Here we go again, another day, another dinosaur out of the woodwork bleating archaic blather. The problem, though, is this particular relic is the richest man in the world, and that will have devastating consequences.
Since Elon ‘chief twit’ Musk purchased and took over Twitter, he has set a cat amongst the pigeons. A very public cull of 50% of staff became almost performative on Twitter, with people seemingly fired on the spot, online, in some cases. Being fired is a hugely emotional time for anyone; we are on the brink of recession, with five weeks until Christmas, and yet the rhetoric around this cull was cutthroat, and it was just the beginning.
The billionaire has - overnight- abolished remote working and has pushed the message that everyone will be expected to be in the office every day, working over 40 hours per week minimum. In a move that feels like something from a Netflix film, employees received this news in an email, where they were then asked to ‘click the link’ if they subscribe to this new ‘hardcore’ way of working. It’s like employment Squid Games but lives are exchanged for livelihoods.
This is a particular blow because, in 2020, Twitter became one of the first tech firms to allow staff to work from home indefinitely; it was a big statement to companies everywhere about the progression of flexible working. Now, just two years later, its work-from-anywhere policy has been scrapped and mandated return to offices implemented. The impact of this decision will be catastrophic.
There is endless research to show the positive benefits of flexible working.
There is no research at all that says that strapping employees to slabs of MDF in an office, under flickering office lighting for eight-hour minimum days, drives productivity and increases performance. On the contrary, there is endless research to show the positive benefits of flexible working.
Working flexibly is good for business, and it’s good for people. Stanford university Professor Nick Bloom is a testament to this with his research into the positive impact of hybrid working on people. He found that if you work two days from home per week, sick days go down, employee absences go down, and you are less likely to quit your job.
But there’s more, because hybrid working also supports companies' diversity, equality and diversity efforts. Nick Bloom noted that minorities in the workplace could be ‘less comfortable’ in the office and could therefore be the first to quit if pushed. Research from CIPD has also shown that flexible working can reduce absence rates and allows employees to manage disability and long-term health conditions, as well as supporting their mental health and stress.
The benefits are endless, the four-day week trial in the UK is reporting huge success, and we know that flexible working is the number one way that we can start to tackle the ever-increasing gender pay gap.
To the dedicated, passionate, and hardworking people at Twitter with children, caring responsibilities, mental health challenges, disabilities and who just don’t want to work full-time and more strapped to a desk, we’re fighting for you, we are demanding more, demanding greater flexible working for all and we won’t stop until we get there.
And we will, for sure, be tweeting about it when we do.
Anna Whitehouse and co-founder Tim Grimes have just launched a flexible working platform called Work Your Way