Claire Black: 'Most people who work at home are more productive than those who work in an office'

Published on Thursday 24 June 2010 13:37

'YOU'RE still in your pyjamas," said R. It's hard to find the right word to accurately capture her tone of voice but I'm going to plump for withering. "I've not had time to get dressed," was my whining reply.

At 6.30pm I realise that this is a difficult line of defence, but as ever, what I lack in terms of being right I make up for in utter commitment to my point. And to be fair to me, I did have a bit of a point.

Shuffling after her, dropping a trail of biscuit crumbs in my wake and a hairband that had inexplicably found its way up my left sleeve, I explained that I had got up at 7.30am and started working at 8.30am. There had been an interlude when I got sucked into an online discussion about whether Christopher Nolan really is a brilliant filmmaker or whether Inception is all smoke and mirrors and no heart. Oh, and I washed the bathroom floor. But apart from that, it was work, work, work.

By half six there really had been no opportunity for putting on clothes, which is why, when I should've been dressed and ready to go out to meet a friend for a drink, I was still cosy in my elastic-waisted trousers, my only concern being how I'd managed to get marmalade on my right leg.

Two pints later the story of my failure to don daywear was making everyone choke on their crisps. "You're so lucky that you can work at home," said Jane. "I'd love to do that. You must get away with murder." Oh how wrong could you be?

There is a reason that bosses have already allowed nearly 700,000 people to work at home and it's not because they know how much we all hate the morning commute. The fact is that most people who work at home are more productive than people who work in an office.

It's perverse. You'd think that the temptation would be to loaf about in pyjamas smearing marmalade on your legs (what?) but actually, given there's no water cooler around which to hang, nobody with whom to go on trips to Starbucks and no boss from whom you must hide lastminute.com as you try to bag a bargain weekend break, we all just tend to, well, work. And so for the people who employ us it's a win-win. Not only do they get to save money on electricity, phone bills, wrist supports and paperclips, they also get a workforce that does exactly what it is paid to do: work.

But if you're spending hours daydreaming at your ergonomically designed workstation about life at the kitchen table then be aware there are downsides. Your invitation to spontaneous post-work pints will be permanently postponed. You will always be the person who has to buzz the postie in/take in other people's parcels/speak to Jehovah's Witnesses. At some stage, so far removed from the world of wearing work clothes will you be that you will find yourself wandering around your local supermarket in mismatching shoes and all of your mates, the ones who spend their days watching YouTube in their air-conditioned offices, will think that your life is one long pyjama party. And that's no joke.