than 300,000 this month.
The feat also featured in Panorama’s “Should We Still BeWorking from Home?”, which is available on BBC iPlayer, which highlighted how some parts of the public sector have tightened up on home working. The Metropolitan Police put a hybrid policy into practice which requires civilian staff to work at least three days a week in the office.
Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), from December last year revealed that 26 per cent of people had been hybrid working in the previous week, while 13 per cent had been fully remote. Four in ten people said they had been in the office full time the previous week, while the remaining fifth were not working at the time.