The Richard Spooner Column: Scrooge and home working�

Ever since Bob Cratchet timidly asked his boss Ebenezer Scrooge if he could go home early to his large family on Christmas Eve, working relationships have largely improved.

Today the question is whether we can go back to the office or, indeed, whether we want to.

What poor Bob, who scratched away at his clerking duties with pen nib (probably made in Brum) and ink to support his family, including sickly son Tiny Tim, would have made of e-commerce is anyone 's guess.

But what a boon it would have been, enabling him to pursue his duties for the miserly Mr Scrooge but from the bosom of his family.

Whether Mr Scrooge would have permitted him to do so is doubtful and that is one of the nubs of the issues many businesses are facing as we tentatively come out of lockdown.

Talking of changing times, having lived through the Victorian I wonder what we would then have made of the sentence: “NFON UK, an entity of NFON AG, a European provider of voice-centric business communications from the cloud, announces today the lockdown restrictions of the pandemic has (sic) driven many UK small businesses to rethink home-working policies, with a view to enhancing staff well-being and reducing office costs... ”?

Apart from the dodgy English, it would have been meaningless to them.

This comes from research the NFON carried out among 500 UK small businesses. It concluded that many would be opting for hybrid working models post lock-down restrictions “with a view to reducing office costs and enhancing staff wellbeing ”.

Headquartered in Munich, NFON AG claims to have more than 40,000 companies across 15 European countries as its customers. With Cloudya, NFON offers an independent solution for advanced cloud business communications. “With our intuitive communications solutions, we enable European companies to improve their work a little every single day, ” they say.

The survey found that over a quarter (27 per cent) were planning to downsize or ditch the office as soon as their lease allowed, which equates to over 1.7million small businesses across the UK.

The survey of 500 UK small business leaders was conducted by Censuswide and commissioned by NFON UK. The research revealed only half of the small business owners (50 per cent) encouraged remote working before the pandemic.

The top reason they cited for being averse to remote working was the concern it could impact on teamwork (51 per cent), followed by not having the right IT set-up to successfully work remotely (32 per cent).

There was also a lack of trust that staff would work as hard from home (17 per cent). However, since the mandatory lockdown, attitudes have shifted.

Over a third (34 per cent) have been pleasantly surprised by their team 's performance while working remotely, a quarter (26 per cent) think it enhanced team spirit and 25 per cent felt the team worked harder remotely than they did in an office setting.

The respondents cited the top benefits of remote working as reduced company expenses (48 per cent), followed by fewer staff sick days (40 per cent), a positive impact on the environment (38 per cent), and increased wellbeing in staff (30 per cent).

JL