Former M&S boss says working from home is ‘not doing proper work’ | Working from home

The former boss of M&S and Asda has said working from home has meant a generation of people is “not doing proper work”.

Stuart Rose, who was chief executive of M&S for six years until 2011 and then executive chair of its supermarket rival Asda until November, claimed that working from home had harmed employee productivity – a longstanding problem in the world’s wealthier economies.

Lord Rose told BBC One’s Panorama: “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.”

The number of people working from home in the UK more than doubled between December 2019 and March 2022 from 4.7 million to 9.9 million, as the Covid pandemic forced people into lockdowns from March 2020 onwards.

Office workers were by far the most affected, although most people in Britain did not work from home. Since then some of the changes have remained, even as pandemic restrictions disappeared.

However, several big companies have told workers they must come into the office more, or even abandon hybrid working completely.

US-headquartered companies including JP Morgan and Amazon have told staff they must attend work in person five days a week. Citigroup last week said it would spend £1bn to renovate its offices in London as part of the push to get workers back.

Rose has himself acknowledged his personal commitment to his working life. A short biography of Rose on Asda’s website said: “Stuart appears to have no hobbies apart from work and has a dog called Bruce.”

Working from home has to some extent become a party political issue. Under the last government some Conservative ministers – notably Jacob Rees-Mogg, business secretary under the short-lived leadership of Liz Truss – expressed their opposition to working from home. Rose sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords.

However, the Labour government is introducing changes to employment law to give workers more rights to flexibility.

Rose has been pushing for people to return to offices – albeit while acknowledging that flexibility can be valuable for some people. In a 2022 interview he said: “I personally am an unreconstructed get-back-to-work man.

“I think people are more productive in the office, but we have to be flexible. We have to understand some people have particular needs and worries, and concerns and health issues.”

In an interview with the Observer in November, Rose said having large numbers of staff based at home was “not a satisfactory way of working, particularly in an industry which is a fast-moving consumer goods industry”.

Rose handed the baton of chairing the struggling Asda to fellow retail veteran Allan Leighton in November. Leighton has said it could take three to five years to revive Asda’s fortunes.