Working from home is creating a generation who are "not doing proper work", the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has warned. Lord R

Working from home 'not proper work' - ex-Asda boss

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2025-01-20 08:00:04

Working from home is creating a generation who are "not doing proper work", the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has warned.

Lord Rose told BBC Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy's "general decline" and employees' productivity was suffering.

His comments come as some companies are calling time on remote working. Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are just some of the businesses who now require their head office staff to be in every day.

However, work-from-home expert Prof Nicholas Bloom said that while fully remote work can be "quite damaging" to some workers' productivity, spending three days out of five in the office was as productive as fully office-based work overall.

Lord Rose, who was chief executive of M&S and recently stepped down as the chairman of Asda, 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."

In a December 2024 UK snapshot survey by the Office for National Statistics, 26% of people said they had been hybrid-working in the prior seven days, with some days in the office and some days at home - while 13% had been fully remote and 41% had been fully office-based (the remainder were not working at the time).