Home, Office, or Something We Haven't Designed Yet?

When Lord Rose — former chair of Marks & Spencer and ASDA — declared that homeworking isn't "proper work," he triggered the predictable cycle. Outrage. Defence. Think-pieces. Counter-arguments. And then, within a week, the conversation moved on, having resolved nothing.

That's what usually happens when we debate location. We argue about where, while the more important question — how — goes unanswered. And it's the how that determines whether hybrid working builds resilience or erodes it.

The implementation problem nobody wants to name

Stuart Bromley's position is direct: homeworking done right should improve productivity, individually, as a team, and at company level. There's good scientific reasoning behind that. But the key phrase is "done right" — and most organisations haven't done it right, because they haven't actually designed for it.

That matters because when hybrid working produces poor results, the organisation almost always blames the model. It rarely examines its own management communication practices, its technology infrastructure, its HR policies, or the external factors that may have suppressed performance across the board. The model becomes the scapegoat for a failure of implementation.

The numbers support this. Homeworking increased by roughly 50% during the pandemic. Millions of people whose first experience of working from home was sitting alone without support, without structure, without any understanding of how to connect beyond back-to-back video calls. That isn't homeworking done well. That's crisis-mode remote presence — and then wondering why it felt hard.

Two different strategies, both legitimate

One of the most useful reframes in the conversation is Maria McCann's point about what companies are actually trying to achieve. There are two genuinely different operating models at play — and both can be right, depending on intent.

The problem isn't choosing one or the other. The problem is the large organisations stuck in the middle — paying for expensive headquarters they feel obligated to fill, applying office attendance as a proxy for culture and commitment, without being honest about whether the office is actually serving the mission or just the sunk cost.

What the resilience gap has to do with this

The link between hybrid working and resilience isn't obvious, but it's significant. The EQUIP cycle — the five-stage process through which people build and sustain resilience — depends on conditions that hybrid and remote work can easily erode if they're not replaced intentionally.

None of these are arguments for returning to the office. They're arguments for designing their replacements. If recovery used to happen in the commute, what happens now? If feedback used to be delivered in passing, how is it being structured? If belonging used to build through shared physical presence, what builds it in a distributed team?

Most organisations haven't answered those questions. They've either mandated a return to the office — which restores some of those conditions but at significant cost to flexibility and talent access — or they've continued with hybrid arrangements without doing the design work that makes them function. Neither is a resilience strategy.

The employees who will choose

Stuart's longer-term view is worth holding onto. Companies that genuinely make hybrid working function will outperform their peers. Better productivity, better engagement, access to broader talent. Their competitors, watching that happen, will be forced to adapt. The pendulum will swing — messily, unevenly, over a long period — until something stabilises as the norm.

But the stabilisation won't happen on its own. It will happen because some organisations do the design work and demonstrate what's possible. They'll attract people who want what they're offering, build cultures that work across distance, and show that location flexibility and high performance aren't in tension.

The responsible position, as Stuart puts it, is to look after all your stakeholders — customers, shareholders, and employees — and navigate a path that optimises across all of them. Not a unilateral return to pre-pandemic norms. Not a permanent free-for-all. A deliberate, designed answer to the question of how work should function for the humans actually doing it.

The debate about homeworking will continue. Lord Rose will keep saying what he says. Others will keep pushing back. But the organisations that will do best are the ones that stop participating in that debate and start doing the design work instead.